Papua New Guinea (1908-2008)

Adventist Women’s Ministries, the Centenary Celebrations of the Establishment of the SDA Church in Papua New Guinea (1908-2008). Photo courtesy of Barry Oliver. Papua New Guinea MILTON HOOK Milton Hook, Ed.D. (Andrews University, Berrien Springs, Michigan, the United States). Hook retired in 1997 as a minister in the Greater Sydney Conference, Australia. An Australian by birth Hook has served the Church as a teacher at the elementary, academy and college levels, a missionary in Papua New Guinea, and as a local church pastor. In retirement he is a conjoint senior lecturer at Avondale College of Higher Education. He has authoredFlames Over Battle Creek, Avondale: Experiment on the Dora, Desmond Ford: Reformist Theologian, Gospel Revivalist, the Seventh-day Adventist Heritage Series, and many magazine articles. He is married to Noeleen and has two sons and three grandchildren. Papua New Guinea is located between 0 and 10 degrees south of the equator, to the north of Australia. It occupies the eastern half of the island of New Guinea. Introduction In the nineteenth century German traders came searching for supplies of coconut oil along the northern shores of modern-day Papua New Guinea. Pockets of British traders established themselves on the southern coastline. In 1885 an Anglo-German Agreement was reached that divided the eastern half of the island along the mountain ridge that divided the north from the south. In 1902 the control of British New Guinea in the south was ceded to Australia. During World War I Australia captured German New Guinea. It was henceforth known as New Guinea. The south was referred to as Papua. Papua and New Guinea were administered as a territory of Australia until it was granted independence in 1975 and became Papua New Guinea, with Port Moresby as the capital. Ethnoculturally, Papua New Guinea is one of the most complex in the world. There are approximately seven hundred indigenous languages. Hiri Motu is the lingua franca in the former Papua, and Pidgin English is the lingua franca in the former New Guinea. A large proportion of the population continues to hold on to clan animistic practices in conjunction with traditional Christian beliefs. Christianity is represented by the Roman Catholic Church, Lutheran Church, United Church, Seventh-day Adventist Church, and others.1 Arrival of Seventh-day Adventists in Papua An aborted beginning to the SDA mission in Papua was made in 1895 in the context of the voyages of the Pitcairn. The schooner had carried many missionaries to pioneer various South Pacific islands, and a similar enterprise for Papua was planned at General Conference headquarters. Albert Read, who was engaged in medical studies at the time, was nominated and about to sail to Papua to establish a mission station when Dr. John Kellogg heard of the plans and wrote a hasty letter to Ellen White, objecting to the idea as one that did not consider the health and training of Read.2 Church leaders therefore rescinded their plans.3 In 1902 Edward Gates sailed through the territory on his way to Singapore, making stops at the Louisiade Islands, New Britain, and ports along the north coast of German New Guinea. He took the opportunity to distribute some literature among the Englishmen and gather information about the indigenous people.4 Griffiths Jones made a similar trip in 1904,5 and George Irwin sailed into the same ports in 1905.6 These visits served to familiarize church leaders with the need for the SDA mission to enter the area as soon as possible. Bisiatabu and Efogi Responsibility for the South Pacific mission field had been transferred from American headquarters to Australasian headquarters, where funds were being stretched to the limit. Mission stations were scattered over a vast area, requiring many individuals to service them and extra finances to supply them. Funds to begin in Papua took time to accumulate. The initial move was to earmark the third quarter Sabbath School offerings of 1906 for the new field.7 Then Septimus and Edith Carr, expatriate teachers at the Buresala Training School in Fiji, were nominated in 1907 to spearhead the enterprise.8 They chose one of their students, Benisimani “Bennie” (or “Benny”) Tavodi, to assist them. Youth societies in New Zealand, South Australia, and Queensland collected funds to finance Tavodi.9 The missionary group arrived in Port Moresby in June 1908 and found a hut to rent on the outskirts of town.10 Carr spent considerable time searching for a suitable place to begin. He explored along the coast as far west as Hisiu. 11 He traveled by packhorse to the Sogeri Plateau northeast of Port Moresby, where he was impressed with the cooler climate and better soil.12 There were no other denominations at work in the area, so he applied to the government, asking them to purchase 150 acres from the local people so that he could lease it long-term.13 Late in 1909 these arrangements were completed. At the same time help arrived in the persons of Gordon and Maud Smith, nursing graduates, together with a Cook Islands man named Tuaine Solomona.14 Tavodi and Solomona did much of the hard labor, clearing and preparing the ground and planting taro, bananas, citrus, and rubber trees. The property, named Bisiatabu, had an altitude of 1,600 feet.15 A mission home of local materials was erected, which, together with the land, was dedicated on February 28, 1910.16 John Fulton, president of the Australasian Union Conference, made a one-day stopover in Port Moresby on July 11, 1910, organising the first SDA church in Papua. It seemed premature, for there were only six charter members, and it was peculiar because it was called the Bisiatabu church, but formed and met in Port Moresby.17 Frank Chaney spent most of 1911 with the missionaries, building a European-style mission home in Port Moresby and another at Bisiatabu. The Carrs moved from their rented quarters into the Port Moresby home.18 When Arthur Lawson joined the mission team, he built a storeroom at Sapphire Creek in 1913. It was the endpoint of the road navigable by motorized vehicles, halfway between Port Moresby and Bisiatabu. Incoming supplies and outgoing farm produce were held under lock and key at Sapphire Creek.19 Carr hired local Koiari tribesmen as laborers and they signed on for a year, earning £6 each for their term of work. He also operated a store so that the men received value for their money, selling them tomahawks, pocketknives, lanterns, kerosene, matches, razors, clothing, and cooking pots. They learned to trust Carr as one who guarded their best interests. The men belonged to the villages located along the track leading to Kokoda, on the other side of the Owen Stanley Range. In 1912 Tavodi walked home with some of the men to explore the possibilities for mission expansion.20 The following year Carr and Lawson trekked the same arduous track to Kokoda via Efogi and Kagi. They found that some of the returned men were trying to observe a Saturday Sabbath as they had learned at Bisiatabu, but they had no calendar and had lost track of the days.21 Later that year, 1913, Tavodi and four men made another treck, this time only as far as Efogi, visiting Kagi, Seragina, Hagari, Bapari, Kotoi, Naori, and Ilibane. He was frustrated because the coastal Motuan language he had learned was not known in the mountains, each village having their own local language.22 In 1914 Carr made an exploratory trip northwest across the Goldie River,23 and Lawson trekked in a southeasterly direction.24 Bisiatabu proved to be a splendid spot for agriculture, but it was not a populous region When Carr returned to Australia in 1914, only one young lad, Taito, had been baptized,25 and he went back to his family and old ways, returning a decade later. Another lad, Baigani, was baptized in 1920. He adopted the Christian name Timothy.26 Carr’s school had failed to retain students. He and Lawson were basically serving as plantation owners. Lawson admitted that the decade 1908 through 1918 had yielded no tangible results.27 The death of Tavodi from snakebite in 1918 was a cruel blow that exacerbated the dire situation and brought some degree of despondency.28 Lawson and Mitieli, another Fijian assistant, maintained the outpost at Bisiatabu, where the crops flourished and the station became self-supporting.29 Captain Griffiths Jones and his wife, Marion, arrived in mid-1921 to replace the Lawsons, bringing fresh optimism.30 Jones restarted the school at Bisiatabu in January 192231 after trekking into Koiari territory with Mitieli, encouraging the parents to send their young people to Bisiatabu.32 “Many devils are coming,” Jones told them, “and they will gather all your young men to a faraway white man’s land to fight and they will never see New Guinea again.” The wily Koiari answered, “We will hide.”33 Nevertheless, he attracted forty of the lads. Some ran away and had to be enticed back. Jones said he found them to be incorrigible and undisciplined, but he had some success teaching elementary arithmetic, some writing, and how to pray for the sick.34 Jones had planned to begin another mission station on the Kokoda Track at Efogi, but he became distracted with government exhortations to expand into the deltas of the Fly and Kikori rivers. The lure of access by boat and of coastal terrain compared to the gruelling Koiari tracks was tempting, but his three-year term expired before he could implement the coastal project.35 Before leaving, he made one last trek among the Koiari people, receiving an offer of land from Chief Odila at

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