Australia had some measure of responsibility for the administration of south- eastern New Guinea since British annexation in 1888. From 1888 to 1902 Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria shared responsibility with Britain; from 1902 to 1905 the newly formed Federal Government of Australia replaced the three States. In 1906 Australia took full control of the territory from Britain, changed its name to Papua (it had been British New Guinea) and ruled it as a separate dependency of the Commonwealth. The foundations of policy had been laid by the British, especially Sir William MacGregor, who advocated a policy designed to protect the indigenous population in its relations with Europeans. This was a touchstone of Australian policy. J.D. Legge argues that one of the permanent themes of Australian administration of Papua was ‘the benevolence of the Administration … expressed … in the measures designed to take control [of] the contact made … between European and the native. More positive expressions of benevolence in the form of health services, education services, or adequate schemes for expanding native production within the framework of the village, were prohibitively expensive’.^[11]

As a result, after pacification (as it was called then), much of the interaction between the administration and indigenous people was focussed on control and management, with advancement of the indigenous peoples framed within the parameters of benevolent government and near penury. Once an area was pacified, the government could concentrate on the ‘civilising’ and ‘modernising’ of the indigenous population—a government anthropologist would be able to ‘help in reconciling an intelligent though very backward race to the inevitable march of civilization’.^[12] J.H.P. Murray, Lt-Governor of Papua, maintained that the government had to govern and this ‘automatically entailed the suppression of repugnant customs and the enforcement of certain standards of behaviour, hygiene and industry. It was irrelevant that these standards cut across traditional bases of leadership and influence, for the government had no choice but to suppress certain customary actions in the process of pacification’.^[13]

A young E.W.P. Chinnery applied for a clerical position in the Papuan service. His motives are unclear but, according to his daughters, adventure was certainly one. He was attached to the Government Secretary’s office in Port Moresby but it is unclear how he perceived a career in the Papuan service and whether remaining a clerk would have satisfied his yearning for adventure.^[14] Francis West, in his Australian Dictionary of Biography entry, states that Chinnery ‘seeking the prestige of field service’,^[15] won an appointment as a relieving patrol officer in July 1910 to Ioma in the Mambare division. The following year he took up a position of Assistant Resident Magistrate in the Kumusi division; for the next three years his work on routine patrols was said to have: