Beyond the battlefields of Australia’s First World War – deep into the shadows of empire.
In New Feller Master, acclaimed archivist Michael Piggott AM unearths a crucial yet overlooked story: the Australian Naval and Military Expeditionary Force (ANMEF) and its occupation of German New Guinea.
In 1914, this small force, supported by the Navy, swiftly captured German New Guinea. Days later, a chilling proclamation in Pidgin declared Australia the ‘New Feller Master’ to hundreds of thousands of New Guineans, marking the start of a de facto colonial administration that would last until 1921.
New Feller Master traces the entire occupation and its century-long aftermath, revealing the intertwined military, colonial, and racial complexities of this neglected episode. Drawing on vivid primary sources, Piggott exposes looting, reprisals, and the controversial assault on Reverend William Cox – an incident that tested official responses to misconduct and reflected broader colonial practices.
In tracing moments of routine and rupture – from boredom and looting to conflicting casualty counts and vivid personal stories – Piggott reveals the attitudes and actions of Australians convinced their deeds mattered, and how these would echo for generations.
Prepare to challenge what you think you know about Australia’s past and confront a legacy that still resonates today.
New Feller Master brings this neglected corner of history back into the light, inviting readers to confront the silences, the myths, and the uncomfortable truths about Australia’s first steps as a colonial occupier.
‘Turns the spotlight from the trenches to the tropics — a fascinating, unsettling account of the moment Australia became a colonial power.’
‘Michael Piggott brings the skills of an archivist and the heart of a storyteller to this extraordinary history of conquest and conscience.’
Paddy Gourley – Pearls and Irritations –
“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
Honest History –
Piggott’s great strength is in getting behind the paucity in Great War New Guinea of what the Australian War Memorial’s legislation calls ‘war or warlike operations’. His occupation story includes racism, being White, ‘not fighting, administering’, ‘not fighting, hanging about’, dying (but mostly not from bullets), looting and the taking of – euphemistically described and often smuggled back to Australia – ‘souvenirs’. The occupation force seems to have had more than its fair share of small-time crooks and chancers. There was also the bizarre incident of the flogging by German officials of an Australian Methodist missionary, the reciprocal flogging of the Germans by (sober) Australian administration people, and the attempts by the Australian side to hush up what had happened, despite the widely circulated photographic evidence of at least the flogging of the Germans.
This reviewer, as a lad, was preached at by Methodist ministers who had been missionaries in the Pacific. None of them mentioned being flogged by Germans.
Finally, Piggott summarises the language of accounting for death in war (page 141) and record-keeping and evidence (pages 178, 227)
Military History and Heritage Victoria –
New Feller Master brings this neglected corner of history back into the light, inviting readers to confront the silences, the myths, and the uncomfortable truths about Australia’s first steps as a colonial occupier.
‘Turns the spotlight from the trenches to the tropics — a fascinating, unsettling account of the moment Australia became a colonial power.’
‘Michael Piggott brings the skills of an archivist and the heart of a storyteller to this extraordinary history of conquest and conscience.’
Peter Stanley – Sabretache –
New Feller Master resembles one of those exquisite watches whose back is of crystal rather than steel, so that the mechanism of time is visible. As one of Australia’s leading archivists, having served for fifty years in several national, state and university archives, Piggott’s curiosity about how the evidence permeates the book. His shows how interpretation depends not just upon who wrote what, but upon what remains of that evidence, making this a comprehensive work of history.
New Feller Master is, Michael Piggott acknowledges, ‘nothing like a conventional battle history’. Indeed; but it is a satisfying exploration of one of the truly ‘neglected’ Australian military forces, whose dead have not even been accurately counted, still less adequately commemorated. His book offers a master class in how to research the inside story of an Australian force in war.