When Chinnery was patrolling in various parts of Papua, especially his early appointment to the Kumusi Division, one task was to arrest labourers who had deserted from rubber plantations. Native constables assisted the field officers in their policing work, while indigenous men were employed on these patrols as carriers, cooks and interpreters.[57] It was during this time that Chinnery developed an interest in labour problems, which were at the heart of the industrial project of colonial rule. Indigenous people were not skilled in working on plantations, assisting gold miners and such like. They were agricultural workers used to different rhythms and division of labour.
On his return to Papua in 1920, he was no longer an officer in the Papuan service, but was engaged as a supervisor of labour for New Guinea Copper Mines Ltd at Bootless Bay. This was not what he had anticipated when he wrote from London seeking an anthropological appointment in Murray’s Papuan Administration. Murray was seeking a government anthropologist and Haddon had supported Chinnery,[58] but Murray did not want Chinnery. He wrote to his brother, Gilbert, that
We have a man called [Chinnery] who is in England now—Haddon has a great opinion of him and wants him appointed. But he would not do at all—he is quite unreliable as to observation, collection of evidence etc—he will say any mortal thing in order to excite interest and attract attention. Not that he is a liar—but he must attract notice.[59]
It is unclear why Murray took such an attitude. To avoid any undue pressure from the Minister, Murray quickly appointed his Chief Medical Officer, Walter Mersh Strong, as government anthropologist. It has been suggested that part of Murray’s dissatisfaction was with Chinnery’s pursuit of heliocentric ethnology: ‘attempts to link Papuan people to any romantic notions of ancient “civilizations” would have been anathema to the colonial regime’.[60] Personally, I think this is a fanciful explanation, although some years later there was an exchange between Murray and Chinnery of some of the ideas about Papua found in Perry’s Children of the Sun.[61] Ideas such as those of Elliot Smith and Perry were academic orthodoxy at the time; rather it was functionalist theory, as promoted by anthropologists such as Malinowski, that created problems for administrators like Murray, who believed that it was a theory which supported the retention of customs despite their offensiveness, thereby keeping people in some form of cultural servitude.[62] I suspect that Chinnery’s anthropology, as he had expressed in his London lectures, had the potential to question the manner in which Murray administered the colony.
While Chinnery waited for an opening in the League of Nations Mandate of New Guinea, he further enunciated the principles of an anthropologically informed administration at the Pan Pacific Science Congress of 1923. He presented a paper on native labour in which he discussed his work at the mine. He explained that an adequate supply of native labour is essential and ‘as numbers in excess of those now employed may be needed ultimately, considerable thought has been given by the Company’s officials as to the best means to adopt for insuring the numbers of recruits needed from time to time for any expansion of the Company’s business’. He noted that ‘strict observance of the provisions of the “Native Labour Ordinance”, maintenance for the natives of the pre-war purchasing power of money, provision of suitable variety of foods, and the creation of conditions for insuring health and contentment of the natives, will combine to attract to our Company many boys who have refrained hitherto from entering into a contract of service, and an increased number of boys who have already worked a term with the Company’. In this connection New Guinea Copper had ‘retained the services of two highly competent recruiters’, and commissioned a former government official, ‘long in the service of the Papuan government to make the necessary investigations and report on the future possibilities of recruiting preparatory to assuming the position of supervisor of native labour department’.[63]
Chinnery drafted the annual report on labour for New Guinea Copper, in which he stated that ‘today there may be seen [Papuans] peacefully wielding the tools of industry … who but yesterday cut off their neighbour’s heads, and ate their bodies with equanimity’. He went on to explain that the company’s labour policy was consistent with policies advocated by Murray who had stated that the ‘preservation of native races depends on whether the energy formerly devoted to cannibalism and head hunting can be diverted into the relatively gentle activities of industrial development’. New Guinea Copper was ‘actively connected with the cultural development of its savage employees, and becomes, as well as their employer, their guide and teacher through the intricate byeways [sic] leading from primitive life to the complex state know as civilization’. Once the indenture was complete, care was taken to ensure that the employee was paid off in Port Moresby ‘and protected and maintained by our agents until a boat is available to take them to their homes where they are landed with their trade goods, the fruits of their labour, well content with the results of their service and the envy of their fellow villagers, who, stimulated by the example and treatment of the time expired boys will, it is hoped engage in their return’.[64]