Before I Sleep (16 page)

It was customary in Saigon that VIPs leave small gifts with those who have looked after them. The prime minister had brought his assistant secretary for Finance and Administration with him and this man was in charge of the swag of goodies. One of the local white mice, as the Saigon police were called, had attached himself to me as a sort of liaison officer because he could speak some English. He said something to me about a gratuity. I told him the assistant secretary had all that under control. But my contact said that none of those gifts would ever reach him, his welfare was in my hands. I said I had no money and he looked very disappointed. I checked up on what the police were paid. It was almost nothing. It seemed to me that they simply couldn't have existed on their salaries alone; bribes and tips of one sort or another would have been essential. The system itself negated the prime precondition for a non-corrupt police force: that the job be sufficiently well paid for there to be no need for illegally accepting money from other sources.

7
Papua New Guinea

(1969-1970)

L
IFE was proceeding normally in Canberra when I was asked by an old colleague who was about to retire from the Police Commissioner's job in the Territory of Papua New Guinea (TPNG) to help find him a replacement. I promised I would but I was unable to attract any worthwhile applicants, perhaps because the Royal Papua New Guinea Constabulary would soon be facing the turmoils of independence. I told Mavis that this was a critical stage for TPNG, since it was vital to develop a law enforcement structure that would be able to cope with the new stresses, before the country became independent. We agreed that I should volunteer, so in 1969 we transferred to the Royal Papua New Guinea Constabulary. We passed the necessary medical tests despite our ages, and with sadness Mavis again sold our family home.

I was very busy in TPNG and Mavis quickly found tasks that needed to be done. She organised the wives of native police into basketball clubs, taught them swimming in the hitherto prohibited (for them) barracks swimming pool, and helped to teach the wives, who were mainly village girls, how to buy appropriate goods cheaply from the trade stores. The wives were shy and unaccustomed to such friendly relationships with Australian people, but Mavis won them over. Our excellent houseboy, Manassa, started teaching Mavis pidgin and she corrected his English. We found Manassa's church less stuffy than the local Baptist church, which was still dominated by a colonial outlook. Once when I was away in the Sepik, Mavis discovered an intruder in her bedroom. Our guard dog, Pepi, was barking in the passageway and Manassa ran to her. The intruder fled. After that, whenever I was absent, Manassa chose to sleep outside our bedroom door, and Pepi was allowed inside at night time. Manassa and Mavis formed a very happy domestic team, and I know he appreciated her “colour-blindness”.

I still entertained some illusions about the world. My much earlier reading of those absorbing novels by Edgar Wallace of the Nigerian adventures of “Sanders of the River” and of the doings of his young Assistant District Officer Bones, with their enforcement team of Askaris, had left behind a rosy image of the life of a colonial law enforcer. But Edgar Wallace, despite his expertise in solving criminal mysteries, had overlooked the underlying difficulties of such an arrangement, even in the then-stable Nigeria. I was largely ignorant about the situation in TPNG, but I quickly learned that the Territory was already undergoing major social change. A constitutional reappraisal was imminent. This was a political reorganisation being pushed by Canberra but resisted in some TPNG quarters as premature.

From the policing aspect, these changes were being made against the backdrop of a criminal justice system that was an amalgamation of western legal philosophies applied by force to a tribal society composed of over 700 linguistic groups. Its enforcement employed the continental principles of policing: the suppression of lawbreaking by regulations imposed from above. This form of policing had been used by the British colonial administrations in what could be termed “occupied territories” such as India, Ireland and Africa. Police in these regions were actually armed gendarmerie who made arrests on orders from superiors. I regarded this model as unacceptable except as a temporary measure. For me, a police job is a vocation — one which helps provide an essential feature of democracy: the maintenance of law and order by common assent to a process in which individual constables make their own decisions.

I had much to learn. In the short time before my departure, I had tried to read some of the material available in the libraries of the ANU, which meant that I arrived in Port Moresby with that dangerous commodity, a little knowledge. I had been unable to track down any account of a police force making the transition from the role of the gendarme to that of the London bobby. That apparent absence of literature should have rung alarm bells signalling the futility of my solution for the future policing of PNG. Some years later I did come across fragmentary references to the pioneering work of Sir Herbert Dowbiggin in what was then called Ceylon. He had very successfully moved its police from a Royal Irish Constabulary model to that of the English civil police system. But it had taken him from 1913-37 to achieve this. Dowbiggen had turned the Ceylonese police into an almost unarmed body in which the truncheon was the main weapon. He had created a detective branch, installed a photographic section, put a greater emphasis on education, and involved his policemen in maintaining peace in their communities. All of this was well before their independence, when Ceylon became Sri Lanka. At that time, there was a theory that policing naturally passed through three stages of development: local, armed gendarmerie, London bobby.

If I had known of Dowbiggin's work when I went to New Guinea, and known how long it had taken him to achieve his results, I am not sure that his time-frame would have deterred me. Middle-aged coppers about to receive their Master's degree in Sociology tend to be a little arrogant, stubbornly clinging to their own judgments, and making little of their ignorance. And I knew very little of local customs. Take my interest in dogs as an example.

Not long after we arrived in Port Moresby, another small family moved there from Australia. They had young daughter who was feeling the loss of her usual playmates. Her father came to me one day and sought my help in recovering the family pet, a daschund dog which had gone missing. His daughter, alreatly unsettled, was gready upset by its disappearance. He had advertised, offering a reward, without result. I spoke to one of my inspectors. “No chance,” he told me. He explained that fresh meat was a delicacy in TPNG and that daschunds fitted nicely on a cooking spit. He said: “That dog would have been cooked and eaten before it was missed.” I don't know how the father explained that to his young daughter.

On a Saturday afternoon not long afterwards, Manassa, who had been weeding the front garden, brought in a young native whom he had found crying on the roadway. Mavis immediately set about treating the very nasty wound on the lad's leg. He objected and talked in pidgin to Manassa. Manassa explained that the native did not want the wound dressed until it had been seen at the police station. I drove him down in our little family car and the duty inspector told me he would attend to the matter. Later I rang him. He said that everybody was happy. He had telephoned my neighbour whose large dog had bitten the lad. The neighbour had come to the station and paid the lad the equivalent of one of our dollars, and the lad had then gone off to get the wound treated. The inspector said that this was the usual custom. I learned that some ex-pats encouraged their large dogs to attack “wandering” locals (our lad claimed he had been on the road in front of the house). Mavis and I thought this custom was unfair and wondered what could be done about it. Of course, these days, with marauding gangs of rascals in Moresby and other towns, fierce dogs are regarded as legitimate protection.

I have already mentioned the dearth of published material about countries that had changed their policing philosophies. I searched for accounts of any former colonial region that had gained its independence. I noted that Jamaica was not far from Mexico City, where the next Interpol Annual General Meeting was to be held in October 1969. As it was my turn, in company with another commissioner, to represent Australia, I decided that a side trip to Jamaica was in order. The Territory's administrator was kind enough to approve three days in Jamaica in addition to my attending the AGM even though I had only been at my post in Port Moresby a short time.

In Mexico City, an official from the Australian Embassy called at my hotel and told me that our ambassador would appreciate my help in getting the local police to investigate a break-in at his office that resulted in the theft of a number of typewriters. When the embassy reported the offence, some detectives called and demanded a large sum of money to help them begin their investigations. The ambassador refused to pay. I made enquiries among my North American colleagues and was told that this was customary in Mexico, but I could not discover where the money normally finished up. I told the embassy what I had learned and suggested they take it up with the Mexican government, which was under an international obligation to provide protection to foreign embassies. I doubt that this was much help to the ambassador, but I had been preoccupied at the time of the official's visit to my hotel. I was busy learning the Mexican Two Step. Despite taking the precaution of drinking only bottled Coca-Cola, I had made the error of brushing my teeth with hotel tap water. That was sufficient for me to pick up the dreaded local diarrhoea. Despite medication, I was incapacitated for a week. As soon as the Interpol AGM finished in Mexico City on a Friday afternoon, I flew to Kingston, the capital of Jamaica. By the time I had gone through Customs and Immigration and booked into a hotel, it was too late to contact the local police. Early on Saturday morning, I called at Police Headquarters where I was expected but personally unknown except for my honorary life membership of the International Police Association. My welcome was friendly enough but I had picked the worst weekend to discuss official business. The country was celebrating the results of the previous day's re-election of its popular president. There were ample parties but little information. I returned to TPNG not much the wiser.

I had originally given myself five years in which to make a useful contribution to the resoution of TPNG's difficulties. I was fifty-three years of age, in good health and thought I could last until sixty; Mavis had turned sixty herself but had a strong body. I tried to gauge the current situation and, against a five-year allowance, work out the best strategies to adopt. I found my prospects were bleaker than when I had started on the restructuring of the former Commonwealth Investigation Service. In Canberra, it had taken me some years to win over a majority of the Gnomes. In TPNG, the Gnomes were the
kiaps
— the district officers and their assistants, and whilst the Gnomes numbered only seven, the
kiaps
were a whole united clan placed strategically throughout the Territory. I learned that my role as commissioner was anomalistic — that while I was the titular head of a three thousand-member force, only those members stationed in the towns were under the directions of my officers; all the others were
kiap-c
ontrolled.

I discovered that many of the constables had been recruited from amongst men who had served the standard two years' corrective detention in a
kalabus
for grievous assault. These charges generally arose from the traditionally approved custom of settling arguments between males with a slash to the shoulder with a large knife. Afterwards, both victim and offender would call in at the nearest police station and report the offence. The offender would plead guilty and be sent to the
kalabus
where he would be medically checked, placed on a nutritious diet, taught simple bush carpentry skills or engine maintenance, taught pidgin or English and paid a small wage.

The
kiaps
were graduates of the Australian School of Pacific Administration (ASOPA) in Sydney. They had joined as career officers when young, having been selected from a large number of applicants. After two years' specialist tertiary education, they were more knowledgeable in TPNG matters than my inspectors. Many of my senior police had been accepted into the RTPNG force having only obtained the rank of constable in Queensland or elsewhere. Some were former British servicemen without any police background. Coming to TPNG had earned them a sudden jump in rank, so the training and experience levels of my senior men fell far short of those of their Australian counterparts. A cadet scheme designed to produce high-ranking indigenous officers was already in place and when Independence finally arrived, one of the first cadets became the new commissioner.

The
kiaps
as a class impressed me. I thought that they were even an improvement on the British colonial administrators in that they were not as class conscious. They had done much for the Territory. They all spoke pidgin and motu, the two main vernaculars, whereas only the best of my men had taken the trouble to learn any native language. The
kiaps
appeared not to have feathered their own nests at the expense of the local people although they had ample opportunity to do so, being the main distributors of Australian funding. I gave myself little hope of ever winning the
kiaps
over to my argument for a more democratic policing service. With evidence on their side, they could argue that TPNG traditions provided for “big heads” to become leaders after much community consultation. It seemed to me that there was a good possibility that Independence would merely result in control moving from the
kiaps
to the “big heads.”

I discovered that the unsatisfactory state of the TPNG's criminal justice system had not passed unnoticed by the Commonwealth and that a few years earlier (before the thought of imminent Independence) a high-powered symposium had been held in Canberra. This had been attended by an anthropologist, judges, administrators and law teachers. I noted that no police and no community representative had been invited. As far as I knew, no one was researching the topic of the future policing system. I talked to the vice-chancellor of the university at Waigani, Dr John Gunther, but “policing” had only low priority access to the limited funds available. I did not know of an appropriate specialist such as a forensic anthropologist or a sociologist police officer who could carry out such a study, except myself and I was too busy with day-to-day affairs. I obtained the approval of the administrator, David Hay, whom I had known previously in Canberra when he had been a diplomat, to invite Brigadier McKinna, commissioner of the South Australian Police Force, who had served in New Guinea during the war, to discuss with me some improvements to the TPNG situation. McKinna came to Moresby and we discussed the possibility that there could be local disturbances of some size after Independence, especially in the Highlands which had a history of clan fighting. McKinna recommended, among other things, the early establishment of a mobile, specially trained unit, which could be despatched to trouble spots to augment the local police detachments. This proposal disappeared into the appropriate administrative channels and I am unaware still of its final disposition.