‘Michael Piggott’s New Feller Master shows that war is not just about fighting’, Honest History, 24 January 2026
David Stephens reviews Michael Piggott’s New Feller Master.
There are trite sayings about what happens in wars: ’99 per cent boredom, one per cent panic’; ‘hurry up and wait’; ‘the supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting’ (Sun Tzu). All three of those are relevant to Michael Piggott’s new book, New Feller Master: Beyond the Trenches; Australia’s Neglected WWI Story (Big Sky Publishing). The interesting points about the 1914 Australian expedition to German New Guinea are that the fighting lasted just for one day, 11 September 1914, pretty much subdued the enemy, and was followed by seven years of colonial administration, in which there was lots of waiting around and lots of boredom.
The German surrender was signed just six days after the one day’s fighting to capture the Bita Paka wireless station, the Australian occupying force was in place by early 1915, putting Australia in charge of 350 to 400 000 New Guineans and a plantation economy based on copra. New Guineans who had worked for the Germans found themselves, as the Australian proclamation said in Pidgin, with a ‘new feller master’.
As Piggott says, this story is not about a war or a battle but an occupation, as hinted at in the front cover picture of Australian Colonel Holmes and staff, Australian and New Guinean, at Government House, Rabaul. It is a story ‘beyond the trenches’ as the front cover also says, though it could just as easily have said, ‘war without the trenches’. It is, in fact, a tale about what Kipling called ‘the White Man’s burden’. (We need not agree with Kipling on the nature of the task.) It was federated Australia’s first go at carrying that burden and it saw all the cock-ups, misjudgements, rogues, rorts, and worse that come with colonialism.
Australia’s deaths in former German New Guinea were mostly from accidents, illness, and suicide – and possibly incompetence, causing the loss of the submarine HMAS AE1 (the wreck of which was not discovered till 2017). Individual deaths stand out. There was Lieutenant-Commander Charles Elwell, who, pinned down with his men by enemy fire during the Bita Paka attack, jumped to his feet waving his sword and was very quickly shot down. His RAN reservists had not followed his lead. There was also medical officer, Captain Brian Pockley, shot at Bita Paka while rendering medical assistance and after handing his Red Cross armband, identifying him as a non-combatant, to a wounded soldier.
The deaths of New Guineans, ‘indispensable agents of the [Australian] administration’, are, however, ‘absent from the occupier’s honour rolls and nowhere acknowledged in Anzac mythology’ (page 158). When Gideon Kakabin, Gunantana/Tolai elder and historian, had a research residency at the Australian War Memorial in 2018, he blogged, ‘When the Australians took over German New Guinea in 1914, the declaration which they read to the locals at Proclamation Square in Rabaul was a total sham, and reflected entirely the Australian and British contempt of the New Guinea people’ (page 265). The Pidgin version of that proclamation repeated six times the phrase ‘new feller master’.
Piggott is strong on evidence, as befits his archivist career. Connoisseurs of Anzackery often wish that evidentiary standards were as high on whether the Gallipoli landing was in the right place, Le Hamel saved the world from the Kaiser, or Atatürk said those famous words about Australian-Turkish unity in death. Or, whether there was a ‘Battle for Australia’ in 1942 or a ‘battle’ at Long Tan in 1966.
Commemoration often means the bullshit meter is turned down low and familiar phrases like ‘Lest We Forget’ and ‘service and sacrifice’ take over. Piggott paraphrases historian Bruce Scates about how ‘we that are left’, government and family, excel at ‘rewriting private pain as patriotic pride and noble Christian sacrifice’ (page 251). Of course, every death in war, civilian or military, ‘ours’ or ‘theirs’, is a tragedy, even if it is impossible rationally to link an individual death to a larger cause.
Talking of linking, the Australians who went to German New Guinea tried very hard to work themselves into the mainstream of post-Gallipoli commemoration, stressing the ‘firsts’ the contingent achieved, for example, first Australian force to leave Australia. Some of them went on to the ‘real’ war in Europe. Their descendants took up the New Guinea cause to some extent. Piggott shows that these efforts were largely in vain, with both governments and historians. It was too small a ‘show’ in an out-of-the -way place, though, paradoxically, one on Australia’s’ doorstep, and was soon overshadowed by much larger horrors. Historians, from Charles Bean on, have mostly given the New Guinea venture cursory attention.
Piggott’s great strength is in getting behind the paucity in Great War New Guinea of what the Australian War Memorial’s legislation calls ‘war or warlike operations’. His occupation story includes racism, being White, ‘not fighting, administering’, ‘not fighting, hanging about’, dying (but mostly not from bullets), looting and the taking of – euphemistically described and often smuggled back to Australia – ‘souvenirs’. The occupation force seems to have had more than its fair share of small-time crooks and chancers. There was also the bizarre incident of the flogging by German officials of an Australian Methodist missionary, the reciprocal flogging of the Germans by (sober) Australian administration people, and the attempts by the Australian side to hush up what had happened, despite the widely circulated photographic evidence of at least the flogging of the Germans.
This reviewer, as a lad, was preached at by Methodist ministers who had been missionaries in the Pacific. None of them mentioned being flogged by Germans.
Finally, Piggott summarises the language of accounting for death in war (page 141) and record-keeping and evidence (pages 178, 227). We’ve reproduced excerpts on our sister website Defending Country.
*David Stephens is editor of Honest History and Defending Country websites. He said this in 2014 about Bita Paka and the political and media froth it provoked at the time of its centenary.
Michael Piggott AM is a long-time friend of Honest History and among the distinguished Supporters of its sister site, Defending Country.
