Reactions to Australian Colonial Violence in New Guinea: The 1926 Nakanai Massacre in a Global Context

Abstract

On 1 November 1926 an Australian-led force left Rabaul bent on ‘justice’. This punitive expedition was in response to the recent killing of four Australian men in the Nakanai district of New Britain seventy miles from Rabaul. Called the ‘Nakanai massacre’, it was the bloodiest attack on whites in New Guinea for twenty years. This article explores the ‘Nakanai massacre’ and examines the revealing responses to it. It argues that the Nakanai massacre generated different levels of concern and anxiety about violence on Australian frontiers than contemporary mainland massacres because it occurred within New Guinea and under the intense international scrutiny of the League of Nations. This incident not only brings to the fore public debate about what Australia's rule in New Guinea was or should be. It argues it had consequences extending to retention of this territory and Australia's national prestige in the highly charged international setting in of 1926.

Notes

^*For their invaluable assistance in the production of this article I thank the Australian Historical Studies co-editors, Richard Broome and Diane Kirkby, the two anonymous AHS readers, Bruce Vaughn and Victoria Haskins for their insights and editorial assistance, Erin Stewart Maudlin and Seth Rotramel for their research assistance funded by Faculty Research Grants from the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University.

¹Patricia O'Brien, ‘Remaking Colonial Culture? White Australia and its Papuan Frontier 1901–1940’, Australian Historical Studies 40, no. 1 (2009): 101–2. Peter Hempenstall, Pacific Islanders under German Rule: A Study of the Meaning of Colonial Resistance (Canberra: ANU Press, 1978), 140–62. The spelling for Sinanga often appears as Silanga.

²Henry Reynolds, The Other Side of The Frontier: Aboriginal Resistance to the European Invasion of Australia (Ringwood: Penguin, 1982); Gordon Reid, A Nest of Hornets: The Massacre of the Fraser family at Hornet Bank Station (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1982) and A Picnic with the Natives: Aboriginal-European relations in the Northern Territory to 1910 (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1990); Lyndall Ryan, Aboriginal Tasmanians (St Lucia, University of Queensland Press, 1981); Bain Attwood and S. G. Forster, eds. Frontier Violence: The Australian Experience (Canberra: National Museum of Australia, 2003); Richard Broome, Aboriginal Australians: A History Since 1788 (St Leonards: Allen and Unwin, 2010); Tony Roberts, Frontier Justice: A History of the Gulf Country to 1900 (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2005).

³Lucy Mair, Australia in New Guinea (London: Christophers, 1948); C. D. Rowley, The Australians in German New Guinea (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1958); Edward Wolfers, Race Relations and Colonial Rule in Papua New Guinea (Sydney: Australia and New Zealand Book Company, 1975); Hank Nelson, Black White and Gold: Goldmining in New Guinea 1878–1930 (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1976); Roger Thompson, Australian Imperialism in the Pacific (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1980) and ‘Making a Mandate: Australia's New Guinea Policies 1919–1925’, Journal of Pacific History [JPH] 25, (1990), 1; Bill Gammage, ‘The Rabaul Strike 1929’, JPH 10, (1975), 3; Amirah Inglis, Not a White Woman Safe: Sexual Anxiety and Politics in Port Moresby (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1974); Sione Latekefu, ed. Papua New Guinea: A Century of Colonial Impact 1884–1984 (Boroko: National Research Institute, 1989); Raymond Evans, Kay Saunders, Kathryn Cronin, Race Relations in Colonial Queensland: A History of Exclusion, Exploitation and Extermination (St Lucia, University of Queensland Press, 1993); Tracey Banivanua-Mar, Violence and Colonial Dialogue: The Australian-Pacific Indentured Labor Trade (Honolulu, Hawaii UP, 2007). John Hammond Moore, Young Errol Before Hollywood (Sydney, Angus and Robertson, 1975), 37–41.

⁴Neville Green, The Forrest River Massacres (Freemantle: Freemantle Arts Press, 1995); Peter and Jay Read, eds. Long Time, Olden Time: Aboriginal Accounts of Northern Territory History (Alice Springs: Institute for Aboriginal Development, 1991); John Cribbin, The Killing Times: The Coniston Massacre 1928 (Sydney: Fontana, 1984); Peter Read, ‘Murder, Revenge and Reconciliation on the North Eastern Frontier’, History Australia 4 no. 1 (2007): 9.1–9.15; Bill Wilson and Justin O'Brien, ‘To Infuse an Universal Terror’: A Reappraisal of the Coniston Killings', Aboriginal History 23 (2003): 59–78.

⁵O'Brien, ‘Remaking’, 100.

⁶Trove lists four small articles reporting on the Forrest River killings. Comments reproduced here on Nakanai events from October 1926 to before the 1928 Coniston Massacre, assumed that collective punishment was an historical feature of Australia's pastoral frontiers. Wilson and O'Brien point to considerable responses to the Coniston massacre from September 1928. ‘To Infuse’, 59.

⁷O'Brien, ‘Remaking’, 96–112.

⁸C. D. Rowley, The Australians in German New Guinea 1914–1921 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1958).

⁹Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men's Countries and the Question of Racial Equality (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2008), chap. 12.

¹⁰Wayne Hudson, Billy Hughes in Paris: The Birth of Australian Diplomacy (Melbourne: Thomas Nelson Australia Limited, 1978), 92–6.

¹¹‘Australia's Mandate: Care of Natives’, The Argus, 25 October 1926, in Papers collected by J. G. McLaren relating to Territories NAA CP290/13, folder 7 [MP].

¹²‘Nakanai Massacre’: Details of Expedition', Brisbane Courier, 9 November 1926; League of Nations Covenant (Geneva: League of Nations, 1919) articles 22 and 23; Susan Pederson, ‘Settler Colonialism at the Bar of the League of Nations’ in Settler Colonialism in the Twentieth Century: Projects, Practices, Legacies, eds. Caroline Elkins and Susan Pederson (New York: Routledge, 2005).

¹³Thompson, ‘Making’.

¹⁴Ronald McNicoll, ‘Wisdom, Evan Alexander (1869–1945)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/wisdom-evan-alexander-9160/text16173, accessed 8 July 2011.

¹⁵William Morris Hughes, Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates (CPD), 22 November 1921.

¹⁶Thompson, ‘Making’, 75–6; Fletcher, B. H. ‘Ellis, Malcolm Henry (1890–1969)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/ellis-malcolm-henry-10116/text17855, accessed 16 February 2012.

¹⁷Klaus Neumann, Not the Way it Really Was: Constructing the Tolai Past (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1992).

¹⁸Thompson, ‘Making’, 76.

¹⁹A. S. Canning, Report of Inquiry into Allegations of Flogging and Forced Labour of Natives (Melbourne: Government Printer, 1924), 15, 18.

²⁰‘Inter-Tribal Fights’, The Brisbane Courier, 11 April 1924, 8. Ainsworth, 9, 12, 24, 38, 39, 41, 42.

²¹Thompson, ‘Making’, 80.

²²John Ainsworth, Administrative Arrangements and Matters Affecting the Interest of Natives in the Territory of New Guinea (Melbourne, Government Printer, 1924), 9.

²³‘Slandering Australia’, Sydney Morning Herald (SMH), 19 November 1924, 12.

²⁴League of Nations, ‘B and C Mandates: List of Questions which the Permanent Mandates Commission desires should be Dealt with in the Annual Reports of the Mandatory Powers’, Geneva, 25 June 1926.

²⁵‘An Example of Common Action’, The Times, 22 November 1926, 15.

²⁶‘When I was in Berlin recently’ The Rabaul Times (RT), 29 October 1926, 3; ‘Outside Interference’, RT, 17 December 1926, 4

²⁷‘League of Nations Mandates Controversy’, Evening Post, 16 September 1926.

²⁸The first rush began on Sudest Island. Hank Nelson further notes that the search for gold ‘was why most Australians went to Papua New Guinea and until the invasion by the Japanese in 1942 it was the main reason why most of them went beyond the beaches’, Black White, vii, 259, 269.

²⁹‘New Guinea Murders: Additional Details’, The West Australian, 9 December 1926, 11.

³⁰‘Opening of Nakanai District Statement by H. Nickols – whether case for criminal proceedings for libel’, NAA A432, 1929/3872.

³¹‘New Guinea Murders’, The West Australian 9 December 1926. The spelling for Nickols varies from Nichols to Nicholls.

³²‘Murderous Attack by Pacified Natives’, RT, 22 October 1926, 3.

³³In January 1929 Rabaul's population consisted of ‘500 whites, 800 Asiatics and 3,000 natives’ The Times, 5 January 1929, 11.

³⁴‘We have had no official advice on this patrol party’, Annotation to an Argus 13 November 1926 article in NAA, ‘Murders of Whites by Natives – Nakanai’, A518, AC840/1/3, p. 19/119.

³⁵‘Local News’, RT, 29 October 1926.

³⁶‘New Guinea Murders: Story of Attack’, The Argus, 13 November 1926, 38.

³⁷ E. A. Wisdom to J. G. McLaren, 22 November 1926, MP.

³⁸‘Nakanai Massacre’: Details of Expedition’, Brisbane Courier, 9 November 1926; ‘The Murder of Australians in New Britain’, The Times, 5 November 1926, 13; ‘Murder of White men in New Britain’, The Times, 6 November 1926, 11.

³⁹Wisdom to McLaren, 22 November, 1926. MP.

⁴⁰‘New Guinea Murders: Expedition not Punitive’, The Argus, 5 November 1926, 11.

⁴¹The image was published in the Sydney News, 8 February 1927.

⁴²Wisdom to McLaren, 22 November, 1926, MP.

⁴⁶‘From the Federal Capital: Review of the Week’, The West Australian, 13 November 1926, 10.

⁴³Richard Broome, ‘'The Planters’ Influence on the Administration of Mandated New Guinea’ (BA Hons Thesis UNSW 1969), chap. 1.

⁴⁴‘Grim background to New Guinea Murders’, Smith's Weekly, 13 November 1926.

⁴⁵ RT, 17 December 1926, 4.

⁴⁷‘Murder of Prospectors’, The Mercury, 4 November, 1926; ‘New Guinea Murders: Character of Natives’, The Argus, 16 November 1926.

⁴⁸‘New Guinea Murders: Character of Natives’, The Argus, 16 November 1926.

⁴⁹Neumann, Not the Way; ‘Murder of Prospectors’, The Mercury, 4 November 1926; ‘New Guinea Murders: Character of Natives’, The Argus, 16 November 1926; ‘New Britain: The New Guinea Murders’, SMH, 6 November 1926.

⁵⁰‘Nakanai Blacks Harmless’, Herald, 13 November 1926.

⁵¹H. L. Downing, ‘New Britain: The New Guinea Murders’, SMH, 6 November 1926; ‘Outside Interference’, RT, 17 December 1926.

⁵²‘This is a good one’, RT, 14 January 1927.

⁵³‘New Guinea Punitive Expedition: Two Natives Killed’ SMH, 19 November 1926, 11; ‘New Guinea Murders: The Punitive Expedition’, The West Australian, 19 November 1926, 12; ‘New Guinea Murders: Expedition Advances’, The Argus, 19 November 1926.

⁵⁴‘New Guinea Punitive Expedition: Two Natives Killed’ SMH, 19 November 1926, 11.

⁵⁵‘Military Funeral: Huge Attendance: Widespread Sympathy’, RT, 26 November 1926.

⁵⁶‘New Guinea Murders: Additional Details’, The West Australian, 9 December 1926, 11; ‘Recent Murders: The New Guinea Tragedy’, Brisbane Courier, 9 December 1926, 13; ‘Attack Upon Gold Seekers’, Western Argus, 14 December 1926.

⁵⁷‘New Guinea Tragedy: Health Director's Story’, The Argus, 9 December 1926.

⁵⁸ Labor Daily, 9 September 1926.

⁵⁹Raphael Cilento, Patrol Diary February 1927, Sir Raphael Cilento Collection, Fryer Library, UQFL44, Box 11, folder 19; See further details from Cilento reported in ‘New Guinea: Story of Massacre’, SMH, 13 January 1928, 10.

⁶⁰‘Thrilling Story: Nakanai Murders, Fight with Natives’, SMH, 9 February 1927; Similar reports appeared in numerous other papers.

⁶¹‘Our Task in New Guinea’, SMH, 12 February 1927, 14.

⁶²Fairplay, ‘The Nakanai Tragedy: To the Editor of the Herald’, SMH, 21 February 1927, 12.

⁶³Senator Matthew Reid (QLD), CPD, 24 March 1927.

⁶⁴‘Sequel to Murder: Natives Escape’, Evening Post, 29 June 1927, 11; ‘Murdered Prospectors: 14 Natives Break Gaol while Awaiting Trial’, Barrier Miner, 24 June 1927, 4; ‘Natives Escape’, The Brisbane Courier, 30 June 1927, 6.

⁶⁵J. K. McCarthy, Patrol into Yesterday: My New Guinea Years (Melbourne: Cheshire Publishing, 1974), 25–6.

⁶⁶McCarthy, 26.

⁶⁷Hank Nelson argues that Australian governments, particularly under Scullin, regularly commuted death sentences in New Guinea, though he did not address this specific case, ‘The Swinging Index: Capital Punishment and British and Australian Administrations in Papua and New Guinea 1888–1945’, JPH 13, (1978) no. 3, 143.

⁶⁸ Report to the Council of the League of Nations on the Administration of the Territory of New Guinea from 1st July, 1926 to 30 ^th June 1927 (Canberra: Government Printer Canberra, 1927), 234.

⁶⁹The sixth and seventh meetings, held June 23 and 24, were devoted to New Guinea.

⁷⁰Permanent Mandates Commission, Minutes of the Eleventh Session, held at Geneva from June 20 to July 6 (Geneva: League of Nations, 1927), 43–45.

⁷¹ Report to the Council of the League of Nations on the Administration of the Territory of New Guinea from 1st July, 1927 to 30th June 1928 (Canberra: Government Printer Canberra, 1928), 129.

⁷²C. W. C Marr letter to Prime Minister Bruce, 16 Aug 1927, Appendix A, Report by Minister for Home and Territories on visit made by him to Territories on visit made by him to Territories of New Guinea and Papua during year 1927–1928 in ibid.

⁷³Appendix B, ‘Description by Administrator of New Guinea of his tours of inspection within the Territory during the year 1927–1928’ in ibid.

⁷⁴Mr David McGrath to Sir Neville Howse, CPD, 4 May 1928.

⁷⁵‘Controlling New Guinea Natives: 1926 Murders, Natives Now Friendly’, The Mercury, 18 July 1928.

⁷⁶‘Two Killed: Attack by Natives, New Britain Affray’, Brisbane Courier, 5 August 1930, 13.

⁷⁷‘New Britain: Nakanai Natives Restless, Patrol Officer Attacked’, SMH, 2 August 1930.