Looking with their eyes and feeling with their hearts: The Permanent Mandates Commission and reform in the mandates

Abstract

In 1921 Anna Bugge-Wicksell,1 a lawyer and internationalist born in Norway and working in Sweden, was appointed the first female member of the Permanent Mandates Commission (PMC) in the Mandates 'Section of the League Secretariat. Only one year later, in a bumpy start to its first formal sitting in Geneva, Wicksell was embroiled in a public falling out between the Commission and Australia's representative. After travelling from London to answer questions on Australia's first two years as the mandated power in Nauru and New Guinea, the Australian High Commissioner Joseph Cook found himself cross-examined over insufficient information on labour conditions in the phosphate mining industry on Nauru then monopolised by a consortium comprising Britain, Australia and New Zealand.2 The confrontation over the rights of workers and the monopoly enjoyed by the Australian mandate over them was to make headlines in Australia and around the world.