Some Experiences of a New Guinea Resident Magistrate

by C. A. W. Monckton

I was not pleased, as I saw the unpleasant prospect looming before me of having to do the district work, in the absence of the Murua, in a whaleboat; the whaler would be safe enough, but when under sail one could have no awning, and would therefore be alternately grilled by the sun and wet through by every passing shower. The Merrie England sailed, leaving me to my work. The first thing to which I turned my attention was, as usual, the detachment of police: the Commandant, while there, had fallen them in with the travelling patrol, but in three minutes had dismissed them to their barracks in despair; they were all, with the exception of a corporal, locally recruited by Campbell and trained by him. They were an uncommonly clean and tidy looking lot, very polite and attentive, excellent body or house servants, and taught to salute on every possible occasion; a man could not even hand one a cake of bath soap without saluting as he gave it, and again when he left. “Corporal,” I asked (a corporal being in charge of the ten men forming the detachment), “what are the hours of parade here, and how often do you have musketry instruction?” “I fall the men in once a week,” he replied, “and we never have musketry instruction.” “My stars!” I said; “what do you teach them?” “I teach them right-hand salute, left-hand salute, officers’ and general salute,” was the answer; “that’s all Mr. Campbell wants.” I groaned. “You will fall them in at half-past six every morning, and at five o’clock every evening whilst I am here,” I ordered, “beginning this evening.”

I went to the first parade, and found that—beyond saluting—the men knew absolutely nothing of drill: their rifles were spotlessly clean, but several were out of order, and the men ignorant of the component parts of their arms; most of them had never fired a shot. When I snapped out an order, as I had been accustomed to do with my hard-bitten devils of the Mekeo detachment, instead of a brisk movement following it, they would shiver and wilt like a lot of scared valets. “My Faith, what would you be like in a fight?” I asked them. “There are no fights in the south-east,” they said, “but we should like to be made the same as the other police; we are ashamed now when we meet them, and the corporal cries.” “Well he might,” I remarked, “for such a lot of sleek pussy cats I have never yet met.” Then I put them through a sweating hour of recruit drill; the corporal, who had once known his work, soon remembered the drill, and began to take hold again. Clancey, the white prisoner undergoing sentence for manslaughter, was a handy man, and, after I had once shown him how to take to pieces and assemble a rifle, I made him take a class and instruct each of the police how it was done. When I left the south-east, I had those men cocking their caps at a rakish angle, and walking with a very passable imitation of the swagger of the fighting constabulary of the mainland.

Campbell had been in the Customs at Tonga; he was, while there, a Corporal, a Colonel, or a Field-Marshal in the King of Tonga’s “Guards,” I never quite knew which. He had a wondrous uniform which he had brought from there, and which he donned on state occasions: Moreton and Armit swore that from it, they never could decide whether he was horse or foot, sapper or gunner; and the confusion was made worse by the addition of epaulets and spurs. Anyhow, it was a harmless conceit, amused Campbell, and hurt no one else: perhaps it is rather unkind of me, while peacefully farming in New Zealand, to laugh at a man still writing interminably in a New Guinea office; my only excuse is, that I am trying to picture New Guinea as I knew it.

Among my office papers were numerous applications, from miners on Woodlark Island, for leases and reefing claims, also notices of pending litigation; they were all nicely docketed and filed, with copies of acknowledging letters, but apparently nothing had been done, and the men were getting frantic. I put in a month visiting islands, and then, not caring to carry my Court Registers and books in the whaler, I went to Samarai, to find out what had become of the Murua. I discovered that she had been handed over to Symons, who in his turn had handed her over to carpenters for repairs: the carpenters—being busy—had merely planted her on a mud bank, where she lay, with her decks warped and ruined by the sun, and her hull full of borers; clearly she was now going to be a three months’ job. After cursing Symons very thoroughly, and the carpenters as well, I sought out Moreton and reproached him. “I can’t help it,” he said, “I have nothing to do with the vessel, and Symons is now so spoilt by Headquarters that I can do nothing with him.”

I learnt from Moreton that he had some awkward work on hand in the Trobriands and at Ferguson Island, for which he had not a sufficient force: I accordingly suggested that, if he would take me to Woodlark Island first to hold my Warden’s Court, I would then join him with my police, who by now were fairly efficient in their work; a plan to which he readily agreed.

Moreton and I therefore sailed in the Siai for Woodlark, where we put in a strenuous time. He took all the police court, civil and native cases for me; whilst I held the Warden’s Court, dealing with multitudinous applications and technical work. Moreton’s time was limited, as native affairs in his own district were pressing; accordingly, I sat night and day, to get through the work in the Warden’s Court. I had no clerk or assistant, and as there were many forms to be filled up and signed, all of which carried a fee for which receipts had to be given, I stationed my corporal at the door of the Court room, with his cartridge pouch open. As I granted each application and wrote out a receipt, I told the applicant the amount, and that he was to pay the corporal at the door, for I had no time to count money or weigh gold-dust; and it says a lot for the honesty of those men, that afterwards when I weighed the gold-dust and counted the cash in the corporal’s pouch, I found the amount to be in excess of what was due. A sweet time that excess of money gave me later on with the Treasurer; having sent it all through with the duplicate receipts and returns, he demanded why they did not tally. When he received my explanation that it was due to over-payment by miners, he wanted to know why I had not returned the surplus to the owners; and when I explained that I did not know who the owners were, he censured me for the “grave laxity in supervising payments of money due to Government.”

While we were at Woodlark, I had one very unpleasant case. The miners presented me with a petition, praying for the removal of a man named Brown, who was a drunken dissolute ex-pugilist, and who spent his time in jumping the claims of weak or elderly men, and then demanding a payment to quit; if they did not pay, he would post a notice stating the title to the claim was in dispute, which thereby caused all work to cease until the next sitting of the Warden’s Court, sometimes months later. I told the petitioners that I could not deport a man, but would call on Brown to find sureties to keep the peace, and that, if he failed to find them, I would send him to gaol. Sending for Brown, I read the charge to him, and told him I wanted two men to go bail for him to the extent of fifty pounds each, otherwise I should be obliged to gaol him. He produced a hundred pounds and said, “Hold that.” “That’s no good,” I said; “I want two men to guarantee you, and I will give you till to-morrow to find them.” Brown went off, but could find no one to stand bail for him; so, in a rage, he went to a tent owned by a man with a considerable knowledge of medicine, and in which was stored the entire stock of drugs in the island, and smashed the lot. I saved him from being killed by the irate miners, and then clapped him into irons.

On the morning I left the mining camp, Brown’s irons were taken off; whereupon he flung himself flat on his face and refused to walk to the vessel, saying, that if I wanted him, I could carry him. I appealed to the miners. “Drag this blighter to the Siai for me, I’m not going to struggle with him myself and I don’t like having him taken by the native police.” “Set the niggers on the ——,” was their answer, “we won’t touch him.” In obedience to my order, the police dragged Brown—kicking, fighting, and swearing—some hundred yards from the camp; then I had him set down. “Brown, will you come quietly?” I asked. “No, you ——,” he answered. “Corporal, load your rifle,” I said. The corporal loaded it. “Sit here and guard that man, and blow his head off if he moves,” came next. Brown looked rather disturbed; then I took the remainder of my men away, and instructed them in the manner in which the frogs’ march is performed. Returning to Brown, I nodded my head at the men, and said, “Frogs’ march!” In ten minutes he was praying for mercy and release; I gave him fifteen minutes of it, and then he walked with us like a pet lamb.

When we reached the Siai, he was put in the hold where there were a couple of native prisoners; afterwards he had the ineffable impudence to send in a report to Port Moresby, complaining about Moreton and myself having put him in with natives, and quoting in support of his complaint, the treatment he had received in English and Colonial gaols, where he had never been put with niggers! Brown only spent a week in Samarai gaol, for a vessel then left for the Mambare, and he begged Moreton to procure his release and let him go thither. “Better let him go,” said Moreton, “he is only a nuisance here, and he can’t have a worse time than sweating for gold on the Mambare. We can let Armit know what he is like and there are enough hard cases among the Mambare diggers to make things hot for him, if he plays any tricks there.” “All right,” I said, “let him go; I don’t care where he is so long as he is out of my Division; but you and I will have to go bail for him.” We released Brown, signed bail, and escorted him upon the vessel bound for the Mambare, where he was afterwards murdered by a boy he had brutally misused. His reputation was so bad on that gold-field, that white men, conversant with all the facts of the murder, declined to give evidence against the boy.

At the Woodlark Island gold-field, at that time, a very peculiar position existed. The Mining Act, under which I worked, was an Act adopted from Queensland, where all lands not alienated were vested in the Crown; certificates of titles, rights or leases in Queensland being granted upon that assumption. In New Guinea, however, under our constitution, all lands not purchased by Government, not gazetted as waste and vacant, were held to belong to the natives; no land in Woodlark had been purchased by the Crown, nor had any been taken over as waste or vacant. The position therefore was, that on behalf of the Crown, I was granting titles to land to which the Crown itself held no title. As a matter of fact, I believe that if the natives had had sufficient knowledge, they could have capsized the title held by every miner and mining company in Woodlark, and could have entered into possession of all the claims or mines; moreover, they could do so still, unless those lands have subsequently been acquired by the Crown.