New Guinea Is More Than A

Battlefield

By Geoffrey Tebbutt, In “Melbourne Herald”

NEW GUINEA has in recent times been presented to the Australian public in a baleful light. I have myself written often bitterly about it, and would not take those things back, for they were true of the time and place, and set down under the influence of battle.

Yet the island begins to exert a fascination.

It is easier, after a few months here, to understand its allure for generations of adventurers: the first revulsion wears off and the elements of beauty and mystery compete with its material dis abilities and deprivations and the rest lessness of the war atmosphere.

It is easier to understand the affection felt for it by the old-timers, and harder to come to the conclusion that they have gone troppo—the easiest way up here to dismiss tastes and theories not in line with one’s own.

Many Will Return

THERE are hundreds who curse it now and who will come back afterwards.

In the meantime those who like it for what it is and those who say nothing would induce them to come back of then own free will, alike recognise how deeply Australia is and must remain committed to New Guinea.

We have made here under war’s pres sure the investments from which we shrank timidly in peace when we would not realise our strength and capacity.

There is an interesting sidelight on the wiping out of the political distinction be tween Papua and the Mandated Terri tory. Police-boys in the Mandated Terri tory who speak pidgin English have come into Papua and are spreading its use among the boys of the Roval Papuan constabulary with whom the current language formerly was a pidginised ver sion of Motu, one of the basic tongues of Papua.

One of their Australian officers told me last night that pidgin English is increas ing in use and that it is far more ex pressive for commanding native police than Motu.

Purists Horrified

INCIDENTALLY, the purists of pidgin English are horrified by the average reproduction of what lay Australians take to mean pidgin.

One to whom I went the other day to have a general’s ceremonial speech to natives at Wau translated into pidgin re luctantly produced what he insisted I should qualify as a “simplified pidgin” version, otherwise his reputation for knowledge of true pidgin would be gone.

In its true written pidgin form it would have been practically unintelligible to the eye, although partially to be understood in phonetic speech.

The point the true Pidginists make is that pidgin is not a gross comic or vulgar corruption, but a tongue almost in its own right, built up, if is true, from several languages, but a living language for all that and entitled to respect. Thus they consider as an outrage the well known popular version of the declaration of the last war as rendered in what was called pidgin, but which bore no resemblance to the real thing. But the ignorant, they admit, must have their fun.

Tribute To Angau

AND let us remember the debt owed to the comparative handful of people who really know New Guinea, without whom we should have blundered hope lessly in trying to learn something in a hurry about our own property and who in all kinds of jobs on and off the record

are putting their brains to the task of winning the island back.

The kind of people I mean are the hardy officers of the Australian New Guinea Administrative Unit, who led the stoical trek and canoe journey of Chinese men, women and children from Wewak on the far north coast to the interior and made nothing of it, and others who’ alone among their trusty and trusted natives, have rendered great services in out of the way places that cannot be written about.

They take their malaria as a matter of course. They are wedded to this vast island of immense possibilities, its surface barely scratched and its value generally unrecognised until the Japanese laid hold and threatened at one time to seize the lot.

Future Gateway

THERE is a lot to be discovered yet behind those great mountains down which the black clouds roll each afternoon of this, the rainy season. There is a lot to be exploited for human-kind on the beautiful and until recently dangerous Buna coast, where the horn bills wing at dusk with laboured heavy puffing beats.

It was the Japanese who brought this realisation home. It is the Japanese who must be fended off before these oppor tunities can be developed. We can never again allow the white man’s burden to drop so carelessly. The long, steel matted airfields in the valleys of Moresby’s red hills have been hewn out to meet the Japanese threat—but some day they will serve to open New Guinea. . . . (See Comment on Page 29)