The YWCA Australia’s “Civilising Mission” in Papua New Guinea
The potential of the archive to provide a range of discursive narratives and multiple “truths” depends on the historian’s interpretation of the evidence. As David Lowenthal notes, archives are no longer valued as “repositories of historical truth”, rather “transient…partial and bowdlerized…witness to invented contrivance.”[1] Hayden White argues that “evidence about the past does not come to us in the form of a story: we impose narrative upon it.”[2] According to Lynn Hunt, it is impossible for historians’ to write objectively about the past considering our own epistemic values, however “the truest history is often written by people with deep commitments on one side or another of an issue.”[3] As a feminist historian, my interpretation of this historical evidence is driven by the imperative of telling “true” stories of women in history, locating their experience and actions and their historical implications. The “true story” of YWCA Australia’s civilising mission in PNG can be interpreted as a transnational feminist history, an instance of international feminist mobilisation in which the exchange of experiences, resources and ideas between women around the world can be traced.[4] However, Edward Said has problematised the idea of historical “truth” in the western imperial context: evidence of colonial encounters produced by colonisers can amount to a form of “modern Orientalism”; these sources often assume “the Oriental is irrational, depraved…childlike, “different”, and “the European is rational, virtuous, mature, “normal”. [5] Indeed, Australian colonial policy in PNG was centred on the idea that white Australian’s were the “superior race”.[6] The YWCA’s “civilising mission” can therefore also be read as part of Australia’s enduring colonial legacy in PNG.[7]
In 1961, two ambassadors from the Australian Young Women’s Christian Association, Dorothy Wardlow and Florence Christian, toured the Australian colonial territories of Papua and New Guinea in order to assess how the YWCA could “play a real part” in helping establish PNG self-government and independence: “as a voluntary movement aiming to help young women establish an organisation that would be their own, it would satisfy the just-dawning reaching after independence and at the same time, under god, help them to conserve those Christian values so devotedly transmitted to them by the churches” [fig 1]. In March of 1962, the Australian Minister for Territories Paul Hasluck invited the YWCA’s Advisory Secretary Mary Fox to Papua’s capital Port Moresby to discuss the YWCA’s plans for the area [fig 3]. Their “civilising mission” would eventuate as the implementation of YWCA “hostels” across PNG, in efforts to achieve the YWCA’s overarching objective of spreading Western Christian values to “third world” countries and promoting women’s agency, whilst contributing to the wider mission of the Australian government to establish PNG self-government and independence as a Commonwealth realm [fig 4 / fig 5] By 1964, YWCA representative Nola Ducat reported that their mission was progressing successfully in Port Moresby: “those who have settled in Moresby are becoming quite Westernised and with Christian influence and education, many are establishing themselves as leaders in the community” [fig 4 and 5]. This “true story” about the past comes from a selection of sporadic, pasted together reports from the YWCA Australia’s Papua and New Guinea Bulletin. The Bulletin was produced by the Australian YWCA in the 1960s for the international YWCA community, and donated to the University of Melbourne Archives as part of the “YWCA Australia” collection.
The YWCA Australia (born out of the English YWCA) was instituted in Victoria in 1882 by fifteen women, in efforts to provide a charitable women’s organisation run by and for women.[8] By the 1960s, the Australian YWCA was part of a global network “World YWCA”, and their international project included “Mutual Service Missions” for improving the quality of life for women in the “third world”.[9] Papua and New Guinea became the Territory of Papua as a British protectorate in 1905 and came under formal Australian administration as Papua New Guinea in 1945, remaining an Australian colony until PNG was declared as an independent nation in 1975.[10] Post-WWII, the Australian government pursued a “civilising mission” in PNG; their mandate was the promotion of a “miracle of growth” in the form of social, political and economic development required to forge a self-governing nation.[11] Consequently, during the post-war period there was an influx of government workers into PNG, as well as grassroots organisations and missionaries.[12] The Australian government’s financial support in PNG did not extend to improving the status of Indigenous PNG women, thus the YWCA took on the role of their maternal benefactors.[13] The presence of Australian women in PNG was not novel in the 1960s; as feminist historian Chilla Bulbeck has shown, by 1975, around ten thousand white Australian women had lived in PNG from 1920.[14] Despite this, PNG was viewed as “a man’s country” and “records of women's experiences in Papua New Guinea are largely absent from the official narrative”.[15]
The PNG Bulletins are alive with narratives of transnational feminism and western imperialism framed within a maternalist discourse. Whilst Mary Fox asserted the importance of understanding “cultures other than our own” in the 1962 Bulletin, the YWCA felt that they were part of the Australian government’s mission to establish “New Worlds for Old” by educating “primitive” PNG women on western standards of self- development [fig 4/ fig 5]. The YWCA’s mission included the building of “accommodation for young Papuan women” in Port Moresby, Rabual, Lae and Madang, and the establishment of YWCA community clubs and training centres where local and European women could socialise, exchange ideas and participate in educational programs and leadership conferences [fig 1/ fig 2]. Indigenous girls, described as “scruffy and dirty”, were taught western standards of female domesticity including “Cookery, Health, Child Care, and Housework” [fig 4 /fig 5] . Their maternalistic project included protecting young Indigenous women from their families “primitive” behaviour and values: “for even if the girls themselves are being educated and wish to come more Westernised, their parents who perhaps aren’t yet very civilised, may force them to observe old village customs and keep them from these new ideas.” [fig 4 / fig 5]. Absent from this narrative are the voices of Indigenous PNG women. Their subjectivities cannot be accounted for through these documents; their stories are transmitted by Australian colonisers.
In this analysis, I have presented the “true story” of YWCA Australia’s civilising mission in PNG that I pieced together from the Australian YWCA archival collection as both a transnational feminist history and part of the narrative of Australia’s colonial legacy in PNG. In the course of telling this story, I have exemplified the multiplicity of ways archives may be interpreted and how the historian’s own historical and cultural context dictate how historical evidence can be interpreted, presented and narrated.
[1] D. Lowenthal, “Archives, Heritage, and History,” in Archives, Documentation, and Institutions of Social Memory: Essays from the Sawyer Seminar, eds., Francis X. Blouin and William G. Rosenberg (JSTOR: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 193.
[2] Sarah C. Maza, Thinking about History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 214-215.
[3] Lynn Hunt, History: Why It Matters (Cambridge: Polity, 2018) 40.
[4] P. Grimshaw, “Transnationalism and the Writing of Australian Women’s History,” in Transnationalism, Nationalism and Australian History, eds., Anna Clark, Anne Rees, and Alecia Simmonds (Singapore: Springer Singapore, 2017), 69–85, doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-5017-6_5.
[5] Edward W Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 2003), 31-49.
[6] Chilla Bulbeck, Australian Women in Papua New Guinea: Colonial Passages 1920–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 164-189.
[7] Akami, and Milner, “Australia in the Asia-Pacfic Region,” 541.
[8] Margaret Dunn, The Dauntless Bunch : The Story of the YWCA in Australia (Clifton Hill: YWCA, 1991), 1-10.
[9] Dunn, The Dauntless Bunch, 103-105.
[10] T. Akami and A. Milner, “Australia in the Asia-Pacfic Region,” in The Cambridge History of Australia, eds., Alison Bashford and Stuart Macintyre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 541. https://doi.org/10.1017/CHO9781107445758.054.
[11] Akami and Milner, “Australia in the Asia- Pacific Region”, 541-545.
[12] Bulbeck, Australian Women in Papua New Guinea, 1-6.
[13] Anne Dickson-Waiko, “The Missing Rib: Mobilizing Church Women for Change in Papua New Guinea,” Oceania, 74, no. 1 (Feb 2003): 98.
[14] Bulbeck, Australian Women in Papua New Guinea, 1-6.
[15] Bulbeck, Australian Women in Papua New Guinea, 1-6.