The Commonwealth War Graves Commission

 A national hauntology. A great article by anthropologist Gregory Bablis.

As with any foreign mission, the PNG Government relinquishes its rights to the land on which an embassy is built. 

The land, property and persons become inviolable and immune from the laws of the host country. The Commonwealth War Graves Commission, formerly the Imperial War Graves Commission, was established by Royal Charter in 1917. 

The Royal Charter was an instrument used by the monarch to incorporate an organisation, give it a legal personality, and give it rights and responsibilities which included ownership of land. 

This technically means that when PNG gained independence in 1975, the war cemeteries at Bitapaka, Bomana and Lae, were the only portions of land in the former territory that remained and continues to remain under Australian control.

These three Commonwealth War Cemeteries in PNG are spiritual embassies of sorts and are constant reminders to maintain diplomatic relations if only to continue the work of caring for the war dead and their memory. 

But how can the memory of the dead benefit the living today? 

How can the PNG Government preserve and promote the history of the war in ways that open new pathways for development, especially for former battlefield sites that experienced the most devastating effects of the war, and where those now laying in the three war graves were reinterred from? 

Development efforts have not achieved the same coverage as memory. Their loss and absence was necessary for our current present. 

How can we imagine a future that honours that sacrifice? 

In PNG, our government says 'lest we forget' only on one day and then proceeds to forget for most of the other days of the year. 

Photograph of an incomplete memorial site at Dipoturu still awaiting government funding for completion.

 The memorial was supposed to honour the events at Higaturu during WWII including its later destruction by the Sumbiripa volcanic eruption in 1951.