Following first contact in the 1930s, the traditional system of conflict management was impacted by all the administrative trappings conventionally associated with colonial mechanistic bureaucracies. These included the establishment of district and regional governance, and local government councils (LGCs); and imposition of a multi-tiered system of state-constituted courts following the 1962 Derham Report — land mediators, land courts, local and district, national and supreme courts (see Figure 6.1); the introduction of village courts, following the Village Courts Act, 1973, and other administrative agencies such as the village councillor system. In addition to this forensic edifice, disputes were also taken to, settled by, or sought to involve, mission workers, administrative agents such as kiaps, or police contingents in Koroba, Tari or Komo.

The fundamental impact of this period was the erosion of the localised insularity of a people who had for millennia relied on indigenous, grassroots-generated, institutions of grievance management. This trajectory of increasing exposure to outside agencies, imported technologies, political representation structures, and non-traditional lifestyles was buttressed by an increase in tourism-related activities in the SHP; provincial management of district policy and public works programs in health, education and communications; assimilation and accommodation of knowledge of, and use and reliance upon, cash and cash economy goods; and the incremental impacts of a newly-educated youth dissatisfied with a subsistence-agriculture-based lifestyle, and which sought employment opportunities in Mount Hagen, Lae, Port Moresby and elsewhere.

There is good evidence to suggest that in this first-wave period of consolidated colonial presence, the various ‘court’ systems imposed a quantum of fines and penalties quite at odds with traditional custom. The cumulative impact in the short term was thus to actually increase the general level of litigation as disputants relied on the activation of pending claims latent in the customary conflict system to redress wealth imbalances. Elsewhere, non-customary impositions of homicidal compensation as ‘penalties’ merely exacerbated levels of inter-group conflict.

The cautionary warning one takes from this period of response to ‘law and order’ is that interventionist activities can often themselves be a catalyst for increased levels of the very activity they attempt to address. Importantly, the whole kot system became a larger referral network for dispute processing as an alternative avenue of recourse when customary talking failed to produce a desired outcome. Risk management strategies weighed up distance, time, cost, and effort considerations. Equally, levels of frustration were building with ‘courts’ because of two quite alien administrative conventions: first, the distinction courts maintained between civil and criminal cases often confused litigants, and secondly, interrogative procedures were aimed at disentangling claim issues to produce a single definition of a wrong/breach against which to apply a reparation calculus or penalty. This was quite foreign to ‘custom’ in which litigants sought to ‘entangle’ issues in sequential chains of causation to reveal the ‘source/base/bone/root’ event, and where compensation might subsume multiple issues between the litigants. For Huli, case prosecution became an alienating experience, often resulting in frustration that parts of the multiple-claim web not dealt with in the courts would then have to be pursued as separate, rather than aggregated, issues. Under these conditions state ‘law’ began to lose social acceptance.

In these decades of assimilation, accommodation and adaptation to change, inter-group behaviour was impacted upon by profoundly politicised agendas associated with national governance. Politics was viewed as a new theatre of competition for acquiring benefit streams. This was politics as patronage. This world-view was not impregnated with any embedded concept of ‘the community good’. Rather, politics was subjected to localised maximising strategies: to secure a position (for oneself or related other) as a member; to ensure one had a ‘wantok’ as an elected representative; and to invoke and rework regional myths of origins to create new provinces as smaller self-interested distributional pies. Fuelled by the belief — underscored by continual revelations and rumours — that national government was corrupt and inefficient, governance became burdened with a credibility gap problem for grass-roots populaces in the highlands. Equally, it has to be acknowledged that there were no predisposing cultural conditions for landowners to become ‘team players’ in nation building. Simply expressed, there was no community agency for social advancement. Succinctly expressed, politico-legal infrastructures and agencies were never welcomed as integral parts of people’s lives; engendered without collaborative debate, imposed without full awareness and education campaigns, they induced apathy and antipathy. These were conveniences of and for an alienated cabal of decision-makers.

What precipitated a downward spiral in social order, after some initial development successes in the 1960s-1970s, was a conjunction of factors that laid the ground conditions for inequality, frustration, and pedestrian progress. On the one hand, there were unfilled, but equally exaggerated, expectations by landowners; on the other hand, they could rightly point to their disappointments with unsustainable agricultural and small business (e.g. trade store) projects. We witnessed the ‘declining effectiveness of courts, the police, and other law-enforcement agencies of the central government; a useful point of departure is to regard them as otiose, if not obsolete’ (Gordon and Meggitt 1985:247). What emerged was a newfound fervour for reparation streams through new claim types — road, vehicle and work related injuries — and even larger war compensation demands resulting from increased inter-ethnic communication and contact. Government infrastructure like schools, aid-posts, hospitals, and district offices became legitimate targets of vandalism in conflict or politically-related disenchantment. Penalties of imprisonment failed to stem the tide of disorder largely because incarceration lacks the stigmatic deterrent value found in Western cultures.

There were, and remain, some systemic environmental (both social and physical) conditions that constrain development progress in Huli, which might be identified as follows.

In effect the vast majority of the rural population saw themselves as impaled on the horns of a dilemma: trapped between their inability to extricate themselves from dependence on subsistence horticulture to simply survive, and the drive to acquire money to purchase cash economy goods and satisfy other needs. Income windfalls were transient in effect, making little substantial or sustainable difference to their lives. In the context of an increasingly alienated political and governance machinery, the rule of ‘conflict custom’ remained the viable anchor for redress of grievances.

Until the late 1980s the geometry of social group formation and custom, the infrastructure of ties between descent groups and land, remained largely intact and to a degree impervious to these sweeping transformations. But this was now a system whose ethical underpinnings and familial control mechanisms had long dissipated. Elsewhere, the waning men’s longhouse tradition and increased rates of male-female coresidence were having similar impacts.

The contexts (e.g. magic, ritual, warfare) in which traditional leaders operated no longer obtained, or had been dramatically altered. Many of the older incumbents of ‘headman’ status lacked education in or knowledge of Tok Pisin/English. Where their representative functions were needed, most especially in resource development areas, they were usurped by, or powers were devolved to, younger literate males. With large contingents of Huli now semi-permanently resident in Port Moresby, discontinuities in the voices of representation began to emerge between grassroots and migrant community members.

Cessation of most religious fertility cults, and indeed the bachelor cult, during the 1960s meant that the institutionalised inculcation of conventional Huli mores was now left solely to religious, school or family agencies. But these belief systems were long challenged by imported ideologies, producing a society with coexistent but plural moral codes. This non-uniformity and breakdown in low-level family control produced fertile ground conditions for a more nucleated outlook on strategies to maximise income streams. These became sedimented well before the onset of resource development. Importantly, policing order became impossible outside the restricted zones of influence adjacent to the small contingent forces in Tari, Koroba and Komo. Resources were simply inadequate for both the size of population and its dispersed settlement. In this respect, consider the comparative police: populace ratios of Australia, 1: 439; New Zealand 1: 692; and Papua New Guinea 1: 1,000. For Huli, it is likely that the ratio exceeded 1: 1000. Irrespective of these resource statistics, this was a rapidly transformed theatre of conflict:

By the 1990s the true ineffectiveness of the court system had become apparent. There were staggering rates of acquittal, dismissed cases, adjournments, and not-guilty verdicts. The appeals system within the context of an under-resourced judiciary only strengthened public opinion that litigation was a form of gamesmanship, another arena for ‘talking’ that bred contempt. Huli became adept at marshalling their own ‘evidence’ including government reports that fell off the back of proverbial PMVs, using Huli lawyers and legal students, and even attempting to co-opt anthropologists.