Unpleasant Conditions

Toads, Flies And

Mud

Unpleasant Conditions on Guadalcanal

CONDITIONS which will be feelingly recognised by all old residents of the Solomons, were described in March in a despatch to Australian news papers by Winston Turner. Turner, incidentally, has developed as the best war correspondent in the South-west Pacific zone. He is drawing a picture of the discomforts suffered by the war cor respondents on Guadalcanal:— The rats still disturb our sleep. They run across the taut canvas roof all night, and the tent reverberates like a drum under their scampering feet. They eat our copy paper and chew the bindings off our books. Frequently in the morn ings we have to search outside the tent for our boots to see where the rats have taken them during the night. Always it is advisable to examine your boots before putting them on. More likely than not there will be a lizard or a fat toad in them.

These giant toads are our pet aver sion. They were introduced to Guadal canal from Java by Levers Pacific Plan tations Proprietary to keep down flies and insects. They multiplied fast, for there is no lack of either flies or insects, and the island is now infested with them.

The past six months have been one long feast for these hideous creatures.

Approach a dead Jap and you will find two or three of them perched on the corpse, feeding off the flies.

GUADALCANAL is richly endowed with insect life, most of it in an undesir able form. The starving Japanese turned to the giant red ants for food.

Prisoners said they were not bad eating —full of sugar and quite nutritious.

The crocodiles on the Henderson Field side of the island have been hunted out by the troops with grenades, but on the other side of the island they abound.

Turtles are now a rarity in the Guadal canal-Tulagi area, which has echoed and re-echoed to gunfire and depth-charging, but on the sheltered side of the island they are frequently seen.

There is beauty on Guadalcanal, too.

The island is famous for its epidopterous insects —notably the magnificent bird winged butterflies. There are also cocka toos, parrots, lories, pretty pygmy par rots, minahs, eagles, ospreys, hawks, buz zards, crows, hornbills, ducks and thou sands of smaller birds such as willie wag tails and the honey-sucking birds.

We have a magnificent arterial road, the Burma Highway, and the engineers are opening up the island fast.

But the mud is still unbelievable. It will always be there to remind the new comer of what it was like in the early days, when Guadalcanal was the blood iest battlefield of the Pacific.

Following the appointment of Monsieur Puaux, at one time French Vice-consul in Sydney, to the judiciary in New Cale donia, the control of the New Caledonian Economic Affairs Department, which in these days involves close co-operation with Australia, New Zealand, and the United States, has gone to Monsieur Lemonnier. M. Lemonnier was one of those colonial administrators unjustifi ably arrested by Governor-General Brunot at Tahiti, in July, 1941. He has since been working with the Condo minium administration in New Hebrides.