The Mixed Legacy of the Hahalis Welfare Society, Buka Island

(Photo: Satellite view of Buka Passage between Buka Island and Bougainville Island).

Hahalis Village on Buka Island, Autonomous Region of Bougainville (AROB) is a quiet place now, similar in appearance to the other villages located along the island's east coast road. There is no outward sign that, from the late 1950s until the mid-1970s, it was the centre of a notorious organisation known as the Hahalis Welfare Society (HWS), regarded as a cult by the Port Moresby-based colonial administration. The HWS, a breakaway from the East Coast Buka Society, was established in 1957 by Catholic-educated John Teosin and his brother-in-law, Francis Hagai, on the principles of communal farming and self-help.

In addition to pooling land, labour and profits to capitalize machinery, trade stores and marketing, in 1961 the HWS set up an "Opposition Church" ("sori lotu" in Tok Pisin). It ceased the practice of paying bride-price and the control by elders over marriage, and established a "Baby Garden", an area in which all the single girls in the village were segregated by age, housed in small thatched huts and required to provide sexual favours to men.

According to my mother, her parents, along with other parents in central Buka, were afraid that their young daughters would be kidnapped by HWS followers for placement in the "Baby Garden". Girls were warned by their parents not to stray too far from their houses and to always walk in groups if they needed to attend to food gardens beyond the village boundaries. In 1972, when my mother commenced studies at a Catholic girls secondary school on Bougainville Island, she got to know some of the young women who had endured their early years in the "Baby Garden". The school arranged for them to be baptised as Catholics.