Islands Society
p. 24 · Read in the full issue
Distinguished Guests of Pacific Islands Society
rE lines upon which the Pacific Islands Society has been working for four years, in cementing relations between the Allied . interests in the Pacific, were commended by Madame Van Dijk, the Netherlands East Indies novelist, when she was the guest of members on June 25. Madame Van Dijk, who writes under the name of Jo Manders, has twelve novels to her credit, mostly on social-economic subjects.
“Holland, as you know, has always been keenly interested in the Pacific, into which her navigators blazed the trail," said Madame Van Dijk, “and though she
is now under the heel of the oppressor she will again rise. Meanwhile, we are trying to keep alight the torch of liberty and culture in her East Indies pos sessions.”
Fellow guests-of-honour were Judge Louis Duplatre and Madame Duplatre, formerly of Bankok, Thailand, where the judge was on the High Court bench—he is now one of the leading supporters of the Free French Movement in Australia; Mr. Mo Myit, and his fellow students of the Burman Civil Service, now at the University of Sydney—but for the war, these graduates of the University of Rangoon would have been at Oxford; Mr. and Mrs. John Barnard, o'f the Malaya Police Department.
The principal speaker was Major J. M.
Prentice, formerly a well-known radio commentator, who deputised for Sir Donald Cameron, director of RAAF re cruiting.
Archdeacon H. Harris, of Suva, Fiji, has been called up for service with the Royal Australian Navy and is now in Sydney prior to taking up his new duties. During the 1914-18 war, he was a Royal Navy Lieutenant in a cruiser squadron, but was captured and spent several years as a prisoner of war in Germany.