Reduction of post-war bush murder in Papua New Guinea was brutal but ultimately effective task.

(The author of this article, a citizen of the United Kingdom who was familar with 1968's mini-skirts, student unrest, and hippy revolution also knew both the men (Roy Edwards and Tumai Mumu) who are the principal characters in this strange post-WW2 story)

The startling picture of a group of manacled Goilala tribesmen (above) and a second picture also taken in pre-independence Papua New Guinea (which format restrictions dictate will have to be published immediately after this article in a separate post) showing a Goilala bikman (village chief) setting up his first savings account may have been taken just a couple of years apart.

The kiap (Australian government patrol officer or bush abministrator) in the first is Roy Edwards who was leading a post-war law and order patrol in the Kunimaipa section of the Goilala Sub-District sometime between 1946 and 1949.

The kiap in the second, which was taken in 1951, is Ron Galloway the Goilala’s Assistant District officer (ADO). He and Tauade speaking bikman Tumai Mumu are outside Galloway’s Tapini office and Tumai has just opened an account with the Commonwealth Savings Bank.

This optimism would not have been possible unless the murder reduction task undertaken by Edwards had been successful - so these contrasting images confirm that development of this difficult section of Papua New Guinea could only have been achieved in stages.

There can be no doubt Edwards was an unusually hard man. He patrolled the Kunimaipa speaking section of the Goilala for months on end in his ultimately effective effort to break the traditional pay-back (tit-for-tat) murder spiral that accounted for dozens of deaths each year and obstructed improvements to village wellbeing as well.

Physical threat and coercion, along with unusual determination and durability, were among his principal pay-back reduction tools.

Tumai Mumu, whose father was the bikman at Tatupit in the Tauade section of the Goilala region, had been one of his interpreters.?

And Ron Galloway not only succeeded Edwards as OIC of the Goilala Sub-District in 1950 but was among those instrumental in parading his predecessor before the Supreme Court, on a charge of common assault, after which Edwards was jailed for six months and became a crocodile hunter instead.

The administration’s view was that Edwards, and his methods, no longer had a place in a service which was keen to direct more of its energy on showing a clean colonial face through more focus on economic and political development.

Nevertheless his murder reduction patrols were so successful that in 1975 long serving Catholic priests stationed at Kamulai in the Kunimeipa continued to credit him with saving hundreds of lives.

It is also difficult to imagine him taking part as Galloway, a modern, more bureaucratic man, did with obvious enthusiasm in a public relations style picture which underlines yet another advance in Pax Australiana’s ambitions and may have found its way onto senior desks in Canberra too.

Tumai’s role is more complicated because he was a self-confessed mass killer who could only have evaded 1940s-1950s arrest through extraordinary cunning.

In 1974 he told me that when he was younger he had ambushed and killed twenty four men. When asked how many of his victims were women he simply wrinkled his nose, stuck out his bottom lip and shrugged.

Nevertheless he appreciated the new found stability generated by the dramatic murder reduction initiated by earlier kiaps like Edwards and when I too was stationed at Tapini he helped me investigate an especially puzzling, carefully planned, murder of a woman who had been axed with precision four times.

The record of his observations read as follows:

?“Four men were involved. In the Goilala many men will kill one man. You must understand that with a pig it would be different. A man can use several blows to kill a pig and it would make no difference. But humans are unique. One man is marked to strike the victim first. This blow should be the killer. Then while the murdered man is shaking and turning other men will come and strike him once. They strike once then run away. And then the man behind them strikes. It is the first man who really kills the dead man. The others just cut him with their axes. “

Later, when I was investigating a double murder, I needed to find the original killer before he too was bumped off. The search was entering its second day and an encounter with Tumai once again proved fruitful.

“As we came to the ridge top by Tumai’s village the old man hurried stiffly towards us waving his arms. Bakaia was already grinning in anticipation. Tumai fired off a rapid burst of tok-ples, smiled, patted my hand, and walked back to his hut.

“What did he say”?

“Amuna is hiding at Pomutu,” Bakaia replied.

This information had saved us hours of fruitless searching.”

?My own Goilala experience, 1974-75, confirms that routine murder had still to fade completely.

?However during that period only five were recorded compared with dozens each year in the pre-Edwards era - and within a much larger population than in 1950 too.

?Unfortunately routine Goilala murder has since re-surfaced and no one can be certain how many victims die each year because very few violent deaths are reported.

?What is known for certain is that the Kunimaipa, the region where Edwards was most active, became a no-go area about twenty years ago when the Patrol Post at Guari, and its day to day government services, was abandoned.

?More recently the Catholic Mission at Kamulai, the only location where health, education and economic development needs within the Kunimaipa continued to be serviced, was also forsaken after its resident priest was murdered with a shotgun.

?So, even though his methods were declared unpalatable seventy long years ago the uncompromising Edwards did secure perhaps thirty years of relatively murder free security for the Kunimaipa people specifically and for the continually troubled Goilala region as a whole.

?Murder reduction was, and still is, pivotal to PNG’s development.

?Robert Forster is author of “The Northumbrian Kiap”.

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