The Life and Fate ^ of a Papuan Amirah Inglis
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IUI£ IW lilt mi\v w £/ Karo , the life and fate ^5 of a Papuan Amirah Inglis This book was published by ANU Press between 1965–1991. This republication is part of the digitisation project being carried out by Scholarly Information Services/Library and ANU Press. This project aims to make past scholarly works published by The Australian National University available to a global audience under its open-access policy. Karo the life and fate of a Papuan PLEASS RETURN TO:- EDITORIAL DEPARTMENT j \mmm m ioyi ssivEasin; RECOMMENDED RETAIL PRICE PUBLICATION DATE i . ^ a , also by Amirah Inglis ‘Not a White Woman Safe’: Sexual Anxiety and Politics in Port Moresby 1920-1934. Canberra, 1974 Karo the life and fate of a Papuan Amirah Inglis Institute of Papua New Guinea Studies in association with Australian National University Press Canberra, Australia, London, England and Miami, Fla., USA 1982 First published in Australia 1982 Printed in Hong Kong for the Australian National University Press, Canberra © Amirah Inglis 1982 This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of study, research, criticism, or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be made to the publisher. National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry Inglis, Amirah. Karo. ISBN 0 7081 0313 8. l.Karo,ca. 1900-1938. 2. Crime and criminals — Papua New Guinea — Bibliography. 3. Murder — Papua New Guinea. I. Title. 364.1‘523’0924 Library of Congress No. 81-71874 United Kingdom, Europe, Middle East, and Africa: Lurospan 3 Henrietta St, London WC2E 8LU, England North America: Books Australia, 15601 SW 83rd Avenue, Miami, Florida 33157 USA Japan: United Publishers Services Ltd, Tokyo From the Europeans’ point of view he was bad but from the Toaripi point of view he deserved a song. So they made a song. Ara Relai, Daugo Island, 13 August 1974 CONTENTS Page About this book xi Acknowledgments xvi The Principal Characters xvii 1. The Villager 1 2. The Policeman 17 3. Magic and Money 35 4. Enter Goava 59 5. The Last Trials 87 6. T am going to Heaven at 8 o’clock’ 108 The Song About Karo 121 Notes and Sources 127 In d ex 139 (vü) PLATES Page 1. Kalo Village 6-7 2. Armed Constabulary, Kokoda Government Station 26-7 3. The Government Station at Rigo 42 4. Sergeant Bagita 50 5. Badili gaol 63 6. Ume and lava’s house 64 7. The married warders at Badili gaol with their families 68-9 8. Before the first murder trial 89 9. Karo, triple-murderer and thief 115 (ix) Vailala Kerema lokea' X)elena Kokoda # Manu Manu, Port Moresby^ P a n -} ^ Tubesereia • Rigo Gaba Gab« Vula'aS 100 km (x) ABOUT THIS BOOK This is a biography of Karo Araua, a man from the Gulf of Papua who in 1938 was hanged for murder. There are many stories about Karo Araua, so many that had I spent ten times as long in Port Moresby and the village where he lived, 1 could perhaps have collected ten times more. I first heard of Karo Araua in 1970 when I was collecting material about the life of Europeans in Port Moresby during the 1920s and ’30s. He was a man, I was told, who at the foot of the gallows, addressed the watching crowd in four languages. The hangman’s noose could not kill him and it was only after the attending priest and the Gaoler had stabbed him many times in the side, that he gave up his life. He returned, 1 was told, after his death to the prison to haunt the Gaoler. I next came across Karo in November 1971 when I read in Kovave, the Port Moresby journal edited by Ulli Beier, a memoir by Sergeant Bagita, then the best known and most highly placed policeman in the Royal Papuan Constabulary. Bagita quoted a fragment of a song which he said Kerema people had made up about Karo. In the song, Karo was hailed as a ‘savage and courageous man’ because he had shot a fellow policeman, and Bagita praised him as a ‘true policeman’. I showed this fragment to Dr Bert Brown who, for more than thirty years had been a missionary among the Kerema — or Elema — people of the Gulf of Papua, who had compiled a dictionary of their language and transcribed, translated and published legends and stories of the people. In the settlements of Gulf people which have become attached to the Motu villages around Port Moresby where Bert Brown preached, he found Ikui Avosa and his wife from Vabukori village, two members of his congregation who knew a complete version of Sergeant Bagita’s fragment. It was the ‘Song About Karo’; 14 stanzas of a song in traditional form sung to the tune and the drum beat of the songs about clan heroes. The reader will xii Karo find Bert Brown’s translation of the ‘Song About Karo’ on page 121 of this book. From then on Karo stories turned up everywhere. I collected the recollections of people who were involved in the events I describe, or were bystanders, or who heard the stories later from older relatives; I used the printed records of the pre-war colonial administration; I used the weekly newspaper published in Port Moresby, the Papuan Courier; I used official files, sadly few, which held letters, reports and despatches from the central administration in Port Moresby to the outstations, from the outstations to the central administration and from there to its Australian superiors. But many files of that central administration no longer exist; they disappeared during World War II and the files of the Central Court went up in smoke in two fires after that war. Papuans smiled in a delighted way as they told me about this very wicked man; ‘Oh yes, I know that story!’, though their delight was often shame-faced. The only Europeans who had heard of him were those men who had lived in Port Moresby at the time of Karo’s iniquities and one who had heard about him from a Papuan carrier during the war when he was a soldier on the Bulldog track. Other Europeans (as we whites were called) were interested when I told them what I was doing. ‘A Papuan hanged by the colonial government? What did he do?’. ‘He murdered a prison warder’, I said. ‘And the prison warder’s wife. And the prison warder’s twelve year old daughter’. ‘Was the prison warder white?’. ‘No, the prison warder and wife and child were all three Papuans’. Then what, some wondered, could be interesting in the life of such a murderer? If he was not murdering whites in retaliation for the colonial condition, then why bother with him? There are several reasons. First, his is an amazing story. His murders were notorious and the trial of the two Papuan accused was reported day after day and at length. The fact that Papuans were headline news in the Papuan Courier was itself remarkable in pre-war Papua where the small white community of Port Moresby for whom the Papuan Courier was published had so little interest in their doings — except as servants — that very little was reported about Papuans. Secondly, Papua New Guinean written history was until recently the history of the whites and what they did there. Papua New Guineans, when they were mentioned at all, were a category and rarely became living people; About This Book xiii even when they appeared in photographs they were almost never identified. Even now this is sometimes hard to avoid, since Papua New Guineans left few traces of their lives and unless they lived in a village where the missionary kept a register or later where the constable kept the village book in which visiting magistrates recorded details of birth and death for the government records, their very existence on the earth together with their names could be lost forever except in their village, in the memory of old men who are dying. But of course they are not alone in this. They left no records of their lives for they could not write. But neither could the lowly of Europe for most of its history and historians are beginning to realise that orthodox history, by concentrating on the world of those who did leave written records, has left out most of the population: ordinary people who did nothing publicly remarkable and who either could not write at all or if they did, wrote nothing that anyone thought worth keeping. In pre-war Papua where almost no one could write anything at all, the only accounts of the life of Papuans, apart from ethnography, were written by colonial administrators and missionaries. Often men of good will, they were divided from their subjects by the great gulf between ruler and ruled, colonizer and colonized; which made a for midable barrier to writing any history with Papuans in it. The colonial records are few and in them most Papuans appear as statistics or observations. Rarely do they appear by name and then because they performed useful services for white people either by saving their lives or working diligently for them. In such cases they were known by name: Sir Hubert Murray, the Lieutenant- Governor during the whole of Karo Araua’s life, immortalised some in his Annual Reports and the Papuan Courier gave the names of two Motuan sailors who had saved a white woman from drowning in the stormy waters of the Gulf of Papua and even started a fund to raise money for their reward.