'The Santamaria Movement' in New Guinea

The anti-communist origins of one of Papua New Guinea's 'founding fathers'

Simon Farley

I will start at the end. Sir Donatus Mola died in 2012. He was publicly obituarised by Peter O’Neill, current Prime Minister of Papua New Guinea (PNG), and former Prime Minister Sir Julius Chan; he was honoured as a ‘founding father’ of the nation, in the same echelon as Michael Somare, John Guise and Albert Maori Kiki. Hailing from the island of Buka in Bougainville Province, he had seen his home invaded by Japan in 1942, achieve independence from Australia in 1975, and ruptured by a secessionist war in the 1980s and ‘90s. He lived to a ripe 88, a grandfather to forty-two.

But when he sent this letter in 1968, he was a man in his middle years, feeling a little out of his depth. Mola had just been elected to the House of Assembly of the Territory of Papua and New Guinea (TPNG). He wrote a letter to Father WG ‘Bill’ Smith, a Jesuit priest based in Melbourne, for advice.

The House of Assembly had been established four years prior. The 1964 election was the first in which indigenous Papuans enjoyed universal suffrage. Although Papuans had limited experience with liberal democracy and self-representation prior to 1964, the House was the colony’s first real parliament. But many of its members were not well equipped for the Westminster-style politics imposed upon them by the Commonwealth. Of the thirty-eight indigenous members of the 1964 House, nineteen had no ‘formal’ (read: Western) education. Mola himself had fewer obstacles than some of his colleagues. He had been educated on a Catholic mission. Marist missions had been entrenched on the islands of Bougainville and Buka from the early twentieth century; after the Second World War, Australian colonial administrators saw Bougainville as virtually "a Catholic fiefdom". One missionary crowed that Mola, Paul Lapun and Joseph Lue, the three Members from Bougainville, were “more literate and articulate than any other like group in New Guinea”.

That said, this remains a remarkable document. Here is an elected parliamentarian frankly admitting, in stilted English, that he has “no idea at all” about political parties. Representative democracy was still very much finding its feet in TPNG.

But why was Mola corresponding with a Jesuit priest nearly 4,000 kilometres away? Father Smith was the director of the Institute of Social Order (ISO). Two years earlier, Mola had been sent to Melbourne for training with the ISO, a Catholic social research and education organisation. On Mola’s return to Buka in August 1966, Smith wrote a letter to one Father Demers, his contact at the Lemanmanu mission. Smith fondly described Mola as “a perfect gentleman”, who had made many friends during his sojourn and studied well, despite being “hampered by insufficient English”.

While technically Jesuit-run, the ISO was effectively the plaything of BA Santamaria. Santamaria was the mastermind behind the Catholic Social Studies Movement. The Movement was essentially an anti-communist conspiracy; Santamaria mobilised devout Catholics to push leftists out of the union movement and the Labor Party. Hence, Mola mentions Santamaria by name in the letter; Mola was anxious not to associate himself with any communists or communist parties in the House and sought Santamaria’s reassurance.

Smith shared Santamaria’s chronic dread of communism. Amongst his files is this clipping from the South Pacific Post.

In 1965, Smith had himself voyaged to New Guinea to oversee the training of “potential native leaders”, expressly setting out to inculcate antipathy to communism. While the Church generally encouraged Papuans to stand against racist colonial discrimination and move towards independence, they strove to ensure that Catholics would be well represented in any Papuan government – and moreover, that these Catholic representatives would be steadfastly anti-communist. Although he did not return to the island after 1965, Smith was obviously keeping a close eye on the political situation in New Guinea. His copy of the gazette listing the winners of the 1968 election bears careful annotations.

Future Prime Minister Julius Chan is marked – peculiarly, albeit not inaccurately – as “Chinese – mixed Race [sic]”. Donatus Mola’s name is simply underlined, while notes on the Catholic education or allegiances of a few other Members have been scribbled in the margins.

Despite his uncertainties, Mola was a conscientious member of the House and went on to form the People’s Progress Party (PPP) alongside Chan. Re-elected in 1972, he thus became a member of the inaugural national parliament following independence in 1975. The PPP is an obstinately free market party, enthusiastic about foreign investment, which often undermined the more populist, social democratic inclinations of their frequent coalition partner, the Pangu Party. If the goal of Smith, Santamaria, et al., was to install representatives in PNG who would bolster the forces of capital, they were certainly successful.

There is a story here of the Catholic Church’s influence on PNG’s infant democracy. Many Papuan leaders were invited to Australia for training with the ISO; the ISO also set up a centre at Port Moresby. In Australian history, Santamaria and his ‘Movement’ are primarily remembered for engendering the seismic ALP-DLP split in the mid-1950s. But these documents reveal that the Movement also had a decisive, if distant, hand in PNG politics at a crucial moment of its development.

I would be foolhardy to paint the Church in too sinister a light here. Every post-colonial regime has its compradors, as Mao might describe the PPP. Even without Catholic interference, it is unlikely that communism would have gained much traction in Papua New Guinea, a nation where the enduring importance of ‘subsistence’ agriculture and traditional kinship systems make any Western-born ideology a hard sell, even today.

Indeed, the Western orientation of this archive that should give us pause before we hasten to a conclusion about a Machiavellian Church sabotaging indigenous political agency. What the historian has access to is but a modicum of Smith’s entire correspondence and little of what has been preserved includes letters written by indigenous Papuan people. Of course Australian Catholics seem influential on PNG politics when PNG politics is seen through the perspective of Australian Catholics. We can take this logic further. That the archive is comprised of written documents is itself a product of Western epistemological biases – a deep-seated collective hunch that the written word is a more credible source of truth than the spoken one. Who knows what conversations Mola was having with young Catholics in Melbourne, with his kin on the mission at Lemanmanu, with his colleagues in the House? Certainly not the historian.  

The influence of the Catholic Church on politics in PNG is deep and broad, and it warrants further investigation, but it is not determinative. Donatus Mola had values and interests of his own – unfortunately, the archive gives us little access to them.