Before I Sleep by Ray Whitrod

Author:Ray Whitrod
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Queensland Press

7

Papua New Guinea

(1969-1970)

LIFE was proceeding normally in Canberra when I was asked by an old colleague who was about to retire from the Police Commissioner’s job in the Territory of Papua New Guinea (TPNG) to help find him a replacement. I promised I would but I was unable to attract any worthwhile applicants, perhaps because the Royal Papua New Guinea Constabulary would soon be facing the turmoils of independence. I told Mavis that this was a critical stage for TPNG, since it was vital to develop a law enforcement structure that would be able to cope with the new stresses, before the country became independent. We agreed that I should volunteer, so in 1969 we transferred to the Royal Papua New Guinea Constabulary. We passed the necessary medical tests despite our ages, and with sadness Mavis again sold our family home.

I was very busy in TPNG and Mavis quickly found tasks that needed to be done. She organised the wives of native police into basketball clubs, taught them swimming in the hitherto prohibited (for them) barracks swimming pool, and helped to teach the wives, who were mainly village girls, how to buy appropriate goods cheaply from the trade stores. The wives were shy and unaccustomed to such friendly relationships with Australian people, but Mavis won them over. Our excellent houseboy, Manassa, started teaching Mavis pidgin and she corrected his English. We found Manassa’s church less stuffy than the local Baptist church, which was still dominated by a colonial outlook. Once when I was away in the Sepik, Mavis discovered an intruder in her bedroom. Our guard dog, Pepi, was barking in the passageway and Manassa ran to her. The intruder fled. After that, whenever I was absent, Manassa chose to sleep outside our bedroom door, and Pepi was allowed inside at night time. Manassa and Mavis formed a very happy domestic team, and I know he appreciated her “colour-blindness”.

I still entertained some illusions about the world. My much earlier reading of those absorbing novels by Edgar Wallace of the Nigerian adventures of “Sanders of the River” and of the doings of his young Assistant District Officer Bones, with their enforcement team of Askaris, had left behind a rosy image of the life of a colonial law enforcer. But Edgar Wallace, despite his expertise in solving criminal mysteries, had overlooked the underlying difficulties of such an arrangement, even in the then-stable Nigeria. I was largely ignorant about the situation in TPNG, but I quickly learned that the Territory was already undergoing major social change. A constitutional reappraisal was imminent. This was a political reorganisation being pushed by Canberra but resisted in some TPNG quarters as premature.

From the policing aspect, these changes were being made against the backdrop of a criminal justice system that was an amalgamation of western legal philosophies applied by force to a tribal society composed of over 700 linguistic groups. Its enforcement employed the continental principles of policing: the suppression of lawbreaking by regulations imposed from above. This

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