Additional information for Chapter 14 - Embogi near Sangara Mission

and for Chapter 16 - The Hangings at Higaturu, 1943)

 

The extract below is from the article “Higaturu hangings complicate Australia’s national narrative” dated 25 April 2015 by Dr Kirstie Close- Barry, Fellow in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Deakin University, and Dr Victoria Stead, Alfred Deakin Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Deakin University, published in the PNG Attitude Keith Jackson & Friends newsletter at https://www.pngattitude.com/2015/04/wwii-higaturu-hangingscomplicate-australias-national-narrative.html.

 

It discusses “hangings, by Australians, of at least 21 …. Orokaiva men in a place called Higaturu on the slopes of volcanic Mt Lamington near Popondetta and the Kokoda track. They were hanged first from a breadfruit tree and later from a gallows constructed for the purpose in July 1943.

 

The Papua New Guinean men were sentenced to death by members of ANGAU, Australian officers who had been living and working in New Guinea before the war and who had been brought into the Australian Army. The ANGAU officers were valued for their knowledge of the local people, terrain, languages and cultures. The executed men had been charged with treason after Australian missionaries from a nearby Anglican mission and an American soldier were handed over to the Japanese, at whose hands they subsequently died ……

 

Australia had been administering the Territory of Papua for nearly 40 years by the time our troops started scaling the Kokoda track in 1942. Papua New Guineans, particularly those in the north where the Japanese launched their assault, were compelled to pick sides in a conflict waged by two foreign powers on their land and in their villages.

 

Some of the people subsequently executed for treason had been appointed as Captains by the Japanese and offered incentives if they helped them to win. In an area that had been under German and then Australian rule, and where many had worked hard for next to no wage on Australian-run plantations, perhaps this was an opportunity for a new start, under a new system.

 

Others perhaps tried to pick who might win the war - and hence who would determine its heroes and its villains - and got it wrong.

 

The handing over of the Australian missionaries and the American soldier to the Japanese was an act of betrayal, and the deaths that they met were cruel. So too, though, were the deaths of the Orakaiva men at Higaturu.

 

There is ample evidence to suggest grave problems with the judicial process leading to the executions, and a strong likelihood that at least some of the men were ‘innocent’ of the charge against them.

 

More fundamentally, though, what does ‘treason’ mean in the context of the Pacific War ? The very charge itself obscures that the hanged men were not Australian citizens but rather colonial subjects; that the Australians were as uninvited as the Japanese.”

 

The same authors are quoted on  the Australian Policy and History website at https://aph.org.au/2017/11/remembering-australias-wars-hangings-of-papua-new-guineans-by-australian-soldiers-in-wwii-complicate-our-national-narratives/# in an article published 13 November, 2017 “Wars and nation-building projects are by their very nature complex and fraught. The stories we tell ourselves about these things must weave together the multiple threads of history, and they must include the angles that we have previously obscured.”

 

Further information can be found from the transcript and oral recording of Mrs Mavis Manuda Tongai talking about the first hand recollection of events by her medical orderly father, the late Mr Redmond Manuda at https://pngvoices.deakin.edu.au/items/show/320