by Tim Wigmore
Besides elementary subjects and Bible study, carpentry for boys and sewing for girls, the Kwato curriculum was heavily oriented to cricket, for its moral efficacy in instilling good technique, good sportsmanship, and good deportment. Abel insisted that his young Papuans play in crisply laundered flannels, setting the standard with a natty bow tie, and with Victorian orthodoxy, seldom evaluating youths in his diaries without an assessment of their cricket prowess (‘a clever youth and a fine medium bowler’; ‘nice serious lad, very clever behind the sticks’).
He was no less demanding of his white colleagues, once dismissing a young teacher sent out by LMS for sporting ignorance (‘Mr Hallows plays no cricket,’ reads the diary entry. ‘He is leaving by the next boat’) and scorning a well-meaning government anthropologist (whom Abel dismissed as ‘out of his depth’ after a mild suggestion that the mission curriculum involve ‘less cricket and more Christ’).
The only time this incurably active man paused was when his edition of Cricket: A Weekly Record of the Game arrived, wrapped for appearance’s sake in editions of The Christian World; eyes glistening, he would pore in silent rapture over its scorecards and match reports. After a while, too, Kwato Mission began playing against outsiders. Regular games commenced with Europeans in nearby Samarai, who had built their own cricket ground, and against passengers on passing ships, including in 1910 a team from the steamer Matunga including Australian Test all-rounder Frank Laver and Tasmanian keeper George Gatehouse. Only rain prevented the visitors’ defeat after Kwato’s star googly bowler, Aleadi, bowled Laver for nought and had Gatehouse caught for seven.
By then, too, cricket was no longer confined to Papua’s eastern extremity. Interest was sufficient among Port Moresby’s European community by Christmas 1906 to invite Samarai to send their team, while former Tasmanian leg-spinner John Watt wrote in The Referee soon after reporting that the game had a strong vogue in villages surrounding the city, ‘If you visit any native village about Port Moresby, small boys can always be seen playing cricket right on the water’s edge, with material of their own make. Every other hit the ball goes into the water, while the two batsmen “run them out”. The Papuan is never stuck for a cricket ball, for as soon as he loses one he taps the nearest rubber tree, and makes another.’
LMS evangelists here were as often Samoan as English, but preached cricket with little less enthusiasm, an Australian expeditioner recruiting bearers for a sojourn into the interior in 1910 finding the game a serious inconvenience:
‘We had some trouble in getting the carriers, as all the villagers, including the Samoan missionary, were engaged in playing cricket. The craze for cricket seems to have spread from village to village all over civilized Papua. Wherever we entered a village we invariably found a cricket match in progress. The singular feature about the play was that young natives who could not speak English had most of the English terms used in the game by heart. Thus one would hear “Play!” “Run!” “Stop!” “How’s dat, umpire?” “Out!”
‘I must say that many of them handled a bat well and gracefully. The bowling was good and very swift, and as for the fielding it was quite up to the average. The worst of this cricket mania, my guide told me, was that if carriers were wanted and they were playing a match no inducement would make them move until the game was over. It was becoming, be said, the curse of New Guinea.’
Nowhere was the vogue more ardent than Hanuabada, thanks to a Samoan emissary of LMS, Fa’vae. The game was well established by the time he was succeeded by an Englishman, Rev. Robert Lister Turner. A rather more orthodox missionary than Abel, Turner would complete the first Motu dictionary and grammar, plus a translation of the New Testament. But he was also the brother of a Leicestershire county cricketer, and made Hanuabadan cricket famous enough by the 1920s to feature in a series of cards for Namo and Papuan Beauties cigarettes sponsored by the British Papuan Development Company, the prowess of its early champions Reautau Mea, Toka Gaudi, Gavera Arua and Kohu Dogoda making it a serious rival for Kwato and Samarai.
One final eastern champion, nonetheless, would outstrip all in fame. Born in Milne Bay in 1914, John Guise taught himself cricket by clipping pictures from Australian newspapers, including one treasured image of Learie Constantine hitting a six at the SCG, and imitating them in solitary drills with a tennis ball and a self-made bat on the docks at Samarai where he worked as a basket carrier. He cultivated a habit of massive scores, including 253 in Milne Bay and 346 in Samarai, after which he was approached by representatives of a Melbourne grade club – only, to his bitter disappointment, to be forbidden from accepting the offer by Papua’s lieutenant-governor Sir Hubert Murray.
His cricket thwarted, his life took different directions. Thirty-five years after Murray’s death, Sir John Guise would become the inaugural governor-general of an independent Papua New Guinea under a constitution whose preamble was drafted by Rev. Charles Abel’s son Sir Cecil Abel.
There actually emerged many crickets on the island of New Guinea. There were expatriate competitions, the original being a triangular in Port Moresby played for the Freezing Company Shield; expatriates also began playing among themselves on the north coast in Lae and Madang in what the First World War had left as Australian territory. There were also Papuan competitions, maturing in Moresby into a league in 1937, with four of the seven teams coming from Hanuabada.
Most numerous were spontaneous local variants, one described by a correspondent in the 1928 spring annual of The Cricketer as involving players wearing ‘little more than is demanded by the laws of decency’ using ersatz equipment in irregular numbers with elastic rules(1).
‘There may be as many as 20 natives fielding, such is the enthusiasm for the Papuan game…Wearying of fielding, point, cover-point, long-stop and other betake themselves to cool groves, there to pluck the scarlet hibiscus…All laugh at hits and misses, for in merry Papua all is jest….Scoring is a strange affair, the losing side increasing its score by adding sufficient runs to the scoring book to render defeat honourable.’
Yet what often looked riotous to outsiders contained strong ceremonial aspects, integral to inter- and intra-village relations. Anthropologist Cyril Belshaw documented both 60 years ago in his encyclopedic ethnography of Hanuabada, The Great Village (1954). As an example of the former he recorded the arrival of a men’s team from the village of Kido to thank Hanuabada’s Taoro Club for laying a pitch and performing some coaching, bringing with them a festive board of pigs, bananas and yams minutely apportioned.
‘At five o’clock in the evening….the bananas and yams were brought out and unwrapped, the principal cricketers foregathered on the verandah of the club captain and ate the entrails and other pig tit-bits. At six o’clock the cricketers distributed the yams, bananas and pig cuts…they carried out the whole procedure with much argument and confusion and disagreement before everyone agreed that the allocation was satisfactory.’
To illustrate the latter, he observed the female Laurabada Club incorporating elaborate cricket matches into their community-building activities, laced with socially approved sledging.
‘Though there was much horseplay and good fun, there was a great deal of determination. Women on the sideline kept proper score, and over the ground flew a large green flag embroidered with “L. B. C.”. Regular teams developed for both cricket and evening games: women without children played women with children, married women played single women, or old women played young. As one side carried the day they would break off to dance triumphantly to a Polynesian song, or to sing a couplet of abuse, or to make humorous or obscene gestures.’
These complex antecedents did not begin blending until about half a century ago, and then only little by little, after the expatriate Papua New Guinean team was invited to play its first games abroad, in north Queensland against a Cairns XI and a Tablelands XI in January 1954 – what became an annual visit.
Moresby’s colour bar was a fragmentary one: some companies, like Burns Philp, distinguished bet
ween expatriates and indigenes; other, like Steamships Trading, did not. In 1958, the PNG team visiting Cairns included two Papuans: Babani Momo from Kilakila, and John Ovia’s father Uduru. Nobody seems to have been overly fussed. And over the next five years, the expatriate and Papuan competitions merged as a prelude to deeper integration.
The 1960s and 1970s leading up to independence were actually a prosperous period for Papua New Guinean sport. Australian rules football produced champions such as Herea Amini and David Haro. Rugby league’s Friday night competition, reinforced by quality players from Australia, was the highlight of the Moresby sporting week.
Cricket kept pace. Around a thriving sports club in Moresby’s premier expatriate suburb of Boroko were clustered three fine grounds with concrete pitches including picturesque Colts, home to a successful club team of the same name. Former Australian umpire Col Hoy, an executive with Ansett Airlines, organized the first visit from an Australian XI of first-class players led by Queensland’s Sam Trimble in March 1972. When a Papua New Guinea Cricket Board of Control was formed the following year with representatives from Moresby, Lae, Mt Hagen, Rabaul and Bougainville, the International Cricket Conference admitted the country as its eighth associate member.
Inspired by PNG hosting its first rugby league international against a Lions team en route to fulfilling World Cup away fixtures in Australia and New Zealand, the PNGCBC invited Clive Lloyd’s West Indians to play two one-day games on their way to the 1975-6 Worrell Trophy series. So it was that just five weeks after the last lowering of the Australian flag, the World Cup’s inaugural winners played, confusingly, two different ‘Papua & New Guinea’ teams selected locally in Moresby and Lae.
After the first ball from Andy Roberts soared from the concrete wicket at Moresby’s Murray Stadium over the keeper’s head, the visitors settled mainly for bowling part-timers. But a new cricket nation had arrived. Well, part of it had anyway.
For the teams pitted against the West Indies represented the last efflorescence of expat cricket. In the first game, Richard Unsworth, a Wollongong accountant, gained a lifetime’s bragging rights by dismissing Viv Richards. In the second game, Charlie Harrison, an Indian-born Australian previously resident in Pakistan, made 34, and dismissed Roy Fredericks, Alvin Kallicharran and Lawrence Rowe.
But cricketers henceforward would be home-grown, if initially still led by a post-colonial elite. Brian Amini, the first Papuan to captain the national team when PNG beat Fiji by eight wickets in 1977, became chairman of the Papuan Community Development Group. His successor Nigel Agonia, a public servant from Moresby, went on to serve as Secretary for Minerals and Energy; Agonia’s deputy Ilinome Tarua, a lawyer raised in Kwato, would later be PNG’s permanent representative at the United Nations.
At first, this new model prospered. Having won the gold medal for cricket at the first South Pacific Games, PNG went on to that remarkable 1982 ICC Trophy, held in Britain’s Midlands. Led by Api Leka, they lost only to Zimbabwe, a class above everyone else, Kenya and Bermuda. They comfortably beat Canada, a participant in the previous World Cup, as well as Hong Kong, Israel and Gibraltar, then finally Bangladesh in a play-off for third place. They played, moreover, flamboyant cricket with a flavour of the West Indies, who whenever televisions were turned on in PNG in the 1980s to pick up the Channel 9 signal wafting across the Coral Sea seemed to be knocking lumps off Australians.
Whether PNG regressed, or the rest of the world advanced, that promise remained unfulfilled. The national team did not play another international game for four years and when they did, in the next ICC Trophy, experienced a rude awakening: Netherlands cruised to 271/6 and bundled PNG out for 52. Fifth in their group, they went home early. For countries containing professionals and semi-professionals, such as Zimbabwe, the Netherlands, Bangladesh, Kenya, UAE, USA and Canada, all-amateur PNG was no match.
Taking on the chairmanship of the PNG board that year, Veari Maha, a leading light in local Australia rules football, did little to change that. A word you hear much of in PNG is ‘wantok’ – pidgin for ‘one talk’, it conveys the idea of reciprocal obligation based on shared blood, shared clan or shared language. Maha was the patriarch of a large sporting family: in due course, his cousin William would become coach, his son Navu become captain, his other son James and nephew Rod key players. It was not a family one offended lightly.
There were still glory days. The South Pacific Games came to Moresby in September 1991, and PNG again secured cricket gold. Victoria led by Matthew Elliott came to Moresby in April 1995 and lost to PNG by six wickets. The PNGCBC rolled out an adaptation of Kwik Cricket, called Liklik Cricket, promoted by Dean Jones.
But the peculiar difficulties of PNG now made themselves felt: the distance between cricket centres, the distance from the rest of the cricket world, the growing heft of rugby league exemplified by the Australian achievements of Adrian Lam, Arnold Krewanty and Elias Paiyo, and such infrastructural shortcomings as the continued absence of turf wickets. ‘Wherever the English went round the world, they left behind beautiful turf wickets,’ PNGCBC’s long-time secretary Wayne Satchell would lament. ‘The Australians in Papua New Guinea left behind only concrete.’
Satchell was one continuous thread throughout this time. His father Bruce had arrived in PNG in 1956 to set up local operations for Trans Australia Airways; his mother Daphne was an ebullient cricket lover; Wayne himself married a girl from Hanuabada.
A patient opening batsman for Lae’s successful Morobe Cricket Club, he was the epitome of the dedicated amateur administrator: his office was the boot of his car, and his office hours when he was not required as a general manager of Gibson Chemicals. For a time, Satchell and the board were so indivisible that he slipped into the habit of covering expenses of the national team at the ICC Trophy himself: some of them in 1990 and 1994; nearly all of them, which involved mortgaging his home, when the tournament came to Kuala Lumpur in 1997. ‘We’d always sent a team to ICC events,’ he says. ‘I wanted us to maintain that record.’
Ask about this period in PNG’s cricket history, however, and the answers grow somewhat vague, perhaps not surprisingly given what was happening elsewhere, with the collapse of the resources economy, the deterioration of security in Moresby, Lae and worst of all on Bougainville, and a succession of chaotic and violent elections. For some, it was not an entirely bad time to be away, including for PNG’s two best players at the 1997 ICC Trophy.
John Ovia accepted the opportunity to train at the AIS Cricket academy in Adelaide, where among other things he enjoyed the thrill of batting to Brett Lee in the nets and became a lifelong Australian cricket supporter. ‘My father, he always supported West Indies,’ says Ovia. ‘But I couldn’t support anyone but Australia. It would be stealing.’
Charles Amini, whose family rivals the Mahas as Papuan cricket’s most fecund, spent the late 1990s in Melbourne on a posting with Shell, becoming indispensable to St Barnabas CC. Charles and son Chris played in the seconds, wife Kune in the fifths, sons C.J. and Colin in the Under-12s and Under-14s; all had or would represent PNG. For Chris, now national captain, it was an invaluable first exposure to two-day cricket. ‘I learned how to bat in Australia,’ he says.
Local efforts, however, to raise standards were fitful. Veari Maha and Wayne Satchell promoted a plan to upgrade Amini Park, welcoming Allan Border to Boroko in September 1999 to turn the first sod. It was a prestigious, high-visibility event: Border was presented to the prime minister, governor-general and local dignitaries, providing the focus for days of media coverage. Yet disappointingly little happened afterwards; indeed, the ground started slipping into disrepair. Any shelter in Moresby will over time attract squatters.
Cricket’s precinct offered a number of instant accommodation opportunities including the old Boroko Sports Club and a curator’s house. Squabbles broke out among local administrators chafing at the long Maha ascendancy, a lack of information around finances and a want of resources for teams. PNG players arrived for
the Under-19 World Cup in New Zealand in January 2002, for instance, with neither equipment nor footwear nor uniforms. Cricket PNG, as the board was now known, even lost its patron, which since Sir John Guise’s time had been the governor-general, when the country went for six months without a vice-regal representative because of two politicians wrangling over the job.
Yet it was out of this chaos that came the first important step to reviving cricket in PNG: the appointment as patron of Sir Brian Bell.
Bell, born in the Darling Downs township of Chinchilla in 1928, would in earlier times have been a south seas merchant adventurer. Reading a magazine story about the infamous ‘Telefolmin incident’ in November 1953, when four Australian patrol officers were bloodthirstily killed by tribesmen in the northern province of Sanduan, Bell decided PNG must be ‘an exciting place’ and moved there. Over the next half a century he built a vast family retail conglomerate, sealing everything with a handshake. He brought a similar goodwill to the role of patron, available to endow senior tournaments, Under-19 tournaments, women’s cricket challenges alike.
Things would get worse before they got better. Bell’s deputy on the board of Moresby’s general hospital was Mick Nades, a savvy Sri Lankan-born accountant who had come from Sydney with Steamships Trading in 1976. When Nades was drafted to provide Cricket PNG with an overdue and thorough audit, troubles emerged. Satchell was claiming to be owed tens of thousands of dollars for personal contributions to Cricket PNG; Bank of PNG was expressing concerns about K250,000 borrowed to redevelop Amini Park, whose title itself was unclear, being vested in a trust on which Veari Maha sat.
Unfathomable liabilities; uncertain assets: Cricket PNG was on a financial brink. It pulled back thanks to Bell, who quietly retired the bank debt, and Nades, who succeeded to the chairmanship and watched every cheque for the next few years until the finances stabilised.