I took over at end of 1970 from Ves Karnups as Local Govt. Adviser for Lavongai Local Government Council. Two-thirds were not only Councillors but also members of the copra co-operative TIA (Tutukuvul Isukal Association) which had grown out the early 1960s Johnson cult events.

I soon decided that the current Administration attitude to them was strange as the grassroots members had planted many hundreds of thousands of coconuts in plantings near to their villages and they had the advantage of a well organised cooperative thanks to the initial efforts of Father Bernie Miller.

Their agricultural endeavours seemed to be very much in line with some of the slogans we heard around the 1970s of: 'Yumi Yet', 'Bung Wantaim', 'Plantim diwai mani long graun bilong yupela' etc.

Thus it was strange that they were viewed with suspicion by us kiaps while we happily befriended the non-TIA spivs who frequently came to Taskul to report what such and such a TIA Board (two leaders per village) had been overheard talking about.

With two-thirds of the island Councillors also members of TIA it was not surprising that the President of the Council was also President of the TIA. I don't know if it was a plan of the District, Konedobu or Canberra but there was a move to have an unelected Village Leader for all the island's villages.

This dual leadership per village was confusing to the average villager and normal nature's urges meant that the people could play each against the other.

I don't know if this was a feeler about the thinking in Moresby of how to weaken the role of the Councils. The initial PNG modified Preferential Voting was soon replaced by the FPTP or 1st Past the Post voting system which too often would elect someone who had only a tiny percentage of the votes cast and mainly from his own locality and/or hauslain.

The MPs I felt considered another way of controlling the Councils was to introduce a second level of governance between the National Parliament and grass roots Councils.

From 1977 the new Area Authorities held the purse strings and so could support or neglect council wards that appeared to be in opposition to an Authority Member who often relied upon the sitting MP and his party for finance to get elected.

The Area Authorities would become Provincial Governments and gradually became more powerful until the most recent reform is for the Regional MP to automatically become the Governor while also sitting in the Parliament at Waigani; as do the Open MPs of his Province. The Councils have become political eunuchs.

The ultimate so-called reform announced 21 August 2020 by the Attorney General is to abolish local governments. Though he did add a typical Waigani ambiguous rider to his press release: “The idea was to have only two systems of government: the national and provincial. At the provincial level, we are suggesting that the (future of) local level governments be decided by the provincial governments.”

The average rural villager will thus be more distant from those who govern them than at any time since the arrival of the whitemen. Perhaps one day PNG will echo to the ancient cry, “No taxation without representation!”

Despite the reforms completed or proposed I smiled at the latest irony from the Waigani swamp: “With the second postponement of the 2020 Census some MPs have called for the Ward Councillor and/or his Secretary to conduct a head count."

Even going so far as to supply each ward with a Ward Register (again) and one praised the Kiaps who could quite easily make a nationwide annual census and do so far far cheaper than the K200 million or whatever is the latest sum demanded by the Census Office.

Thanks for jogging my memory, Garrett, on the name of the then-MHA for that area. As I recall, the road was to go directly past Pena Au’s place - surprise, surprise. I can’t say now which it was of the two roads you mention.

Paias Wingti MHA, and later PM, probably would have been in high school at the time of the incident on the road. The Jika clan was legendary in the Hagen area.

The other Councillors’ names you mention are also the stuff of folklore. Komp De, Minimbi Ken, Wamp Wan, are names that ring down through the years to me, even now.

Wamp Wan in particular, I remember as not just a very bigman in his own right but also a successful entrepreneur. I remember he had a huge smile. Wamp-Nga Motors was I think an enterprise of the Hagen Council, but he was the driving force behind it.

The generation before those men was the last before white society entered the Highlands. So their status as bigmen was earned in the turbulent days when people were working out how tradition and custom could co-exist with the new world.

It says something about their skills and wisdom that they were able to make that transition, yet retain so much of their culture.

As Garrett says, “the system of local government councillors was quite effective, and in many ways it linked in well with the local culture and customs.”

Later, as societal circumstances changed, the nature of how bigmen earned their status and how some were able to use the local government system to enhance their status probably lead to irreversible changes in both local government and the concept of bigman.