The Fuzzy Wuzzies

From JOHN FOWKE

 

Forget about them helping to save Australia- these men saved Papua New Guinea- and young Papua New Guineans should be told about this.

It is salutary that Australia’s High Commissioner to Papua New Guinea has given recognition of service to the tiny handful of remaining wartime carrier-conscripts who became known as the Fuzzy-Wuzzies.

But it is sad that PNG itself has nothing to say or to give in honour of these old men.

For they and the forces they served with saved PNG for its ultimate emergence as an independent democracy.

If Japan had been allowed to overrun and entrench itself in PNG and Australia, we would not be reading this English-language newspaper today.

Nor would Papua New Guineans be free citizens in our own free, democratic nation.

The invasion by the Japanese in what is now PNG was one prong of the overall policy of subjugation to the will of the Japanese under the Emperor and his proposed Greater Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.

We know just how prosperous and well-treated the other invaded countries - Burma, Malaya, Indonesia, Timor and so on - became under the new military regime. So it is unfortunate that the myth that PNG was "forced into a war not of its own making" is widespread today.

PNG was in effect, even if not widely aware of it, defending itself as much as Australia from a fate very different from that which awaited it under the League of Nations Mandate- ( later United nations)- administered by Australia.

The labour force we call the Angels - courtesy of a famous poem in The Australian Women’s Weekly at the time - were conscripts taken from villages all over coastal and inland Papua; not simply from the villages along the famed Kokoda Track and surrounding district.

Men aged between 18 and 40 were  taken from their villages and placed with the Army in areas of need from the Gulf through Central, on the Track itself, later at Kokoda, and in Milne Bay.

One old Fuzzy conscript, who lives near Malalaua in Gulf Province, being the father of a friend of mine, carried and laboured for four years on the Bulldog Track to Wau, supplying the Allied forward push from Wau towards the Markham Valley and Japanese-occupied Lae.

Every now and again, whenever yet another story about medals and rewards for Fuzzies was featured in the news of the day the old man would collect enough for the return bus-fare to Moresby and go to the big city.

All his trips, needless to say, were fruitless.

Until last week, when with five others, the last of the last, he finally received recognition from Australia, if not from his own nation.

In 1942, the Australian Army Command in Port Moresby instructed its agents, the civilian Resident Magistrates in charge of each of the administrative Districts to send Patrol Officers to forcefully recruit, under threat of sentence of imprisonment, all able-bodied males of ages judged by the recruiting officer as between 18 and 40 years.

These recruits were medically checked and all those who passed were then signed for service and sent to Port Moresby.

Men from west of Daru right around through Goaribari and Purari, Orokolo, Kerema, Moresby, Abau, on through Mailu, Milne Bay, East Cape, Gosiago,the islands and Northern District were conscripted at the will of the Army.

These men were conscripts, like the young Australian militiamen they initially carried for and supported. And, unknowingly, and importantly for today’s generation of Papua New Guineans, they were serving the interest of their own land and people in this arduous and dangerous work.

Now that Australia has recognised and honoured the contribution of all the Fuzzy-Wuzzies by making a presentation to the last, frail representatives of a generation who knew the reality of  warfare between modern, industrialized nations, is it not time that the people of PNG also paid honour to the contribution of these men?

The truth of the emergence into independent statehood by PNG is that the founders and pioneers of this nation are not the politicians who in the mid-sixties obtained independence from a willing colonial government; not the men who founded the two original political parties.

No. The true pioneers of modern PNG are the Fuzzies together with the hard-fighting soldiers of the Pacific Islands Battalion, and equally-brave and willing men of the Royal Papua Constabulary and the New Guinea Police, all of whom served, shoulder to shoulder with the Allied forces, in opposition to the aggressive Japanese invasion of this land.

The Nation owes it to itself- to the younger generation particularly- to recognise these facts by bestowing a suitable honour upon these few old survivors before it is too late.