In contrast to Papua’s bleak capital I found Rabaul a picture of tropical delight: regular streets were bordered with poinciana, royal palms, coconut palms; betel-nut palms raised graceful, slender stems and flaunted their feathery tops just above clusters of fruit that were like hothouse grapes; Indian laurels loomed graciously over thriving fig trees. The Germans had drained all this land, relieved it of mosquitoes, planted the groves; they had set Government House on a fine eminence overlooking a stretch of water that might have been a Scottish lake.
Rabaul was an extremely shaky Garden of Eden, geologically and politically. Jolly earthquakes came and went with seismic whimsicality, and were so frequent that every hotel, house and office had its heavy furniture lashed to the walls. Otherwise, one might have waked up any morning and found a large German wardrobe in one’s lap. Right inside Rabaul’s port, Vulcan Island was a particularly bad actor. The Reverend George Brown, the fighting missionary, records its beginning back in 1878 when it blew the twenty-mile channel full of pumice; thousands of boiled fish were washed ashore, and great sea turtles with their tortoise-shell cooked to a pulp. The next big show was in 1937, when Vulcan covered the town with ashy vomit; after that there was talk of moving the capital, but the colonial becomes a fatalist. He has to be.
One morning in 1921 I saw some lumber that had been piled on Vulcan go scattering into the sea like a box of matches, and I saw the huge sheet-iron D.H. & P.G. store curl like a withered leaf. After that Eloisa and I agreed that at the next tremor we’d pick up little Harriette and make for the hills.... And let’s not forget two very wicked “Shaker ladies,” two tall peaks about three miles from town on the mainland, and officially named Mother and Daughter. On the night of Vulcan’s birth there was a volcanic growl at the mouth of the Bay, and in the morning Vulcan loomed from the sea, shoved 600 feet from the water and venomous as a newborn cobra. Vulcan is now popularly known as “The Bastard,” and so he will be called until he takes a notion to sink again.
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Where Papua with her probable 500,000 natives had five official medical men, New Guinea Territory, equally populous, had eight or ten government doctors to serve it. The hospital at Rabaul I found especially well equipped, thanks to a retired German medical staff. The Australians had adopted a German expedient. Well-trained orderlies, under the supervision of medical officers, were sent out to run the lesser hospitals. These orderlies were called “lik-lik doctors” or “small doctors”—lik-lik means “little.” They had a high sense of duty and were remarkably competent. When I was there the natives were being trained simply in bandaging, treating sores and administering physic; then they were given a uniform cap and lavalava and sent back to their villages to apply their useful knowledge. They had the title of “Tultul” and their salary was a pound or so a year.
The Medical Tultul was a modest beginning in an important system that was destined to go on. I had studied the mind of the higher type Melanesian and had begun to see that he was far from a fool. I had watched the work of my head boys in the field—men like Ahuia, for instance. What except race prejudice stood in the way of their being educated in medicine and equipped to practise among their own people, whose language and customs no white physician would ever understand?
Even in those days I heard reports of the more progressive Fiji Islands where for a long time they had been giving a sketchy medical training to Melanesians. Most of the South Pacific received the idea with a cynical smile. In Papua I had broached the plan of sending out picked natives, under the direction of laymen, to administer yaws and hookworm treatments over a country so vast that the few white doctors were ridiculously inadequate to cover it. This plan was later adopted. In the Territory of New Guinea I had still better luck; crusty old Colonel Honman had sufficient faith in me to permit the experiment at once. The black boys I chose and instructed in the administration of oil of chenopodium proved remarkably useful, considering the inadequacy of their training.
Conditions we had to meet were similar to those in Papua, only the people were far nearer to the Stone Age than were most of the Papuan natives. Cannibalism was still practised within forty miles of Rabaul. We had to move cautiously out in the bush, but we never carried firearms—with the exception of Chris Kendrick, who faced one or two situations where a pistol proved a very useful tool.
New Guinea Territory, in fact, was at that time harder to deal with than it was before the abrupt political change of 1914. The coastal native, more sophisticated than his brother of the jungle, was dumbly wondering what had become of the Germans, who had ruled them well, all things considered. Natives had been servants of the padroons, and had learned to like them. And what was this new set of white men with a new set of laws which they seemed unable to enforce?
The military administration, which came in with the first World War and lasted for seven years, was a great political blunder, as the best minds of Australia knew from the first; but what could be done about it until Billy Hughes’s home Government decided on something less fantastic? The whole business had the nasty look of any sudden political overturn.