PIR Communication before Independence

Papua New Guinea is famous world-wide for having over 700 different languages, not just dialects, but distinct languages, making it very difficult to communicate across boundaries. To overcome this problem two universal languages emerged. In the previous Australian Territory of Papua, it was “Police Motu”, a simplified version of the language of the people from the village of Hanuabada near Port Moresby. In New Guinea it was Neo-Melanesian Pidgin, a mixture of English, local words, and German. Over the years it became a prominent local language, and it was the official language of the PIR. This meant that one of the first tasks for recruits from Papua was to learn to speak Pidgin. The PIR motto was: “To Find a Path”. In Pidgin it is called “painim rot”. There were no capital letters in written Pidgin which makes it quite hard to read.

Australians posted to Papua New Guinea were required to become fluent in Pidgin, although some never really mastered it. Because of the significant English component, it was relatively simple to become fluent but considerably harder to become accurate. Pidgin has its own grammar, and much embarrassment was often caused by inaccuracy. For many years, Father Ray Quirk, the Catholic Chaplain and a former long-term missionary in Papua New Guinea, was the main instructor for the Australians. The book from which most of us learned to be fluent was compiled by the late Father Francis Mihalic.

There is an excellent example of the problem of inaccuracy from the early 1960s. The RSM, an Australian, was drilling the PIR in preparation for a ceremonial parade.
He was shouting at the companies to lift their legs higher when they were marking time. He shouted in Pidgin “upim lek” (lift up your legs), then “upim tupela lek” (lift up both your legs) and then “upim tupela lek wantaim” This meant “lift up both your legs together”. The parade came to an abrupt halt as the troops broke into gales of laughter.

Here are the links to two stories familiar to us all, told in the official language of the PIR. The stories are
Little Red Riding Hood (liklik redpela hat) and
The Three Little Pigs (tripela liklik pik).

Article by Maj Gen “Hori” Howard