Rubber From Papua

And Bathos From the Sydney "Telegraph"

The following appeared in the Sydney “Telegraph” of July 8. It is from that journal’s “representative at an operational base”.

Army officers have taken control of all rubber plantations in the New Guinea area.

They hope to speed up rubber produc tion substantially in the coming year to supply the Allied war machine.

Rubber-growing is probably the strangest job ever undertaken by an Australian Army in the front line. (It is not being “undertaken by the Army”. As has been stated many times, a number of experienced Papuan rubber-growers have been specially enlisted in the forces there, in order that they may be detailed to rubber-plantation work. The com mander of the forces there is re sponsible, now, for the administration of the Territory, which includes care of plantations.) Rubber is one more reason why New Guinea must be held.

With more than 90 per cent, of the world’s rubber production in Japanese hands. New Guinea’s once infinitesimal contribution to the world’s rubber stocks has assumed a new and vital significance.

Army control aims at rationalisation of New Guinea rubber resources to ex tract the last drop from latex-bearing areas. (The loose use of the .term “New Guinea” may be deliberate, for political purposes; but probably is due to ignorance. No rubber worth mentioning is —or was—produced in the Mandated Territory. Papua,

which is really the Territory under discussion by the young gentleman, was prducing only about 1,500 tons per annum when war came. But a great deal of planting has been done in recent years.) Plantation men with many years’ ex perience have been recruited and given commissioned rank to run the plan tations on blnz production methods. They are already achieving results.

The best native labour now available in Australian New Guinea gravitated to the rubber plantations.

As enemy bombers roar overhead in raids and dogfights with our intercepting forces the rubber production race con tinues.

Hundreds of rubber-tappers and fac tory workers go on with their jobs scarcely looking up at the air war which may decide the ownership of New Guinea’s immense undeveloped resources. (Plain hyperbole—the sort of stuff beloved of puppy-dog journalism.) When this war is won New Guinea can never return to its old status as an anthropological museum and an experi mental area for native culture. Who ever owns it will develop it. (This cheap sneer at the regime o f the late Sir Hubert Murray is typical of the stuff provided by the ornamental young gentlemen who have gone to Papua as “war corres pondents”. The work done by Sir Hubert Murray as a tropical adminis trator and protector of native peoples will be remembered long after the “Telegraph” and its representatives are decently buried and forgotten.) Small-scale experiments have proved the practicability of producing tea, coffee, cocoa, quinine, tobacco, spices, and all the other products which made the

Dutch East Indies one of the world’s treasure-houses.

The Army is making a systematic survey of the resources and doing more —building roads and developing supply routes, lack of which made New Guinea exploitable only by large-scale capi talists. (If the man is talking about New Guinea, there is much in what he says. If he is discussing Papua, he is merely babbling. New Guinea has enormous resources; and, having also very large revenues from the gold industry, it should have been developed during the past 20 years.

The laziness of both Canberra and Rabaul in this regard, for two de cades, is well worth writing about.

But Papua was a different case.

Papua had no revenues worthy of the name —nothing with which to carry out development. Even the administration could be carried on only modestly and with great economy, because of the smallness of the Commonwealth grants, made with obvious reluctance each year.

Sir Hubert Murray, for 20 years, tried in every possible way to en courage new industries —but what could one man do with the miserable funds allowed him?

The “Telegraph” cannot be ex pected to know that it was Sir Hubert Murray’s single-handed fight in Canberra, about 1936, which pre vented the Papuan rubber industry from being wiped out altogether by the greedy and ruthless rubber monopoly—working underground, of course. Australian rubber manu facturers were quite reconciled to seeing the ramp go through —they did not want to be bothered with Papuan rubber. Now, they are thanking high heaven for it.)