Why Not a Pawpaw and Kaukau Board ?

Kaukau Board ?

Bureaucracy Discovers New Guinea

Territories folk might well ask what the Jap has that they hadn’t!

The Australian authority now is giving to New Guinea, while the Jap is there, an amount of attention consistently denied in peacetime.

The latest expert to visit those shores is the Commonwealth Director-General of Agriculture. He will inspect likely looking pawpaw and vegetable-growing areas—the Commonwealth Government proposes to put up to 500 acres under vegetables in New Guinea —in places where they have not been grown on a commercial scale before.

Pawpaws—we are told—contain the -essential vitamin C, and a quantity of selected seed has been obtained from the Queensland Department of Agriculture for this new project.

Presumably this is what is called “tak ing the long view.’’ Still, there is an optimist born every moment, and there are a few people left who hope that before any possible pawpaw, grown on the Director-General’s selected plot, from best Queensland seed can reach maturity, peace will be, at least, “just around the corner.”

There used to be Departments of Agri culture in both Papua and New Guinea, and experimental stations in both Terri tories. Private firms and individuals grew vegetables, native and otherwise, for their labour-lines and for themselves.

All Territorians know the properties of the pawpaw: from the un-toughening effect of its leaves on meat, to the medi cinal uses of its seeds: they knew, too, how hundreds of seedlings sprang up wherever the ripe fruit was eaten.

Is it too much to expect, then, that among those people a few men could be found with the necessary knowledge, experience and talent for working native labour, who could cut the cackle and go to work and MAKE a garden without bothering the Director-General (who must be a busy man, “travelling to the ends of Commonwealth territory to super vise vegetable growing”) about it? But under this regime of regulations run riot that’s heresy—it just couldn’t be done!

No —let us have experts by all means— and doubtless, in time, New Guinea will reach the ultimate pinnacle of progress (Australian fashion), with a "Pawpaw and Kaukau Board.”

A successful Patriotic Ball took place recently in Rarotonga, under the auspices of the Rarotonga Ladies’ Patriotic Com mittee. It brought £lO4 to the Patriotic Funds —the most successful effort prob ably yet made in Rarotonga. President and secretary respectively of this ener getic committee are Mrs. H. F. Ayson (wife of the Resident Commissioner) and Mrs. L. J. Warren.