Extraordinary

Trek

Across New Guinea With Chinese Refugees

ONE of the most extraordinary New Guinea treks in a year famous for such feats, has been reported by three former Mandated Territory District Service officers, C. D. Bates (ADO), J. S.

Milligan and T. G. Aitchison (Patrol Officers). Bates has had 14 years’ ser vice in New Guinea, Aitchison 10 years’ and Milligan nine years’. Their know ledge of the country and its people proved invaluable to the Allies.

These men are now attached to ANGAU with the rank of Captain, and at the time of the Japanese occupation of Wewak, they were in that district. All European civilians were withdrawn many months ago but the Chinese artisans and traders stayed on until the Japs were approaching—that is, until fairly recently —and then they asked to be taken away.

The task of bringing these 27 refugees, ranging in age from a nine months’ baby in arms to old men of 70, through some 600 miles of the wildest, least known and most inhospitable country in New Guinea, was herculean —but it was accomplished; Much of the country behind Wewdk and the Sepik is uncontrolled, and it was not long before the officers were passing through territory that was new to them.

Sometimes carrying the weaker members of the party, living on rice and kau-kau and whatever food they could barter from the natives, for six weeks they threaded their way along vague moun tain roads, across raging torrents, through swamps teeming with mosquitoes and down sluggish streams.

The safety of the party depended entirely upon the three Europeans and their knowledge of the country and its natives, their idea of direction and their bush-craft. All, at one time or another, suffered intermittant malaria. The natives, although “uncontrolled,” were friendly, willing enough to trade kau kau for beads and cowrie shells —and for white buttons, but only, states Aitchison, “if they had four holes in them. This was interesting,” he adds. “But we did not have time to study it!”

The party were of the opinion that their best day was when they saw a flight of Allied bombers overhead —a delightful sight that almost bettered the day upon which they at last reached civilisation.

It is difficult for the outsider to make adequate comment upon this feat. All of the appropriate words have been used up in the last twelve months, which have seen literally dozens of such treks, each in itself an epic of courage and endur ance. So the tendency is to swing to the other end of the scale and state that this or that was undertaken “stoically,” or as a “matter of course.”

No human being, much less those well known patrol officers, who have a full knowledge of New Guinea in its nastiest moods, could undertake such a trek, shepherding 27 men, women and little children, over 600 miles of the world’s ghastliest country, and remain stoical at the prospect. That they, and others like them, carried it through with a mini mum of fuss stands out like a monument in this period of words and blather.

Sergeant Bert Aitken, who became known to many Fiji people when he was stationed there with the New Zealand Forces, and who was engaged to marry a Suva girl, has been killed in action in

Libya,