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In his entry for the Southern Highlands in the Encyclopaedia of Papua New Guinea, McAlpine (1972:1089) noted that:
The bellicosity of precontact society was indicated by the fighting ditches and trenched roads lined with defensive gate barriers noted by early exploratory patrols.…The District was the last to be brought into contact with European society and partly as a consequence is one of the least developed heavily populated areas.…Isolation and the recency of pacification have delayed economic and social development.
After the major exploratory patrol by J.G. Hides and L.J. O’Malley in 1935, the Southern Highlands remained relatively undisturbed until after World War II, with increased Australian administrative contact gathering momentum only in the 1950s and early 1960s. McAlpine described the task as ‘virtually completed by 1965’ and considered that: ‘Despite the penchant for intertribal warfare pacification was remarkably peaceful’ (ibid). Nevertheless, as French and Walter reminded their readers (1984:20):
It was not until the early 1970s, however, when the last isolated groups were located and the Hewa area north of Kopiago was derestricted (in 1973), that this phase was completed province-wide.
When I commenced teaching at the University of Papua New Guinea in 1972, Southern Highland students in my classes provided vivid first-hand accounts of the first Australian patrols that had come to their scattered communities. Schools had been established and they had gone on to high school and now, in their mid 20s, they were to become the first university graduates from their areas. Self-government was a reality and independence was on the horizon. This was both an exciting and a daunting prospect, as it was expected that these new graduates would assist their people to ‘catch up’ with the more developed areas of Papua New Guinea.
At the same time, it was clear that the Australian colonial system of government and administration, which was now to be handed over to a national government, had not yet been fully understood or accepted. The inherent difficulties in taking on responsibility for economic and social development activities and projects were also appreciated, and students began to question the wisdom of imposing a preordained form of development on their people.
At a seminar in 1973 a group of students, who had spent several weeks in Wambip, a village in what is now the Karint sub-division of the Mendi District (see Bourke et al 1995), reported on their findings (Bais et al 1973). After a lively discussion as to whether silk worms, citrus, cattle, coffee or other projects could, or should, be established, one Southern Highlander challenged me as the only Australian present.
What happens if they don’t want your kind of development? What do we do if they want to go back to the way things were before you people came and disturbed their lives?
The students’ field experience had been further enlivened by differences of historical record on what had happened in the early1950s when the first Australian-led patrol had come into the area. The older villagers recalled with great detail how the patrol had crossed their ‘fight ground’ so their group attacked, as they knew these were hostile enemies. But the patrol retaliated with gunfire and six or eight had died. The men pointed to the places on the nearby hillside where a father or uncle had fallen. Although they had heard about earlier patrols, this was the reality of the new system of administrative control.
On the other hand, the Australian administrative officers in Mendi were outraged that the students had reported this story so uncritically. The official patrol reports they held told a very different story. ‘The patrol had been attacked when it was peacefully crossing an open area. The numbers of dead were greatly exaggerated. The villagers had wanted to impress the students with this story’. I had to work hard to gain official approval for further student fieldwork in the Southern Highlands. All involved in the debate seemed unaware or unable to accept that both stories could be true. The villagers felt they had indeed been ‘pacified’ and the patrol officer’s record indicated that his men had come under unprovoked attack and that they had to defend themselves.
Similar questions were raised a few months later, when I taught a long-vacation ‘Working with Communities’ course for high school teachers and administrative officers. The opening community development theme was:
Start where the people are. Go at their pace. Learn what they want and try to help them achieve these economic or social goals.
Nice sentiments but reality was a very different matter. One exasperated teacher responded:
I am the first person from my area to be a teacher. They think I have become a woman as I am twenty-six and I have not killed anyone. A strong man is someone who has killed a member of the enemy group. In the past a really strong man would have killed a policeman. What does your community development say to that?
The lessons from these stories are both in the time-scale and in the responses to external intrusion and control. My students were trying to consider the appropriate action to take to bring about effective development in some communities whose experiences of outside administrative control had begun less than twenty years earlier. I was again reminded of this in September 1975, when pictures appeared in the Post-Courier and on television of Australian patrol officers raising the Papua New Guinea flag in remote Southern Highlands patrol posts, while local community leaders looked on.
Achieving development may be a slow and painstaking process, which requires more than one generation from the first contact and many changes in strategies to achieve real and lasting success. Another question, which was frequently asked at this time, was: ‘Development for whom?’ One response was: ‘If they don’t want the suggested development, we should leave them alone.’ But, as became even clearer over the next few years, it was not possible to leave them alone. In any case, most Southern Highlanders wanted to gain access to economic opportunities and the main problem was their unrealistic expectations of the overall benefits which they thought would be obtained from particular projects.