Editorial Note (Response to Dorothy Fay's Letter)
pp. 30-31 · Read in the full issue
Dorothy Fay.
Walaur, Rabaul, 4/l/’37.
Editorial Note.
MRS. FAY makes a number of statements that are open to serious challenge; but she has had the courage to write over her own name, and therefore we must give her the opportunity of making her contribution to this very important discussion.
The weakness of Mrs. Fay’s case—and it is almost a fatal weakness —is her assumption that practically every planter and trader is trying to exploit the natives, and that all traders are in a kind of conspiracy to keep the dark people in ignorance and subjection. This definitely is not a fact. The great majority of planters and traders in New Guinea are men of good type, with enough vision in public affairs to realise that there rests upon them an obligation to assist the Admin- 28 Pacific Islands Monthly, January 22, 1 937
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That there has been exploitation of the New Guinea natives, in both commerce and industry, is beyond doubt. They have been, on occasions, tricked out of their copra, fobbed off with outrageous rubbish as trade goods, and literally enslaved as labourers on plantations and mines. But the men responsible for those outrages are not numerous —the great majority of traders and employers conduct themselves with some sense of decency.
The Administration is to blame, first, in permitting rather too many rogues and sadists to remain in the country, in contact with the natives; and, further, in not having sought or secured from planters and traders a much larger measure of co-operation in regulating trading conditions between whites and blacks, and in preventing exploitation.
Mrs. Fay’s letter is valuable because it so clearly and forcefully sets forth the case for the natives. Its presentation may be fatally coloured by prejudice and a lop-sided vision; but, nevertheless, one must give homage to people, whether they are right or wrong, who fight on the side of the down-trodden.