Long before 1885, when the Kaiser’s Government officially occupied German New Guinea, his thrifty subjects had been working the plantations. This was no pumped-up Sudetenland, for the Germans were honestly in control. They were good planters who studied the soil under tropical conditions on this favored side of the big island. Their colonial treasury showed a surplus; they had increased their acres and become rich padroons; they lived luxuriously. Their Governor’s Palace at Rabaul (which the new military administration seized) was a fine example of tropical architecture. Out of a fever-ridden swamp they had made a Rabaul that was malaria-free.
In our time Germany has committed so many crimes against civilization that a crime against Germany may be worth putting on record. Its criminality reacted on all concerned, and especially on hordes of young war veterans whom the Australian Government “rewarded” with free grants of land.
I was settled in Rabaul and enjoying the generous privileges which Colonel Honman gave me in the fine German-made hospital when I learned some details of that military occupation, which a hard working civil administration was by now trying to live down. Everybody was talking about a scandal which compared with our own postbellum days in the South. Field-tried old soldiers were referring with scorn to the “Coconut Anzacs” whom Australia, for lack of better men, had sent to take possession in 1914. The Coconut Anzacs seemed to have been mostly men who hadn’t gone to the real war, for one reason or another—raw amateurs without the slightest sense of discipline. Military power inspired many to wanton acts of cruelty and the stupidest sort of blunders.
My daring young man Byron Beach was eyewitness to one outrage. He presented himself as a medical officer to a punitive expedition, and was taken along. A company of Coconut Anzacs had been sent out to chasten a native village, accused of cannibalism. Led by a hard-drinking officer, himself frightened of the poor, scared cannibals, the troops surrounded a certain inland village to teach the black beggars a lesson. Maybe they were pretty drunk when they proceeded to shoot up everything they saw. Men were shot as they ran, women and children were gunned out of trees. Beach saw the leader of the party put a pistol to the head of a girl who lay flat on the ground.
And next day the commanding officer found that he had made a little mistake. He had attacked the wrong village.
Another expedition went to see about a German anthropologist who lived alone in the bush. He had been there for years and had a way of locking his books and papers in the little house and going away on tours of research. When war was declared he was so far away from his home base that he didn’t hear the news. In his absence the frenzied patriots broke down his door, found great stacks of carefully written papers and made a bonfire of them. They didn’t understand German, and the writing looked like spy stuff. On his return the scientist found his lifework reduced to ashes. They say he went crazy.
Maybe the new civil government was too bitter, looking over the mischief the military administration had wrought. There had been a great deal of aimless sabotage. For instance, they had demolished the apparatus in the great radio station. The excuse was that it might be sending messages to Berlin. It hadn’t occurred to the conquerors that they might save these costly things for their own use.
Now what to do with the German planters? Prime Minister Hughes’s Territorial Government was taking care of that. When I established myself at Rabaul in 1921 the farce was in full swing, and through no fault of Governor Wisdom’s, who had to make the best of a policy already framed. The policy was starkly this: Encourage the thrifty Germans to improve their land with the promise that they might retain it. In 1921 something called an Expropriation Board arrived, called in the anxious Germans, and gave them vouchers enabling them to sell their property back to the Territory, at their own valuation. But when the Germans turned in these vouchers the Territory’s Treasury Department paid for them in orders on the German Government—to be applied on Australia’s reparations claim!
Bankrupt Germans were selling their household goods for anything they could get. During my stay in New Guinea it was a commonplace to see vessels departing for Australia, laden with pictures, rugs, silverware. Returning ships were bringing back the same old load: hard liquor and fresh contingents of war veterans to stray into the plantations, sicken and go home.
Liquor and malaria, malaria and liquor—a vicious circle to worry the public health physician. These brave soldiers, who never wanted to hear the word “war” again, were taking Billy Hughes’s advice: “Just go to New Guinea and pick out a fine plantation.” They didn’t know how to eat, drink or live in the tropics. There were many stories, funny and sad. One returned soldier was blithely dumped on the beach and sent to the wilds with nothing more substantial than a case of tinned beef, a case of mixed pickles and six cases of beer. Babes in the wood, what did they know about malaria? Men who should have known said to them, “Shaky in the morning? Then scoff off a tot of whisky or a bottle of beer, and you’ll feel fit as a fiddle.” Green as grass, the poor fellows thought that coconuts grew underground like potatoes or on vines like grapes. They starved, they drank, they let the natives take advantage of their ignorance. They swallowed the popular “fever cure” and finally tottered back to the returning ship—if they could.