Ambulance Convey Child-Welfare

Certificated Nurses and Modern Ambulance Convey Child-Welfare Instruction to Naked Mothers in New Britain Bush.

IT has been said that pictures speak louder than words; and the little group of photographs published here with serves to explain occasional out bursts of fiery indignation on the part of planters in New Guinea, who have for many years vainly sought road ways and other public works.

There are hundreds of thousands of natives in the Territory, and the great majority of them live under entirely primitive conditions. The gentle, kindly theorists, who comprise the Mandates Commission of the League of Nations and who have entrusted to Australia the administration of New Guinea, profess an urgent and insistent interest in the welfare of the native inhabitants.

It is not our purpose to sneer at any activity devoted towards native welfare —on the contrary we believe that the history of the Pacific Islands groups shows that far too little attention has been paid in the past to this aspect of European penetration. But we do say, with reason, that this thing can be carried to ridiculous extremes, and the New Guinea instance which we now quote, is an example of that.

The Commonwealth of Australia makes an annual grant to the New Guinea Administration, to be spent specially on native welfare activities, and the New Guinea Administration itself imposes a tax on the whole com munity with the same object in view.

The money is spent in various ways— most of them worthy of praise; but the genius who decided that some scheme to provide these primitive people with maternal-care and child welfare advice was an unconscious humorist, who added somewhat to the gaiety of the nation.

Away out in the wild country, nearly 50 miles from Rabaul, the Administra tion has built a bungalow as a child welfare centre for the natives. Within that bungalow, it has installed two highly qualified Australian nurses competent, clever women, who hold certificates for general nursing, for ob stetrics and for child welfare. These ladies have been provided with an ex cellent motor ambulance—see photo graph herewith and with all neces sary orderlies and servants. If any comment is needed concerning the use fulness of this work, it is provided by the photograph of the native women and children a snapshot taken to show these people in their ordinary every-day condition.

Maternal care and child welfare are excellent things in their right place— but everyone knows how very difficult it is to have these principles accented and applied, even in Anglo-Saxon communities. How completely ridicul ous it is, therefore, to send this highly skilled and experienced staff and equipment 50 miles into the New Britain bush, to propose methods of hygiene and common-sense to a prim itive native population, which lives,

and is likely to live, exactly as it has done for thousands of years.

The natives must have ordinary med ical care and supervision; and, as time and opportunity permit, they must be given some kind of rudimentary edu cation. But Pacific administrators in the past have found it possible to sup ply these requirements in a perfectly satisfactory way by co-operating with the missions; and there is little doubt that if the native welfare fund of New Guinea were apportioned among the

missions, the natives would get far more value for the money than by the establishment of mother and child wel fare centres in the manner described.

The man who took these photo graphs has a valuable plantation, along with some score of others, in the Bain ings District. They have been waiting years for a road along the shores of Ataliklikum Bay, which would give them direct communication with Rabaul. But the Administration has

no funds for such a purpose, and the Bainings planters continue to reach Rabaul by launch, along the coast.

The planter in question, being addict ed to figures, takes a bitter pleasure in calculating how many miles of that road could have been built with the money that is wasted in sending highly skilled Australian nurses out into the bush to urge naked black mothers to give their offsprings ten drops of orange juice four times a day.

Photographs referred to in accompanying article.