History as Resource: Moral Reckonings with Place and with the Wartime Past in Oro Province, Papua New Guinea

ABSTRACT

Located in Oro Province, Papua New Guinea, Higaturu Station is a place marked by multiple intersections of violence. Originally established as an Australian colonial headquarters, in 1943 it was the site of execution of 21 local Orokaiva men convicted – by the Australian administration – of treason during the Second World War. Eight years after the executions, the nearby Mount Lamington volcano erupted, killing thousands and devastating Higaturu. Today the place remains uninhabited but laden with memory and meaning, a site of ambivalent moral reckonings both with the colonial past and with the postcolonial present. These moral reckonings, in turn, intersect with peoples’ experiences of, and hope for, ‘development’. In Oro Province, history is becoming a resource – not unlike gold, or the oil palm plantations that extend across the landscape – which might attract outsiders, and with them forms of wealth and possibilities for realising the good life. Accordingly, Higaturu landowners work to attract outsiders to the site of the eruption and the hangings. At the same time, however, they worry that the outsiders they attract – including anthropologists – will exploit and profit from their history in the ways that so many outsiders have profited from the Province's other resources. Commercial considerations inform these hopes and worries, but the mobilisation of history-as-resource also speaks to other concerns, including about the relationships of insiders and outsiders across time, and the proper attributions of guilt, responsibility, and entitlement within colonial and postcolonial landscapes of remembrance.

KEYWORDS:

• Second World War
• history
• resource
• dark tourism
• colonialism

Acknowledgement

I extend my sincere thanks to my Oro colleagues and friends, particularly Margaret Embahe, Mavis Manuda Tongia, Maclaren Hiari, and Professor John Waiko, as well as to the Hohorita community and all those within Oro who have shared their time and knowledge. Thanks also to Jonathan Ritchie, who first invited me to work with him on Oro wartime histories in 2014, and who has led the PNG Oral History Project of which I have been a part from 2016 to 2018. Kirstie Close-Barry worked with Jon and I through 2015, conducting invaluable archival research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. An album containing 62 of Speer's images is available online at the National Library of Australia collection, PIC Album 1085 A #PIC/9275/1-62

2. http://www.kokodatrackauthority.org/

Additional information

Funding

The 2015 fieldwork on which this paper principally draws was funded by the Deakin University Central Grants Scheme (RM29511). Subsequent fieldwork, including my January 2017 visit to Dipoturu, was funded through the PNG Oral History Project. This Project is supported by the Australian Government in partnership with Papua New Guinea, through the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade Aid Program (PGF-2016-0023).