Michael Piggott’s ‘New Feller Master: Beyond the Trenches Australia’s Neglected WWI Story’, details Australia’s occupation of New Guinea and challenges familiar national narratives – confronting uncomfortable truths about power, race and legacy.

Two days after it declared war on Germany on 4 August 1914, Britain asked the Australian government if it would mind, awfully, taking over the Germany colony in New Guinea on the understanding that any territory gained would “be at the disposal of the Imperial Government for purposes of an ultimate settlement at conclusion of the war.”

Of course, the Australian government obliged. In smart time the Australian Naval and Military Expeditionary Force (ANMEF) was formed and soon troops were on board the converted P&O liner, Berrima, and headed north in the company of a naval force of a dozen ships.

Within a couple of days of the ANMEF’s arrival in New Guinea on 11 September 1914, the main German garrisons had been captured. Thirty New Guineans, six Australians and a German were killed in the action. The terms of capitulation were agreed with the Germans on 17 September and the ANMEF occupation of New Guinea – a territory about the size of Victoria with a population of around 400,000 – began. It endured until May 1921.

Piggott says his book is “not a conventional battle history” as “there was so little actual fighting, the occupation so long and the aftermath even longer”. Rather its focus is on the “backgrounds, attitudes, ideas, behaviour, and self image” of the Australians involved, how they approached their tasks and the trailing effects of their experiences for themselves and their families. Equally the book deals, often with startling explicitness, with the effects of the occupation on New Guineans and the German colonists. It touches on the inheritance of the ruthless mining of phosphate in the now independent country of Nauru.

Piggott’s book is no casually tossed off military potboiler. It is a thorough, scrupulous sociological consideration of Australia’s occupation of New Guinea developed over many years of study. And it avoids the migraine-inducing jargon of those prepared to own up to be being sociologists. Indeed, the book is a model of clarity enlivened by wryness and occasional whimsicality.

The author has combed through official records, public reporting and, he says, “microhistories of themes, incidents, campaigns and mini-biographies."

Nothing seems to have been left to chance and the book takes the trouble gently to correct big and small slips in earlier histories. For example, Charles Bean is chided for titling his 1946 summary volume of Australia and WWI as Anzac to Amiens, “an alliterative title” Piggott says “which dishonestly started too late and ended too early. Still ‘ANMEF to Rabaul’ would never have worked.”

The Australians who occupied German New Guinea “were neither equipped, qualified nor experienced for their role” Piggott says, notwithstanding that on their journey to it the troops were given “lectures on personal hygiene, international law and bayoneting”.

The various leaders of the ANMEF had, in Piggott’s judgment “a quality of inertia about them.” That’s not all. When in the early stages of the occupation, a German medical practitioner and several German plantation owners caned an Australian Methodist missionary they suspected of being a spy, the ANMEF commander, Colonel William Holmes, arranged for a reciprocal public flogging of the German floggers. Matters may not have much improved when Holmes was replaced by Colonel Samuel Pethebridge KCMG who was moonlighting as Secretary of the Department of Defence.

Perhaps the most bracing chapters in New Feller Master are those dealing with the Australian occupiers’ relations with New Guineans. The chapter headings give the flavour - “Being Racist”, “Being White”, “Looting Like a Soldier” and “Looting Like a Coloniser”.

Piggott says Australian “attitudes towards New Guineans were almost entirely negative, if occasionally qualified” and that they reacted towards the locals with “disgust, exploitation, corporal punishment and rape.”

When it came to looting, Pethebridge saw the Australians as “champions” and when he ordered the baggage of some returning troops to be searched, he said he was threatened with mutiny and that some officers “considered their personal honour was impugned.”

After studying soldiers’ “native curio collecting”, Piggott cites Christine Winter’s conclusion that “New Guinea was Australia’s greatest war trophy.” Piggott claims that “for sheer self-interest the calculated plundering of New Guinea has few parallels. And thinking of phosphate, nothing comes close.”

Of the consequences for the families of the occupiers “back home” few may be as tragically poignant as those for Eva Moffatt. Her son, Able Seaman Robert Moffatt was shot in the spine in an attack on a German wireless station on 11 September 1914. He died and was buried at sea. Eva, who was widowed, had had ten children two of whom had died. Then she got the telegram about Robert. Through a long period of devastation, Eva walked Sydney streets at night, slashed her wrists and in 1918 was found drowned in a disused quarry.

“So often” Piggott writes “the cruelties of war continue in peacetime and leave one lost as to know how to respond. Even so we might puzzle over the unsettling link between Moffatt’s burial at sea and Eva’s name being Ophelia recalling a Shakespearean fictional suicide by drowning.” Hamlet had a lot to answer for.

In a sense Piggott’s history of the ANMEF takeover and long occupation of New Guinea is a narrow story that’s been drowned out by, especially, the furies of attention given to the ANZACs at Gallipoli, a strategic and military disaster that even an historian of Hew Strachan’s standing believes, Lord save us, “forged” Australia’s “national identity”. By contrast and in a real sense the ANMEF story is as wide as a mile and full of contemporary meaning in many senses, including, for good or ill, about enduring aspects of the character of Australians.

Piggott’s telling of this story is masterful and engaging. It’s a gem that deserves lots of readers

Michael Piggott – _New Feller Master: Beyond the Trenches Australia’s Neglected WWI Story_. Big Sky Publishing 2026

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