Kiap

"The kiap, for example, is district administrator, commissioned policeman, magistrate, gaoler: if he is in a remote area he may well be engineer, surveyor, medical officer, dentist, lawyer, and agricultural adviser.

The kiap system grew out of necessity and the demands made by poor communications in impossible country: the man on the spot had to have power to make the decision.

"[3] Under Australian administration the kiap was a one-man representative of the government, taking on political education, policing and judicial roles as well as more mundane tasks such as completing censuses.

When Patrol Officer (Kiap) Jim Taylor and prospector Mick Leahy, with eighty police and carriers, first entered the Wahgi Valley in March 1933, the Australians were thought to be ghosts.

"[11] Before World War II kiaps had been required to attend Sydney University for lectures in law, anthropology and tropical medicine.

"[21] A former World War II Field Marshal and Governor-General of Australia, Viscount Slim, said of the kiaps: "Your young chaps in New Guinea have gone out where I would never have gone without a battalion and they have done on their own by sheer force of character what I could only do with troops.

Kituai "[peels] back of the veneer of Kiap authority, hierarchical command and so-called peaceful penetration which has underlined much of the earlier patrolling history of Papua New Guinea.

My gun, my brother reveals a history of opportunism, property destruction, sexual predation and personal tragedy that highlights how the unofficial and unregulated underside of colonialism affected people's lives and created today's new nations".

Anyan had been chosen by her family "to go live in the government station of Kainantu in order to learn Tok Pisin and thus be able to act as a translator for her relatives and other villagers".

Subsequently, Virginia Watson asked permission from Anyan to write her story, using her field notes, in the form of a book: One time when the kiap came to get us we all ran away from the village as fast as we could.

[23] "Not many Papua New Guineans were ever found innocent in a kiap's court—never as many as 10 percent in any year for which records... are available"..."the law has been administered only intermittently in most indigenous communities, and then in what has often seemed to be an arbitrary manner in the eyes of many villagers" (Wolfers, 1975)[24] In July 2013, after eleven years of lobbying the Australian Government, forty-nine ex-Kiaps were presented with the Police Overseas Service Medal at Parliament House in Canberra by the Hon.

Jason Clare MHR, Minister for Home Affairs and Justice and the Australian Federal Police Commissioner Tony Negus APM.

He acknowledged that kiaps were often on call twenty-four hours, seven days a week, in remote areas in a role that "demanded perseverance, tenacity and commitment".