N.I. Hospital

Mr. Love Enters a Hornets’ Nest

From Our Own Correspondent

Norfolk Is., Feb. 12.

On this casual island we never take seriously an invitation to render our selves at any given spot at any given time, and we turn up so late to any entertainment, as a rule, that any where else the promoters would have given us up in despair and gone home to bed.

But on the evening of February 8, long before the appointed hour of 8 o’clock, the Rawson Hall was packed and jammed to the door with an audi ence eager to hear a special lecture on the aims and methods of the modern hospital, prepared by a Mr. Love who, over the other side —as we broadly des ignate the whole of Australia —is something very exalted in the official world of hospital management.

For some months past we have been sailing very stormy seas indeed in re gard to the control and administration of our little local hospital—which ap pears to be a public institution when it comes to our obligations towards it, and private when patients are called upon to pay fees —and it was finally considered advisable by all concerned to clear up the situation once and for all by a semi-official invitation to Mr.

Love to make a sort of holiday visit to the island and meet all the officials involved.

Mr. Love, therefore, accompanied by two friends—Dr. Colvin and Mr. Fitz patrick, both concerned also in the ad ministration of hospitals—arrrived by the Morinda on January 28, and this address to the general public was the outcome of the passionate feeling ex isting throughout the whole island and expressed in no uncertain words.

“An Island From Heaven.”

Mr. Love is a man of vast experi ence, and his advice and suggestions were extremely interesting; but we here on Norfolk are faced with pecu liar problems duplicated nowhere on any continent, and his counsels were counsels of an impossible perfection and, in many cases, of a nature that we cannot possibly apply. However, during his short stay of something over a fortnight he gathered enough of local conditions and sampled our glorious climate sufficiently to assure us that he would do his utmost to bring before the public of Australia our desirability as a health resort. In his own words: “Norfolk Island should be a para dise for convalescents. So far as cli mate and conditions are concerned, it is an island straight from heaven.”

And he intends to broadcast this fact and to induce persons in need of sunshine, peace and beauty to flock over here in ever increasing numbers.

We shall he much obliged if that happy state of affairs should come about, and Mr. Love will not have paid his visit and attempted to regularise us in vain.

His address concluded about 9.30, and the meeting—for which he, Dr.

Colvin and Mr. Fitzpatrick remained, while the administerial party retired — was taken over by the Hospital Board,

who ranged themselves in the vacated chairs on the platform, with Mr. Love in their midst, and the public were invited to go ahead and to subject the Commissioner, or whatever he is, to a bombardment of questions, enquiries and information of urgent import.

He had come prepared to be ham mered, he said, and by the time the chairman of the board closed the meeting towards midnight he must have felt as though the weapon em ployed was a steam hammer. But it was a God-given opportunity for the ventilation of serious grievances, and no doubt Mr. Love knew a good deal more of our actual problems and diffi culties by the time he wearily climbed into his car than when he rather com placently took the platform some four hours earlier.

What will come of the clash of official opinion and public sentiment we do not yet know; but we under stand that Mr. Love intends to formu late a policy and submit it for con sideration to our existing administra tion —which is still headed by Colonel A. J. Bennett, with Mr. Cyril Leonard, late of Papua, as private secretary— and in due course our Hospital Board —which at present is declared to be unconstitutionally elected —will be ad vised of its clauses, and from thence it will trickle through to the public, who are so vitally interested.

All sorts of side issues and personal considerations are concerned, and it is hoped that Mr. Love knows enough to know how little he knows the situation.