‘Dry your tears. Perhaps they are otao naso, our friends’
—Father James Benson to a Papuan boy, on seeing the Japanese ships
On the afternoon of 21 July 1942, a humble Christian missionary was fixing his deckchair in his shed by the Solomon Sea. Father James Benson enjoyed pottering about with his tools at Gona Mission, on the north coast of Papua. The little deckchair served a special function for this Yorkshire-born clergyman: he would perch himself upon it aboard the native outriggers that plied his coastal parish.
Benson, the Anglican missionary at Gona since 1937, was a respected local figure. He’d devoted himself to the spiritual wellbeing of his small flock, many of whose ancestors were head-hunters; and while not every Papuan had converted to Christianity as enthusiastically as he might have hoped, Benson could not complain. His parish numbered several hundred, and those parishioners who had not ‘gone bush’ were models of zealous attentiveness.
Two decades earlier their tribes had been warriors and cannibals who solved tribal disputes with bloodshed, and whose trophies of war were the shrivelled heads of their real or imagined enemies. They were the Orokaiva and Binandere people, with a reputation for being ‘bellicose in the extreme’ and ‘the most rampant and obstinate savages’, in the view of the Australian Governor of Papua in 1923.1 No doubt their thorough head-hunting raids on neighbouring villages were ‘uneconomic’,2 as he also observed.
The flaxen-haired Orokaivans, whose oiled ringlets grew into a mass of tails, pencil-thick, and fell about their shoulders ‘in the manner of a Chief Justice’s wig’3 were notoriously superstitious, and the Australian Government deemed it seemly to stamp out an interesting snake ritual in which the village witch doctor induced in his patients ‘paroxysms of a peculiarly horrible nature’.4
Yet in time these powerfully built people adapted to white rule, and agreeably sheathed their scalping knives to participate in the less dangerous diversions introduced by the colonial power: chiefly cricket and football. Western controls were introduced. The Orokaivans who joined the local constabulary gained a reputation for ‘cheerful bravery’, transmuting the ferocious warrior ethos of 1920 into a force for order and relative stability. Notwithstanding Governor Murray’s appeal for ‘less Christ and more cricket’,5 some eschewed sorcery for Christianity and, in 1942, some three hundred parishioners welcomed the familiar sight of their white-haired preacher who, sitting up in his outrigger, came by sea to spread the word of the white man’s god.
At about 4.00 p.m. that day, Benson heard loud cries from Gona beach. An assistant ran up to the door of his shed: ‘Father! Great ships are here!’6 Benson put aside his deckchair and emerged from the shed into the sunlight to see, less than a mile offshore, a 5000-ton Japanese transport ship flanked by two destroyers. ‘My mind must have been numbed,’ he later wrote, ‘for in the next few minutes I did several foolish things.’7 He stored his deckchair and packed some odd items in a canvas satchel: a cheap watch, a few sticks of tobacco, a notebook and pencil, some spare handkerchiefs and a compass. He then walked the few hundred yards from his mission compound down to the grey, palm-shaded sands of Gona beach. A tearful little Papuan boy stood there, crying and shaking with terror, and pointing at the great black ships that loomed offshore.
The Japanese fleet had penetrated the network of shallow tropical reefs and was ‘almost on the beach’.8 The biggest ship the boy had seen, apart from his father’s toy-like canoe, was Benson’s 50-ton mission boat, The Maclaren King. But the monsters anchored off Basabua Point, their hulls shimmering in the afternoon sun, were from another world.
‘Dry your tears,’ said Benson. ‘Perhaps they are otao naso—our friends.’9 The reverend instructed the boy to rejoin his people at Jenat, some two miles up the beach, and went to confer with the senior Papuan teacher and the mission’s two young Anglican Sisters: Miss May Hayman and Miss Mavis Parkinson.
Benson had been alert to the Japanese threat since December 1941. That month the Australian Government recommended the compulsory evacuation from Darwin, Papua and New Guinea of all women and children ‘other than missionaries who may wish to remain and nurses’.10
New Guinea was a colony of Australia, which had been granted a mandate over the northern region, New Guinea, and the nearby islands, at Prime Minister Billy Hughes’ behest during the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. Papua and New Guinea would form ‘ramparts’ to be held from ‘the hands of an actual or potential enemy’.11 Only 1500 white people lived in Papua, the southern half of the island, and 4500 in New Guinea, in 1939. The local people numbered around 1.8 million, representing a huge variety of ethnic and language groups for whom extreme violence tended to be the chief mode of dispute settlement until European guns, the rule of law and the church (chiefly the Seventh-Day Adventists) arrived to pacify them in the early twentieth century.
Most white civilians had left Papua by July 1942. At Gona, Benson and the two young women elected to stay. Mavis Parkinson, a teacher who ran the three schools in Gona, got permission from her parents back in Ipswich, Queensland, to remain. Elsewhere in Papua and New Guinea, 689 foreigners, including 121 missionaries with 26 children, decided similarly against evacuation, and remained in their villages.12
Benson was under no illusions about Japan’s intentions. He’d seen hundreds of refugees fleeing the Japanese attacks on Salamaua and Lae pulling up on the beach; he’d witnessed the occasional dogfight in the sky. He urged the two young women to leave Gona, but they refused. They bossed him about in a cheerful way, and were unyielding in their determination.
Benson’s dwindling Papuan flock were less stubborn and needed no encouragement to go. Fearful of the Japanese—or perhaps in the grip of a less benign god than Benson’s—most had already evacuated along the coast, or fled to the foothills of the Owen Stanley Range. The village people streamed along the bush tracks and across the swamps, which ran parallel to the beach strip. They carried all they could: sleeping mats, clay cooking pots, little pigs and babies.
A handsome, easily dominated man of 57 with bright, compassionate eyes behind round spectacles, Benson stood on the beach and contemplated the Japanese convoy. It was time to leave, he thought, to abandon all this. He turned and surveyed his little paradise one last time: Gona Mission, whose green lawns, little cricket pitch, carefully groomed gardens and paths lined with flowers—hibiscus and yellow crotons—seemed to him a corner of the world that would indeed remain forever England.
The mission’s tin-roofed house—marked today by a little white cross—a school with sago-stalk walls and a little church of woven sago leaves, surrounded by native huts on stilts, were as dear to Benson as the services they performed. On balmy nights, he remembered, the missionaries would entertain visitors, chiefly the bishop, beneath swinging hurricane lamps on the lawns by the sea. Indeed, the Yorkshireman’s eye beheld something of exceptional beauty in Gona whose ‘tropical garden’, he wrote, was ‘set above a lovely sweep of grey sand and blue water, with a couple of coral islands to the east…I don’t think the Garden of Eden could have been more beautiful.’13 Unless, of course, one looked inland, where an altogether less reassuring spectacle met the eye: a coastal plain of jungle, swamp and rough grassland merging with coconut groves and crisscrossed by flood-prone creeks and rivers. To the east, a few miles along the beach, were Buna and Sanananda. The three villages marked out one of the wettest, most malarial regions on earth; the swamplands offered a perfect breeding ground for the anopheles mosquito.
Benson hoped the Japanese might spare a Papuan village and religious community. He was swiftly disabused. At about 4.45 p.m. on 21 July the destroyers shelled Buna beach and then Gona. ‘Hundreds of guns were spitting fire, and the deep woof! crump! crump! of bursting bombs a mile away gave me a queer feeling in the pit of my stomach.’14
The sight thrilled the two hopelessly naive Anglican Sisters. Mavis Parkinson clapped her hands and cried, ‘Scrummy! A real naval battle and here we are watching it. I do wish we knew if they are our ships.’15
The softening up lasted several minutes, after which, at about 5.00 p.m., hundreds of Japanese troops slid down ropes thrown over the ships’ sides into barges. The sound of rifle butts stamping on the hulls accompanied their shoreward advance, according to one native witness.*
The Orokaivan outriggers that normally plied the coastline lay abandoned on the beach. The tribes had deserted their villages. A nervous Benson decided he, too, must lead his little white tribe into the jungle: ‘Miss Hayman, in a brisk manner, was putting tins of food into an empty kerosene case. I put two mosquito nets, some old blankets and a square of calico into a blue canvas bag. Miss Parkinson put a change of clothes and some other odds and ends into a small suitcase.’16
The first Japanese troops stepped ashore near Basabua, about a mile east of Gona, and the advance troops—the Tsukamoto Battalion—set off immediately inland. At about this time Benson’s party left via a path to the rear of the mission compound and into the jungle, ‘our nice hot dinner—Miss Hayman’s daily delight—still in the oven, and…soldiers’ shirts and trousers awaiting repairs laid out neatly on a side table.’17 The uniforms awaiting the Sisters’ needlework were those of two officers of the Papuan Infantry Battalion, the indigenous army led by Australians.
The missionaries walked over hard country towards the Siai region, where the local Papuans ‘constructed a small bush hut for them a little way up river’.18 Their destination was Popondetta, the largest town in northern Papua; they were accompanied by a few Australian soldiers and two wounded American airmen. But the advancing Japanese cut off Benson’s route, and forced his party off the track. At one point, within yards of the enemy, Benson offered to approach the Japanese commander, to which the girls said, ‘That is impossible. We will never give ourselves up to the Japanese.’19 They plunged into the jungle with only a compass and Benson’s prayers—the gently lilting Itinerarium and The Lord’s Prayer—to guide them: ‘Lighten our Darkness, O Lord,’20 the missionary prayed, as he led the group into the Papuan night.