No Air-mail For Samarai

From Our Own Correspondent.

Samarai, Oct. 5.

A MATTER which needs attention is that we cannot post air-mail letters to catch the air-mail from Rabaul, when the opportunity offers. We are told that, unless we can secure New Guinea stamps to put on the letters, to gether with sufficient Papuan stamps, we cannot send any per air-mail.

The local post office does not sell New Guinea stamps, so if we require them we shall have to send up to Rabaul, and get them sent to us.

EDITORIAL NOTE: It is an extraord inary thing that Samarai, although only a little way off the air-mail track, can not use the air-mail because the Samarai post office is too unenterprising or too

proud to stock the necessary stamps. Pre sumably, if a Papuan postmaster were asked to sell New Guinea stamps, or vice versa, a brigade of outraged officials would cast themselves, in hari kari abandonment, upon the points of their pens! Yet—strange as it may appear to the uninstructed outside world —Papua and New Guinea are territories of Aus tralia.

A recent visitor to Fiji was Captain Andy Thompson, one of the best known men in the Central Pacific, who has made his home for many years in the Cook Is lands. While in Suva he renewed acquain tance with Mr. Graham Dickson, now pur ser of the liner “Aorangi”, who held a similar post on the old “Makura” when she used to pass through Rarotonga. Mr.

Dickson at one time represented the Union Company at Avarua, C.I.