Nagêlê and his “Master”: Race Relations in New Guinea.
In 1929, the Bank of New South Wales opened a branch in Salamaua, Papua New Guinea, due to its proximity to the prosperous Morobe Goldfields. Previously, this area had been largely inaccessible to Australians: it fell within the German Protectorate of New Guinea, and was only placed under Australian mandate after the defeat of Germany in World War One. Papua, previously British New Guinea, had come into Australian possession in 1906, as the recently federated government attempted to amass an “island empire”. Yet, this southern Protectorate did not yield the wealth of natural resources which the north would later provide. From the early twenties, Australian prospectors were already eyeing the mountains rumoured to be rich with gold.
Both Australian soldiers and civilians would come into contact with the Indigenous people of Papua New Guinea on this colonial mission. One of these civilians was James Harold Wesley Johns. Johns was sent to establish the Salamaua office for the Bank of New South Wales, and remained there until 1932. In his frequent letters to his parents back in Melbourne, he details the conditions and his personal experiences. These descriptions reveal an insight into the relationship between “master” and “servant” in early twentieth-century Papua New Guinea; a relationship naturally reflective of the racial hierarchies implicit in the colonial context. At the time Johns came to find himself in Salamaua, Orientalism was the primary means through which Westerners understood the encountering of the native “other”.
“There are Westerners, and there are Orientals. The former dominate; the latter must be dominated,” observed Edward Said in 1978. This is certainly the framework through which Johns interacted with his servant, Nagêlê. His characterisation of the native people with whom he engaged was deeply imbued with a paternalistic racism and an assumption of inherent superiority not merely drawn from the typical distinction between employer and employee. Johns’ writes as if describing a mischievous child, one who must be disciplined, tempered, and rewarded, who can be bettered, but who will never grow out of their natural inferiority. He justifies this through the native’s apparent lack of logic or reason: “a problem which will not be solved in 1000 years”. By mimicking their speech, he mocks their ‘simplicity’, and goes on further to depict them as dependents who cannot look after themselves, and who must thereby appreciate in some regards the governance of the white man.
However, the strange affinity with which John writes of his own “boy” soon fades when he speaks of “Orientals” beyond the direct control of Westerners. He explains to his parents, “at the end of three years indenture, the native is returned to his village and is then an infinitely superior man in physique and education to his … nut chewing, loafing black brother”. The native is here presented as a malleable object, emphasised by the use of the word “returned”, his worth dependent on his compliance with, and subordination to, the coloniser’s rule. Johns further illustrates the pervasiveness of Orientalism as an inherent knowledge within Western socio-cultural structures, when he relays the disgust of a German man at the “policing of their towns by France with Negro and [Senegalese] troops”, as per the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. Even when acting under the command of a Western authority, a non-white person in a position of authority over a white person became a subversion of the moral order. In a colonial context, as in Papua New Guinea, such a subversion mandated the exercise of force to maintain order: latent if not overt violence inevitably underlay nineteenth and twentieth century colonialism. This is not a conclusion the content of Johns’ letters directly invites us to draw, yet the knowledge we have of the conditions of other indentured servants allows us to fill in the gaps his narrative glosses over.
Johns’ letters show us how the white civilian coloniser experienced and understood race relations in this period. Upon gaining control of Papua, and then New Guinea, Australia was conscious of the reputation they had earned through their previous and ongoing treatment of Indigenous people. It was no longer economically or politically appropriate to openly annihilate a native population when there existed a potential to “civilise” them and exploit their labour in the service of the relative Western power. Violence was present not merely at the discursive level, but enforced at a physical level. An overwhelming percentage of the miners on the goldfields were natives; and the means by which they were scouted was not necessarily a benign practice. Different tribes had different responses to the presence of the white man. Some resisted fiercely and this often ended in bloodshed, while others felt no choice but to conform. Johns tells his mother, “Frankly, missionaries are not popular in this quarter. It is recognised that the white man does a lot of good in the way of medical work and sanitation … and are tolerated,” and suggests there is a “commercial” aspect to their missions. Here, even Johns seems to hint that the role of the missionary was to transform the socio-cultural structure as a precursor for economic coercion and cooperation. However, Johns includes little of the actual treatment of the Indigenous people outside of his own immediacy, and ultimately portrays the impact of the white man as a positive one upon the conditions of the native people. While this is an incredibly biased perspective, it gives insight into the way the West viewed their global role in the East.
It seems that Johns’ letters cannot give us a true story in terms of a holistic representation of race-relations in colonial Papua New Guinea. It gives us the white perspective. Yet, this is invaluable in its own way, for Orientalism was indeed the “truth” by which the West “knew” the East. However, Johns existed in a relatively unique environment: as an employee of the bank he was in a position of privilege and power. He was in many ways removed from the common experience, and it is likely that he had a different relationship with his “youth” than perhaps a Proprietor would have had with his indentured servants, or a white miner with his native co-workers. We can only take Johns’ words to indicate perhaps a general attitude of the commercial class, whose main interaction with the Indigenous population was through its servants.
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