Miners, Labourers and Officials on the Lakekamu Goldfield of Papua

Abstract

Before 1910 more white men came to Papua to look for gold than any other material or spiritual reward.1 Gold was the reason most of them were prepared to leave the beaches, more Papuans had worked for miners than any other employers, and the miners and their labourers were in advance of representatives of Western governments and Christian missions as the bearers of a foreign culture to many peoples in Papua. After the importance of the alluvial miners declined in Papua, prospec tors crossed the Mandated Territory of New Guinea from the Markham Valley to the Dutch border, and they opened the Morobe field which in the late 1930s produced up to six million dollars worth of gold in a year. One group of miners?Frank Pryke, George Arnold, William (Shark eye) Park, Les Joubert and Joe Sloane?first mined in British New Guinea, stayed on to work in Australian Papua, and were in Morobe to open the rich deposits on Koranga, Edie and Bul?lo in the 1920s. Between 1888 and 1910 the diggers worked alluvial fields in the islands of the south-east, and on the mainland at Milne Bay, Keveri, and in the Northern Division. They accepted Queensland mining law only slightly modified since the miners at Sudest Island had asked Dr William MacGregor for its introduction in 1888 and they used techniques learnt on Australian fields to recover the gold. But by 1910 the white miners in Papua behaved in ways unknown to the Australian alluvial miners. The Papuan miners were employers. They had come to believe that no white man could travel in the interior of Papua or work a claim without a 'team of boys'. On the early fields of Sudest and Woodlark Island some miners had argued that a man who used 'boys' to work a claim had an unfair advantage over other diggers, but by the early 1900s equality among white miners had been established on another level. The miners might still be independent battlers and bushmen, often in debt to store keepers, but to the ten or twelve men they had recruited as indentured labourers they were the tauhada or 'boss'.2 In fact, on Goodenough Island, the main recruiting ground for miners' labourers in Papua, time-expired men imposed the new order of men and masters on the old, and the normal word for a village leader became 'bossman'. Little has been written on the alluvial miners and their relations with the people they encountered and employed in Papua New Guinea. H. J. Gibbney has recounted the events of the goldrush of 1878 when no gold was found, and A. M. Healy in his work on the Morobe goldfields has a brief survey of events before the 1920s and has chapters on Bul?lo