An autobiographical account, in the conventional sense, by a Motu-Koita person, would represent a significant transition from the mythopeoic worldview and the non-historical self-perception of the narrator as persona, which I have described here. It is worth noting that when Williams elicited the reminiscences of Ahuia Ova more than 50 years after the arrival of Christianity, the latter had long since converted to the introduced religion, and had explicitly denounced the kinds of activities which the administration labelled ‘sorcery’ and associated with a pre-Christian worldview.^[33] Kori Taboro, who continued her traditional divinations and midwifery until her death in 1950, was schooled in her youth by the London Missionary Society.^[34] Long experience of Christianity did not foster the degree of individualism necessary for an autobiographical consciousness in either of these articulate narrators. However, in the 1970s, a series of writings, culminating in an account which could rightly be described as autobiographical, was produced by a Motu-Koita man who had internalised the message of legal documents at least as much as the word of God. His name was Bobby Gaigo, and he was from Tatana, a village which had barely been mentioned in academic literature on the Motu-Koita until he began writing history.

Tatana is on a small island, essentially a hill, in the inner harbour beside the town of Port Moresby. At first contact by Europeans in 1873, a village of up to 200 people occupied the northern edge of the island and had only a little gardening land at the base of the hill. Archaeological research suggests that as a result of a fission when the forerunners of the Motu were in a state of migration centuries earlier, Tatana villagers, and the people of another village on the mainland coast, Vabukori, moved into their present sites via a different route from the rest of the Motu.^[35] A few oral traditions reinforce this possibility, giving Tatana people different migration routes than the majority of Motuans, mostly from beyond Galley Reach to the west.^[36] Early European observers noted that Tatana villagers appeared not to make pots, which distinguished them from most other Motu villages in the area, but specialised in the manufacture of shell beads (ageva), and shell headbands (gema).^[37] They were of less interest to early anthropologists than the much larger village complex nearby known as Hanuabada, and little was written about them. Turner, a missionary anthropologist, wrote in 1878 that they ‘have no plantations and so they live by plunder’.^[38]

Missionaries and the administration ‘bought’ land from the Motu-Koita, especially those of the Hanuabada village complex, initially paying with items of clothing and axes. Whether the Motu-Koita recognised this process as a land sale in the European sense is debatable: traditionally land had either been taken by conquest in warfare, or land-use by outsiders was negotiated in terms of ongoing tokens of reciprocation and goodwill. The administration’s land acquisition procedure later included rental agreements and more substantial payments, but by the mid-20^th century local landholders had become alarmed by the growth of permanent infrastructure and buildings. By the end of the colonial era (the 1970s) the de facto loss of their land to what had become a city of migrants was developing into a major issue for the Motu-Koita.^[39]

In the 1960s Motu-Koita discontent manifested in a number of claims for compensation in respect of land which they regarded as inadequately paid for, or even illegally acquired, during the early colonial period. The land claims created legal conflict among the Motu-Koita, as various groups occasionally claimed to have been the original owners of the same piece of land, alleging that the colonial authorities had paid the wrong people when acquiring the land, or had made inadequate enquiries as to whether land was owned in the first place. An example of the latter was a tortuous case lasting two decades in which a large number of groups claimed ownership of Daugo Island, near Port Moresby, which the administration had acquired as ‘waste and vacant’ land in 1889. Tatana villagers became involved in several claims to land in and around Port Moresby, including the Daugo Island claim, in the 1960s.

It is conventionally legally held in Papua New Guinea that the process of establishing genealogical linkages to the actions of apical ancestors is customary and therefore legitimate, and indeed warranted, in land claims. But in relation to Motu-Koita claims, the traditional sense of siahu was made irrelevant a priori, by virtue of the cases being a contestation of ‘ownership’ demonstrated according to principles of probability, requiring claimants to reasonably prove their habitation of an area of land and use of its resources during a particular period of historical time. This necessarily obliged commissioners and judges to consider the credibility of claimants’ testimony, which could only be done by reference to a measure of historical ‘fact’, provided by documentary evidence and European testimony. Siahu, in its original sense of affirming the mythopoeic simultaneity of the past and present, the incontestable expression of the potentiality of occupation or use of a place by virtue of an ancestor’s presence, had no legitimacy in these sorts of procedings.

Of all the claimants to Daugo Island, the Tatana villagers recognised the importance of demonstrating to the court a detailed knowledge of historical facts and articulating themselves with those facts. In contrast to the other claimants, who relied on assertions that they had traditionally fished and camped at Daugo, the Tatana villagers claimed that they had actually lived and gardened on Daugo. They also claimed to have planted coconut trees on the island (against the documentary evidence that the trees were planted by prisoners working on the government plantation in the late 19^th century). As the hearings progressed visits were made to Daugo Island, where Tatana witnesses pointed out pottery sherds, and what they claimed were the sites of their village, and gardens and a waterhole. Tatana witnesses also claimed variously that their grandparents had been active on the island or had lived there in the days of prominent early colonial figures such as Captain Moresby, Governor William MacGregor and the entrepreneur Robert Hunter and had interacted with these people.^[40]

Much of what they said contradicts not only the documentary evidence before the court, but the body of knowledge available from a spectrum of academic research (not used in the Daugo claim hearings) touching on Daugo Island.^[41] Nevertheless, as the claim continued, their ability to position themselves as actors in the conventional history of the island became focal in convincing the courts of their ownership of the island. A National Court appeal hearing in 1979 was a turning point in the fortunes of the Tatana claimants to Daugo. The Court, reviewing the evidence, was impressed by the extensive historical knowledge of Daugo Island apparent in the witnesses’ testimony and in subsequent hearings Tatana village had the ascendancy over other claimants.^[42] They were eventually judged to be the traditional owners of Daugo Island, in 1985.