"Foreign" Missions

New Guinea Administrator's "Warning" to Australia

IN concluding its report of an address to the Sydney Legacy Club by Sir Walter McNicoll, civil administrator of New Guinea, on May 6, the “Sydney Morning Herald’ said: “Sir Walter warned Aus tralia that foreign missionaries (presum ably in New Guinea) should be replaced by British and Australian missionaries.”

If Sir Walter is correctly reported, he has said either too much or too little.

Attention is directed to an article on page 16 of this issue, which shows the number and nationality of Roman Catholic missionaries in New Guinea at the outbreak of the European war. The only other foreign missionaries there were those of the Lutheran Church.

What happened after the outbreak of war? Although Australian public opinion was extremely sensitive on the subject of suspected enemy propaganda or espionage in New Guinea, only half a dozen of all those' Roman Catholic foreign mis sionaries were removed from New Guinea (about 2 per cent.). In the case of the Lutherans, there were two sections — German and American. The younger Ger mans were bitten deep with the virus of Hitlerism, and a large proportion of the German Lutherans were sent away; but the proportion of American Lutherans who were suspect, although many bore German names, was very small.

Therefore, apart from the group of German Nazified Lutherans, what is the objection to “foreign” missionaries carry ing out their work in New Guinea? Have they done any harm, which might be set against the immense amount of good they have achieved?

The overwhelming majority of foreign missionaries in New Guinea are Roman Catholics; and, from one end of the Pacific to the other, the devotion of the Roman Catholic missionaries to their work, and their readiness to sacrifice themselves in caring for the natives, are so well known as to need no description here. Nationality has had nothing to do with the quality of the service given by these people. British, Germans, French, Italian —the story is the same in all the Territories of the Pacific. Wherever there has been work to do, there almost always has been a missionary to do it; and the record of the foreign Roman Catholic missionaries is not one bit less creditable than that of the various British mis sionaries of the various Protestant de nominations —excellent as the latter has been.

LACKING a full report of Sir Walter McNicoll’s address, we cannot say that he cast any reflection upon the foreign missionaries of any particular sect in New Guinea; but any criticism of missionaries would come from him with singularly bad grace, because none of the larger Territories in the Pacific has a worse governmental record than New Guinea in the fields of native health and native education.

For 25 years, Australia and the Aus tralian administrators have shirked their responsibilities to the natives, and have left the care of native education and health very largely to the several organisations of devoted and self sacrificing missionaries. Because they were more numerous than the Protestants, the larger share of this work naturally has been carried out in New Guinea by the very “foreign missionaries” against whom Sir Walter warns the Australian public.

In the case of some Administrations, there is a good reason why the care of the natives’ bodies and minds are left to

the missionaries: the Administrations are chronically short of funds. But New Guinea did not have this excuse. For several years, New Guinea derived rich revenues from the taxation of the flourishing gold industry (royalties, im port duties, license fees, and what not); and a well-planned Administration would have turned back a proportion of this money into channels which would have directly benefited the natives.

But not the NG Administration. It sponsored some feeble efforts in the way of training a very few native school teachers and hospital assistants; but, for the most part, it squandered all the gold fields revenues in various ways, and left education and health to the missionaries —mostly “foreign.”