Table of Contents
In South Seas in Transition, the Australian anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner commented that a majority of ‘Australians between the wars might have denied, in all innocence, even with a certain indignation, that the Commonwealth was a “Colonial Power” at all’.[1] This is, with few exceptions, all too true today, and is mirrored in the lack of scholarly investigation of the interwar period.[2] A good deal that is available focuses on Papua, which Australia administered for over 70 years, rather than New Guinea, a League of Nations mandate.[3] This paucity is to some degree due to the loss of government records. The files of the Australian administered League of Nations Mandate Territory of New Guinea were depleted first by the 1937 volcanic eruption in Rabaul and again as a result of the outbreak of war in February 1942. The National Archives of Australia explains: ‘in early 1942 the Japanese invasion led to the destruction of large quantities of records … Of the surviving eight series of records, six relate to mining in the district of Morobe; none cover the general administration of the Territory’.[4] The situation regarding the records for Papua is much better and we have, for instance, several superb histories, particularly Francis West’s on J.H.P. Murray, and J.D. Legge’s on Australian colonial policy. There is also some interest in the Papuan government anthropologist Francis Edgar Williams.[5]
Consequently, to develop an understanding and an appreciation of the interwar period in New Guinea, historians are largely dependent upon the private papers of colonial officials. For example, E.W.P. Chinnery’s papers in the National Library of Australia are an exceptionally rich source for the workings of a colonial official in New Guinea (including Papua and the Northern Territory of Australia). His personal records are supplemented by the various government records held in Canberra and Melbourne, particularly the Central Office of the Department of Home and Territories, and the Territories Branch of the Prime Minister’s Department, as well the holdings of the National Library, which has a varied collection of papers of colonial officers, especially field officials.
Chinnery’s career presents an opportunity to investigate Australia’s colonial involvement in all its territories, as well Australia’s regional and international relations in regard to its colonial obligations and aspirations. His appointments—Government Anthropologist, Director of District Services in New Guinea, Commonwealth Advisor on Native Affairs and director of the Northern Territory Department of Native Affairs as well as his earlier service in Papua—make him one of the few colonial officials to work in the three main Australian administered territories of Papua, New Guinea and the Northern Territory.
Ernest William Pearson Chinnery (1887-1972), born in Waterloo, a Victorian country town, joined the Papuan service in 1909, rising to Acting Resident Magistrate, before leaving for England in 1917 to join the Australian Flying Corps as a navigator. After he was demobilised, he completed a diploma in anthropology at Cambridge under A.C. Haddon and W.H.R. Rivers. He returned to Papua, as the supervisor of Native labour for New Guinea Copper Mines (November 1920), and, in 1924, was appointed Government Anthropologist in New Guinea, and Director of District Services in 1932, retaining his position as Government Anthropologist. He was made Commonwealth Advisor for Native Affairs and, in April 1939, Director of the Native Affairs Branch in the Northern Territory administration. After Chinnery’s resignation at the end of 1946, the Commonwealth continued to use his experience and knowledge in matters as diverse as the South Pacific Commission and the United Nations, sought his advice on the Papua New Guinea Act of 1949 and the future of the Australian School of Pacific Administration. (Chinnery had in the early 1930s represented Australia at the Permanent Mandates Commission of the League of Nations). In 1951, John Gunther, Director of Public Health in Papua New Guinea, invited Chinnery to complete a longitudinal study of depopulation in New Ireland, a project started under the German administration in 1911. Chinnery retired in 1952.
This chapter concentrates on Chinnery’s work in Papua and his subsequent attendance at Cambridge in 1919, as it was in the years 1910 to 1920, I contend, that he formulated ideas about the usefulness of anthropology in the management, control and advancement of colonised peoples. In this chapter I set out what brought Chinnery to Papua, his move from a clerk to a field officer, examples of the work he undertook and the various influences on Chinnery as he developed an interest in anthropology and it uses for the governance of colonised peoples.
I have been working on Chinnery since the early 1990s. Chinnery’s papers were stored in the house of his eldest daughter, Sheila, and the researcher had to travel to Black Rock, a bayside suburb of Melbourne, to see them. Sheila and her late husband Larry looked after researchers well, and the atmosphere was most congenial and enjoyable. Sheila and her sisters, ever helpful to answer questions, nonetheless exercised a watchful eye over their father’s legacy and encouraged researchers to concentrate on his life as a government official. As part of a larger work on Australian anthropology I wrote several articles on Chinnery and aspects of his official work.[6] After reading two of my papers on their father I was contacted and asked if I would write his biography. I discussed the proposition with various colleagues, especially Hank Nelson, and decided to start, but could give the family little by way of a completion date. I have other projects, and all research takes longer than anticipated!
My interest in Chinnery arose from my interest in the intersection between anthropology and colonial governance. In the first decades of the 20th century, anthropology was making a claim for its special relevance to the governance of colonised peoples. By the mid-1920s there was a chair of anthropology at the University of Sydney premised on the need to train colonial officials in anthropology, in order to better understand indigenous peoples and assist in their transition to modernity.
Chinnery, a colonial official trained in anthropology, had the opportunity to investigate the relationship between anthropology and colonial governance in a context wider than simply Australian colonial rule in its external territories. Such investigations also underline the international aspect of Australian colonialism. This is most explicit in regard to the administration of New Guinea, and the obligation to report to the Permanent Mandates Commission (PMC) in Geneva which put Australian rule under scrutiny. In fact when the University of Sydney’s Chair of Anthropology was threatened with closure, Radcliffe-Brown turned to Lord Lugard, chair of the PMC, for support.[7]
When Chinnery joined the Papuan service, anthropology was dominated by ideas of evolution and diffusion, and ethnographers, often initially trained in biology or zoology, were interested in the origins and spread of people and culture. There was however a nascent anthropological practice developing in Britain which found expression in long-term expeditions to far-away places, such as the Torres Strait Islands and Central Australia. In some instances individuals, such as the Melbourne University biologist Baldwin Spencer, undertook what might now be considered long-term field work in Central Australia.[8] These expeditions were scientific in character and a move away from traveller tropes and mission stories of savagery, salvation and conversion. Largely as a result of colonial rule in Africa and the Pacific, a belief was developing that colonial governance could best be effected by some sort of specialised training for field officials. This was reflected in resolutions at meetings of professional associations and papers published in journals such as Man, the journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland. For example: In 1894 the Cambridge zoologist Alfred Cort Haddon considered it was of ‘urgent national importance’ that colonial personnel possess some anthropological knowledge, and he approached the Royal College of Science in London ‘urging that a course in General Anthropology with practical work should be provided there to meet this need, and outlining a comprehensive syllabus’.[9] Nearly 10 years later he noted that ‘it can hardly be questioned that a missionary would have a better chance of success if he understood something of the aboriginal ideas which he proposes to modify or supplant’.[10] What was needed was an acceptance by universities of anthropology so that teaching could begin. In 1900 Haddon was appointed lecturer in ethnology and instituted a course of lectures in ethnology for missionaries and explorers. He was appointed Reader in Anthropology at Cambridge in 1909, a position he held until his retirement. The tripos degree in Archaeology and Anthropology was established in 1919. I mention Haddon because he trained Chinnery but there were other appointments, around the same time, such as R.R. Marett at Oxford and C.G. Seligman at the London School of Economics.