Golden-Brown

White Skin Versus Golden-Brown Some Considerations in Favour of the Polynesian

NOW and again, we meet an angry Englishman or a disillusioned Ame rican tourist who is affronted and outraged at the total absence of that fawning reverence the travel books and romances represent as due from native races of the Orient and Pacific Islands, to the superior white man.

We have heard and read many opin ions as to the probable causes of the diminishing prestige of the Caucasian among—what that lordly individual is pleased to term —inferior peoples; but we have never comprehended the really basal reason until we read the following paragraph in Doctor Peter H. Buck’s de lightful and scholarly book, “Vikings of the Sunrise”: “Probably no people have been prouder of their lineages than the mariners of the Pacific. In Polynesian mythology, the god Tane moulded the first woman out of earth, brought her to life by magic power, and made her the mother of the first human being. The descendants of this first union thus partook of divine attributes by direct physiological inherit ance.

“This may appear irrational to scien tists who claim descent from anthropoid apes, but it gave great confidence to chiefly leaders, who in moments of stress could call upon their divine ancestors for assistance whereas western man may ex pect little help from his remote arboreal progenitors”.

When we refresh our memory, the genesis of decay of European prestige in the Orient and elsewhere, actually coin cides with the period when Darwin and his coadjutors deposed their ancestors from the salubrious heights of Olympian glory to the dismal shadows of miasmic jungles.

Had they kept this shattering discov ery as a dark and dreadful secret with in the unpenetrable arcana of some mys tic cult, all might have been well, and the white man continued as the most favoured heir of the Sons of that Golden Age when the gods walked the earth.

But, after the manner of scientists, they and their successors have filled the world with books proclaiming the de gradation of their ancestry, as the pre mier achievement of their craft.

And now that knowledge of it is uni versal. they marvel and are astonished and resentful because those who still are convinced of their own divine ancestry, have ceased to pay reverence to the self proclaimed brother of the Orangutan and Barbary ape.

Moreover it has been observed that Caucasian women are, apparently, ashamed of their white complexion.

When they are not concealing it under paint and powder, they are lying about on sunny sea-beaches trying to darken it. If they can achieve the golden-brown of the Polynesian complexion, their hap piness is complete, and they endeavour to preserve that delectable shade for ever more.

Contrary to general opinion, the white complexion of the Caucasian is neither admired nor envied by Polynesians. His torians tell us that when the first white men appeared, the Tahitians viewed them with sympathy and pity; believing them to be afflicted with some mysterious disease which had robbed their skins of colour and beauty.

The Polynesians—and, no doubt, other

races of the Orient—are endowed with the same discrimination possessed by Caucasians in appraising the measure of a man. If a white man is respected by Polynesians, it is not because of his race; but because of those qualities of charac ter and spirit which have already estab lished him in the esteem of his own fel

lows.-

A.C.R.

Mr. R. A. Laws, of Messrs. Greenwood and Laws Ltd., New Guinea, was a visi tor to Sydney early in June.

Mr, H. S. Russell, Collector of Customs at Samarai, Papua, arrived in Australia by the “Bulolo” recently to undergo medical treatment.

Rev. E. C. Harris, 8.A., of the Method ist Mission, Vavau, Tonga, will return to Australia on leave at the end of the year.

Mr. L. Perichon has been relieving Mr. G. A. Bayer, manager of the Hotel Moresby, at Pt. Moresby, Papua, during the latter’s absence in Australia on holidays.