Morobe Consolidated Goldfields Limited Morobe Gold and Silver Project Socio-Economic Impact Study Volume I Introduction, analysis of social and political risks, recommendations Volume II Area study and social mapping ► Volume III Working Papers March 2001 proof corrections 11 May 2001 document format remediated in Word 2007, 22 August 2010 Author With the assistance of John Burton Peter Bennett, MCG In 2001: Morobe Consolidated Goldfields Ngawae Mitio, MCG In 2010: Australian National University Lengeto Giam, MCG Wayang Kawa, MCG Susy Bonnell, Subada Consulting Jennifer Krimbu, MCG Boina Yaya, MCG CONTENTS The Working Papers collect together work carried out for CRA and AGF, as well as for the present impact study. Too many informants to mention by name, as well as my colleagues L. Giam and W. Kawa, have supplied the information on which they are based—I acknowledge their great help in putting together this material. Working Paper No. 1 Hidden Valley: some historical matters to start with (1995) Working Paper No. 2 Condemned forever to fight? social mapping at Hidden Valley, Morobe Province, PNG (1995) Working Paper No. 3 Aspects of Biangai society: the solorik system (1996) Working Paper No. 4 Settlement formation and leadership in the Upper Watut (1996) Working Paper No. 5 The history of Nauti village, Upper Watut CD, Morobe Province, PNG (1996) Working Paper No. 6 Early colonial contacts among the Upper Watut and Biangai peoples from 1895 to the First World War (1996) Working Paper No. 7 The history of the descendants of Mayetao and others in the Upper Watut (2000) Working Paper No. 8 Preliminary schedule of culturally significant plants in the Upper Watut and Upper Bulolo areas with commentary by Watut and Biangai speakers (1996- 2000) Working Paper No. 9 Peter Taparai and the Kunimaipa alluvial miners at Hidden Valley (2000) Working Paper No. 10 The Local Land Court case over Hamata, Upper Watut (1997) Working Paper No. 11 Land ownership in the Upper Watut Valley: issues and outcomes (1998) Working Paper No. 12 Settlement history of the Southwestern Biangai and catalogue of National Museum site codes (2000) Working Paper No. 13 First contacts between outsiders and the Watut and Biangai people of the Wau and Bulolo area (2000) 13-i HIDDEN VALLEY: SOME HISTORICAL MATTERS TO START WITH HIDDEN VALLEY PROJECT, WORKING PAPER No. 1 prepared for CRA Minerals by JOHN BURTON Pacific Social Mapping 12 Lilley Street CANBERRA ACT 2602 Australia April 1995 revised 15 November 1995 revised 27 April 1996 revised 13 August 1996 revised 9 October 1997 Purpose of this discussion A sequence of court cases, culminating in G.C. Lapthorne’s 1987 Provincial Land Court decision on landowner claims to the Hidden Valley prospect area, is notable for its lack of precision in referring to the actual groups of people involved. The identification of these groups and their members is not simple. The landowners groups are actively engaged in defining and redefining themselves, principally through the use of group histories, for different reasons in the two main landowner areas. Luckily, the magistrate’s lack of precision is not a particular handicap as it allows adequate room for more detailed criteria (i.e. rules) of group membership to be devised, free of fixed determinations given by the magistrate. The purpose of this working paper is not to do this, but to set out general clarifications of the meaning of the relevant names mentioned, without entering into much of the organisational detail of the groups. This will be done in subsequent papers. Hidden Valley: what name is that? ‘Hidden Valley’ refers to a prospect area in the headwaters of the Upper Watut River. The CRA exploration camp is the entity now known as Hidden Valley, at 2500m altitude, just below Mt. Naiko, 3250m, and close to the section of the 1943 Bulldog Track known as ‘Summit’. Prospect maps also label one of the terminal creeks as Hidden Valley Creek. Village informants downstream of this say ‘Hidden Valley’ may have been a name first applied by the early gold rush miners; they do not know when it was first applied. (A pre-war water race runs from very close to Hidden Valley into the Edie Creek area approximately along the 2280m contour.) ‘Hidden Valley’ as a prefix to a set of mine area landowners (‘the Hidden Valley landowners’) refers to two, culturally separate groups of people: those of the Watut side and those of the Kolo (Upper Bulolo) River side. The former were referred to in G.C. Lapthorne’s 1987 Provincial Land Court judgment, which ruled on current land ownership arrangements for the prospect, as variously the ‘Nauti people’ or the ‘Nauti clan’ and the latter as jointly the ‘Winima people’ and the ‘Kwembu people’, and more abstractly as part of the Biangai people. As is obvious to and recognised by all parties mentioned, each of the labels used so far—Watut, Nauti, Winima and Kwembu—sits uneasily on the people it is intended to designate. Let me go though them one by one. Watut Watut is a geographical term. It is not a tribe or clan. Above Hidden Valley, the ‘Watut River’ is known as Naiko, and lower down as Awei, by those who live along it, and Youli by the Biangai who live across the watershed to the east. Lower down, as it enters the Mumeng area around the junction with the Zenag (Snake) River, the Buang name (for the Watut-Snake Junction, at least) appears to be ‘Ali’. Near CRA’s Wafi prospect another 1-1 name meaning ‘big river’ is heard. ‘Watut’ (or ‘Wotut’) was a name given in German times and may be a version of a name heard between Tsili Tsili and the river’s junction with the Markham River; I do not have more information than this. At any rate, ‘Watut’, as a label for a culture area, has been transferred to inhabitants of the middle and upper reaches of the river, Hidden Valley being at the extreme head. The ‘Upper Watut’ (the people of the Upper Watut Census Division) are Anga people, and the Anga cultural area extends more or less seamlessly from the Korpera River (known to them as Watui) to Kaintiba and Menyamya. It is a classification of similar people; it does not really designate a ‘group’ in the sense of something that could have spokesmen or leaders, a unity of purpose, or could be convened in a way that a common will could be expressed. I believe the same thing applies to the concept of ‘Wati-Naiko’, a geographic designator that Watut people can use to distinguish themselves from Anga people living in other districts, Mt Naiko being the 3250m peak at the head of the Upper Watut Valley. The exact range of meanings carried by the prefix wati need more clarification, but it seems to be a helping word traditionally used to distinguish Anga descent groups, as in Wati-Ekuta, Wati-Nautiya, etc. Prior to WWII, according to the patrol officer H.P. Seale, the villages of the Slate Creek area were known as the ‘Inner Circle’ and the term Kukukuku was applied to the inhabitants. The name came from coastal people, ... but it arose here when the Watut area was first being visited and the locals were heard using the word ‘kauka’, meaning ‘man’ (H.P. Seale, PR, Wau No. 2 of 1949/50). This is quite true. However, Seale said, the people had since learnt that the Pidgin for crab is kuka and ‘do not like being so described’. Searle counted sixteen villages in this area and said, It is intended to refer to this group, in future, as the Upper Watut Area (H.P. Seale, PR, Wau No. 2 of 1949/50). The term ‘Upper Watut’ was used in German times (see Working Paper No. 6), but in modern usage it was reinforced by the decisions of Seale and others to avoid a less appropriate label for the administrative area, and in the absence of a suitable local name to distinguish the Slate (‘Watitapinga’) Creek and Watut Valley villages from their neighbours.1 The Upper Watut area was patrolled before the war, with a police post at Otibanda, and most creeks were worked for gold by European miners beginning with Helmuth Baum (eaten on the Upper Tiveri in Papua in 1931) from about 1926. The police were pulled out in early 1942 and the area did not directly see ground action in the war, but it was arguably left worse off for this as other dislocations seem to have prompted acute food shortages and deaths from malnutrition, according to station correspondence of the late 1940s. (Nearer Wau, war-affected villagers were kept in the care centres and given rations for a period.) Certainly lawlessness reigned for eight years until long-delayed post-war patrols were 1 The junction of Slate Creek and the Watut is Sai, giving the name ‘Sai-Watut’ to a co-operative society which operated at the old Watut LGC chambers; this place is now called ‘Society’ or ‘Sai-Watut’. 1-2 resumed in November 1949 and the police post re-established at Otibanda.2 There were airstrips at Slate Creek (adjacent to the modern Lutheran station at Mainyanda), ‘Surprise Creek’ (about ½ hour’s walk from Otibanda) and at ‘Rising Sun’, thought to be the ‘Upper Watut Drome’ on some maps. Nauti The village called Nauti in the Upper Watut area is an identifiable community, but there is no such thing as the ‘Nauti clan’ of the Land Court judgement. After WWII, Nauti village was routinely visited on patrols and is shown on patrol sketch maps as positioned about 2km up ‘Nauti Creek’.