Escape from Salamaua: a conversation with Ashley Chapman.(History)(Interview)

ASHLEY CHAPMAN was one of the few people ever to flee in danger from an invader in Australian territory. He was an oil depot manager on the north coast of New Guinea when the Japanese military arrived. A six-week arduous cross-country trek got his party safely to Port Moresby, then Sydney. He joined the RAAF and a posting back to Papua New Guinea with Allied Intelligence followed. He now lives in retirement on the New South Wales Central Coast, where Robert Murray interviewed him in July.

Robert Murray: You arrived in New Guinea in 1933 to work with Burns Philp?

Ashley Chapman: I was a London boy who emigrated to Sydney in 1930 and I had this wonderful experience of going to the New Guinea colony, which was then an Australian Mandated Territory. I was not quite twenty-one. It was the Depression. I was offered 18 [pounds sterling] per month and the best I could do in Sydney at that time was about 3 [pounds sterling] a week. I went away on [pounds sterling] 18 per month and expenses paid, which in those days meant I could send a pound a week home to help the family.

Burns Philp was a big Pacific trading and shipping company. They were general agents for just about everything and had massive plantation and commercial interests in New Guinea. I got the job because I had just completed an apprenticeship with a law reporting firm and was a fast shorthand writer. They didn't have recording devices then and the only way you could get a transcript was by manual reporting. Burns Philp had applied to my business college for a male stenographer. Not many women went to the tropics in those days.

How did you find Salamaua?

Things were pretty primitive. It was a tiny settlement in the Morobe district on Huon Gulf. They didn't employ women in the early 1930s because the living conditions were not suitable. It was a very isolated white community, with only about forty whites, mostly Australians and English in their early twenties, living on a sandy isthmus that connected a rocky island jutting into the gulf with the north coast at the foot of the mountains. The reason for the settlement was that gold had been discovered a few years earlier in the interior. Burns Philp had a store at Salamaua and were agents for the Shell Company of Australia, as they were throughout the South Pacific. It was an administration centre as well.

Salamaua was a native name for the isthmus and there was a separate native village, also known as Salamaua. An Assistant District Officer, at that time a man named Taylor, administered about half a dozen patrol officers and staff, based at Salamaua, who had been trained in tropical courses. The patrol officers gradually penetrated the interior, which was mostly unexplored, made contact with the natives and set up some kind of civilised administration.