No More Isolation

What Pacific “Listeners”

Want

Noises Of The City

From Our Own Correspondent

Norfolk Is., May 2.

I SUPPOSE countless readers of The P.I.M. “listen-in” all over the Paci fic. What a boon a radio set is on plantations, trading stations and lone islets set in empty seas!

This writer lived for years on a coco nut plantation 9 degrees south of the Equator, where the only sounds that broke the silence outside the domestic radius were the rush of wind through the tall palms, the roar of surf on the distant reef and the far singing of some solitary native boy, who quavered endlessly on three or four notes, re citing his personal griefs and joys and, probably, his opinion of the “taubada,” who held him to distasteful labour.

At night, the thumping of drums was added, and the concerted howling of a hundred natives.

What a joy a wireless would have been! To turn a dial and to have the whole world come flooding in. Voices . . . music . . . laughter . . . song. The applause of living audiences —even the shuffle of their feet. The hoot of mo tors along some city street and the chiming of city clocks!

I would like to tell the broadcasting companies that it isn’t the highbrow stuff we want, to comfort us, out here in the Pacific—we have had that for decades past, imprisoned on gramo phone records. It is the common, hu man, everyday touch—simple things to reassure us that we are still one with a familiar world—not removed to some strange planet, or sole survivors upon this one.