Papuan Prohibition: Nationalism, Racism, and Gender in Australia's Colonisation of New Guinea
"wherever the flag has gone in our attempts at Colonization the rum cork has followed + native races have been decimated"
After years of being a nation colonised, Federation came with new ‘opportunity’ for Australia. Enshrined into the Constitution was the new nation’s ability to control “relations of the Commonwealth with the islands of the Pacific”.[1] Britain began transferring governance of New Guinea to Australia in 1903, and the Papuan Bill legislated the beginning of a specifically Australian empire. One of the most debated clauses of this bill was Prohibition – banning native New Guineans buying or consuming alcohol. The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), to campaign for the clause, sent letters to Australian senators inquiring about their voting intentions. This response to those letters, from Senator John Barrett, highlights the intersecting influence of nationalism, racial hierarchy, and gendered family roles that explain why this legislation was considered important.
Coming so soon after Federation, governing over New Guinea was seen as a test of Australia’s independence. Australia had a poor reputation regarding indigenous populations, with global critics already questioning the treatment of Aboriginal peoples. In 1888, Sir William MacGregor, administrator of British New Guinea, described Australians as “the leading opponents of primitive peoples” in reference to colonisers’ use of violence against Aboriginal people.[2] Barrett conceded this poor reputation in his letter, although he blamed “the rum cork [that had] followed” colonisers for undermining their authority rather than questioning colonisation itself. For Barrett, this colonisation of New Guinea needed to remove the distraction of alcohol to make native people “useful + good citizens” and prove Australia’s productive capacity. This attitude was evident in the consequences it had for native New Guineans, who were subject to harsh labour conditions and exploitation for the sake of production.[3] They were treated as a tool that could prove that a new Australian government could be an effective, leading nation. Prohibition was partly motivated by a nationalist hope to show that Australians were, in Prime Minister Alfred Deakin’s words, among the Commonwealth’s most effective “white ruling race”.[4]
Deakin contrasted this “white ruling race” to “coloured races who are ruled”, and indeed this racial hierarchy informed the reasoning for Prohibition.[5] The Australian government enforced many restrictions on the native New Guinean population which they believed were necessary because of native peoples' supposed 'racial inferiority', but which actually inscribed those differences.[6] Prohibition was one such law. Drawing on a stereotype of ‘savage and naïve natives’, it was assumed that native New Guineans were easily swayed by “temptation” and could not control themselves around alcohol.[7] Barrett felt that as a ‘civilised’ “white man” he should use government to enforce Prohibition and “protect the weak” natives from their own behaviour. Prohibition both solved the ‘issue’ of race interfering with native New Guineans’ work capacity, and used the racialized idea of natives ‘needing’ Prohibition to further Australia’s case for being among the rulers who could control themselves and others. The nationalist angle of Prohibition was permeated by racist conceptions of native populations.
This racial hierarchy also interacted with a construction of the nation as a family. Barrett's suggestion that native New Guineans were susceptible to the “temptation” of alcohol drew on WCTU’s phrase that temperance was necessary “for the sake of their little children growing up in the midst of so many temptations”, making a parallel between native people and children.[8] Moreover, Barrett’s concept of “ma[king] useful + good citizens” can be connected to the idea of similarly raising children who contribute to society. Indeed, Chilla Bulbeck describes Australian policies for New Guinea, including prohibition, as “justified in paternalistic terms” of protection. The racialized belief in native people’s need for guidance around alcohol aligned them with the children WCTU sought to protect, creating a parent-child relationship between Australians and New Guineans.
This ‘parenthood’ was gendered by the shifting relations between men and women in Australia during early Federation. The Papuan Bill came at a time of increasingly explicit roles for women in Australian politics. White women gained suffrage in 1902, and WCTU exemplified their nationalised voice.[9] Furthermore, women often played explicit roles in colonial projects as teachers of virtue and morality in its "civilising mission".[10] Women’s new presence outside the home, however, contradicted older associations between women and domesticity, men and politics.[11] Although women’s actions in New Guinea were legitimised by Barrett through his desire to “second” the efforts of “brave men + women”, he associated this arrangement with “giv[ing] up all in Life”, implying it disrupted preferred norms.[12] Prohibition on New Guinea was debated in a context of tension between a masculine-centric government and the feminine-centric WCTU.
To navigate this tension and make their arguments more viable, Barrett and WCTU played gendered roles in Prohibition legislation. Although the women of WCTU moved into the public sphere by interacting with politicians, they considered writing suggestions the most fundamental part of their approach.[13] WCTU played a wifely role on a national scale by seeking to encourage politicians and ultimately defer to their paternal authority, rather than demand direct impact on the legislation. Meanwhile, Barrett’s form of care consisted of publicly-orientated paternalism, talking of ‘raising’ “citizens” and highlighting the nationalist elements of “righteousness that exalts a nation”. Prohibition on New Guinea thus navigated the tension of women taking a public role in the debate by framing it as a family on an international scale, with government as fathers, WCTU as mothers, and the native New Guineans relegated to being children.
For Barrett, the Australian government needed to express a paternal power over the native New Guineans to assert national competency and to engage in racial narratives that both distanced them from ‘savage’ people of colour and demonstrated a sense of ‘care’. Prohibition was a way to do that. We can question whether this frame could be considered a ‘truth’ for more than just Barrett. Perhaps it can be tentatively considered relevant at a national level, given some of the context and consequences remain, though this generalisation would need further evidence.[14] Indeed, Behan McCullagh suggests keeping historical analysis at the level it begins to ensure evidence is fairly applied.[15] It would certainly be impossible to turn this single story into a general law, partly because of this source limitation, but also because the number of contextual variables intersecting around this little narrative, let alone those that might be introduced in expanding the story, would be difficult to encompass scientifically.[16] But the identification of these multiple influences that could be lost in a more thematic analysis of Prohibition still makes this a story worth telling.
"through the view of the white man ... [t]o those brave men + women"
References
[1] ‘Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act - Sect 51 Legislative Powers of the Parliament’, 1901, http://classic.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/consol_act/coaca430/s51.html.
[2] Cited in Chilla Bulbeck, Australian Women in Papua New Guinea: Colonial Passages, 1920-1960 (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 138.
[3] Clive Moore, ‘The Twentieth Century: Colonialism and Independence’, in New Guinea, Crossing Boundaries and History (University of Hawai’i Press, 2003), 184–9.
[4] Cited in Marilyn Lake, 'Colonial Australia and the Asia-Pacific', in The Cambridge History of Australia, eds. Alison Bashford and Stuart Macintyre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 559.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Bulbeck, Australian Women in Papua New Guinea, 165–7. Another law forced native New Guineans to wear loincloths, rather than buy new European clothes.
[7] Ibid., 166.
[8] For example, G.O. Gerguson, 'To the Women of Western Australia', East Murchison News, Dec 12, 1903.
[9] Judith Pargeter, For God, Home and Humanity: National Woman’s Christian Temperance Union of Australia, Centenary History 1891 - 1991 (Golden Grove: National Woman’s Christian Temperance Union of Australia, 1995), 25–8.
[10] Hyaeweol Choi and Margaret Jolly, ‘Paradoxes of Domesticity: Missionary Encounters in the Making of Christian Homes in Asia and the Pacific’, in Divine Domesticities, ed. Hyaeweol Choi and Margaret Jolly, Christian Paradoxes in Asia and the Pacific (ANU Press, 2014), 3–6; and Bulbeck, Australian Women in Papua New Guinea, 221–48.
[11] Choi and Jolly, ‘Paradoxes of Domesticity’, 5–6.
[12] Emphasis added.
[13] Pargeter, For God, Home and Humanity, 28.
[14] As described in ‘Women’s Christian Temperance Union’, The Age, Nov 11, 1904.
[15] Behan McCullagh, The Truth of History (London; New York: Routledge, 1998): 60-1.
[16] Cf. Henry Thomas Buckle, History of Civilisation in England vol. 1 (London: Longman, 1862) who aims to produce laws of causality in history that, I believe, could not capture a multitude of factors like this.