The New Guinea Road And The "P.I.M."

Letter to the Editor

IT is generally recognised here that your magazine is the mouthpiece of the vested interests in this Territory and it is often stimulating to get the other fellow’s point of view. Chiefly for that reason, the boycott did not do you as much harm as it should and, for the same reason, you probably will not have much to worry about with regard to circulation, while the battle for the road and against high freights and charges is on.

Your article in September, “Monopo lies in New Guinea” leaves one in a state of bewildered indecision—whether to weep with you over the pathetic situ ation of a world helpless in the grip of the money power, or to continue in a state of amazement at your naivete, for do you really think that the big firms carried on during 1929-1934 from altruistic motives, or that they lost one penny piece by doing it?

At any rate, if the money power is to devour us all eventually, and the neople named in your article represent it as you seem to infer, there is no sign of that defeatist inhibition in this com munity so far, and we hope to cause some more violent indigestion before we are finally assimilated.

Turning to other articles in your September issue: Mr. Hughes is well able to defend himself from journalistic attack, and it is to be hoped that he can do so against the Parliamentary pack, most of whom are, I am afraid, only too prone to dance to the piping of that ogre, the money power.

Mr. Hughes was not up here very long, but Mr. Fairbairn had a much quicker look, as you say. Mr. Hughes has pass ed the stage when he can have axes to grind. Mr. Fairbairn probably has no need to, hut he has friends who have, and most people here think that his statements were impertinent and mis chievous in the light of the auspices of his visit, and the sum of his experience.

You say you are not anti-road, Stev enson said: “There is nothing so mon strous but we can believe it of our selves”. By frequent asseveration I think you have almost come to believe it. You know that the primary object of this road is to cheapen costs on the Morobe goldfield, so that it can continue to carry the baby for this Territory, but do it a little easier than during the past three or four years. Without cheap transport the life of the field, as a whole, is not 15 or 20 years, but more like five.

Your anti-road outlook appears when you insist that it should be led round some circuitous route which you know would bring haulage costs around about the same as the existing murderous air freights. You have said so. And all in order to open up some problematical agricultural and/or pastoral project for the Ramu and Markham Valleys, for sooth!

The Markham Valley had a road once at a cost of £40,000 but it never appeared to open up anything beyond a gap in revenue, and a void in the landscape where it once existed.

Your anti-road aspect appeared in your celebrated circular, when you ex pressed solicitude of the danger of the big firms being taxed to pay for it when you knew they were not likely to be asked to pay anything (I leave out the suggestion of the equitableness of their being expected to contribute something to the country’s development as beside the point). Your anti-road attitude bobs

up again when you persist in clouding the issue in connection with the road and the capital by grouping both propos als together, by stating that Salamaua cannot be the capital but that Lae might and thereby inferring that the road, by devious meandering should be led there —a proposal that you know would kill the road through excessive cost alone.

It is shown again in your circular, where you stated that £150,000 would go no where in its cost and that any direct route was impracticable and impossible on account of landslides, rain, and gen eral maintenance costs. This without any practical knowedge of the country and despite examples of roads at higher elevation in wetter countries throughout the world. I think that should be about

enough to show that, to my mind, your anti-road attitude amounts almost to inspiration in all your writings on the subject.

The question appears to be whether to expend a fairly large sum for the im mediate benefit of a going concern that has shown itself capable of repaying the expenditure over a very short period, if necessary, or of expending what ultim ately will be a much larger sum upon experimental development, much of which will necessarily be of the nature of trial by error and which will have to be paid for by the goldfield anyhow.

Given direct cheap transport, the gold field can foot the bill, as heretofore, un til the new industries can stand on their own feet —if ever. Without it, in a very short time, you will have neither gold mining nor agriculture, so take your pick.

You can’t have it all ways. The development of this country is not going

to be held back in order to keep a num ber of antiquated aircraft in the air, and I am afraid that we are going to have that road in spite of you all.

I am, etc.,

Norman Dickson.

Lower Edie, T.N.G., 21/10/’3B.