A Native Charter For Melanesia

What Australia May Do With Papua and New Guinea

AN interesting little booklet entitled “The Atlantic Charter and the Pacific Races” has been written by the Rev. J. W. Burton, M.A., general secretary of the Methodist Overseas Missions, who has been in close contact with Pacific affairs for 40 years.

"The Covenant of the League of Nations promised great hope for ‘un developed’ races,” says Mr. Burton. “It was the Magna Charta of liberty for millions of people—on paper. Unfor tunately it did not get beyond the idealistic stage. Now there has come the Atlantic Charter—and we can only hope that these ideals will not be merely elo quent words and rhetorical phrases, but will be translated into worthy deeds.”

The Charter promises the “ending of special privileges for the few” and the “preservation of civil liberties for all.”

Where does the Pacific Islander come in on this scheme?

In 1920 Australia was given the “trusteeship” of New Guinea —Australia assumed the trusteeship of Papua many years before that—yet all will agree that the native policies of both Territories, especially New Guinea, fell short in various ways.

At present, all Territories’ problems are in the melting-pot. What will come out of it? Already many—seeing the Islands for the first time, and thinking about them for the first time—have devised a crop of half-baked ideas that should be nipped in the bud before they take root in the public mind.

One of the least-baked ideas is that propagated by Mr. Frank Clune; and we can do no better than quote from Mr.

Burton on this subject:— “For example. Frank Clune has just written a book which he calls ‘Prowling Through Papua.’ It is written in the true, slap-dash, racy, journalistic style. He was three days at Yodda and as the re sult declares that Papua can grow all the tea that Australia needs—some £2,500,000 worth a year. The climate and soil are proved suitable, labour is abundant, cheap and willing, land is plentiful—why delay?

Says Mr. Clune:—

“ ‘ln Papua we have 90,000 square miles of country, of which one-third is ideally suited for this crop, and 300,000 natives who at present can find work only as house-boys, or coconut plantation boys, which absorb merely a fraction of the labour power available.

“ ‘Sir Hubert Murray’s policy of keeping the natives in a state of semi-primitive bliss means that they have to stay in their straw villages, and only a few —a lucky few—are permitted to work for whites, being indentured only for brief periods. ... It would be far better to open up the country to intensive culti vation of modern tropical and industrial products, to provide the maximum em ployment for the natives, and so raise their standards of education and civi lisation by allowing them to earn economic wages.’

“Later on, he suggests that here is a solution of the post-war employment problem: the employment of Papuans under demobilised soldiers.

“ ‘The natives of Papua, under sane supervision, should be put to work im mediately clearing thousands of acres of .iungle, and planting areas with rubber trees and other crops which take several years to mature. A ten-million-pound loan should be raised in Australia to finance this venture, and the improved land should be made available on easy purchase terms to demobilised soldiers and munition workers immediately the war ends —instead of gratuities and service pensions.’ ”

MR. CLUNE has an Australian public— I dare say he has earned it—-and it is a safe bet that his uninformed public will swallow the “information” he gives so generously. I am afraid that his naive ideas of what constitutes “semi primitive bliss,” and what he apparently accepts as the fantastic natural wealth of Papua, already has given some Terri torians hysterics.

The percentage of rich land in Papua is small in comparison with the large areas that are entirely unproductive—it would be an economic impossibility for Papua to support Mr. dune’s £10,000,000 worth of munition workers and soldier settlors Secondly, all Islands’ residents know just how profitable the production of tropical crops has been during the last decade. It is true that just at the moment copra and rubber are almost worth their weight in gold—but, Mr. Clune, there is a war on, and the Japs have been un mannerly enough to take practically all of our former sources of supply.

When war broke out in 1939 the South Pacific copra planters jubilantly thought that copra might increase in value. But those delusions were quickly dispelled.

Until Japan came into the war, the United Nations got all the copra they needed from sources closer to them than the South Pacific As for rubber—Malaya could provide all the world’s rubber before the war, and no doubt will be able to do so again after the war. Coffee, cocoa, quinine—they are all produced just as well somewhere else.

It is doubtful whether selling to the Australian market only could keep the Clune munition workers and soldiers’ in bread and butter. With most tropical crops, long years elapse between planting and the first bearing. Tropical agricul ture, therefore, is essentially an industry which must be backed by a moderate amount of capital.

To compete in the world’s markets—

under the present or pre-war economic state of things—it is necessary to have cheap and plentiful labour. Who is going to look after the labour of the “poorwhite” farmer in the initial stages of his new venture? Who is going to feel the first effects of having a chronically “broke” master?

And, above all, why in the name of foi tune, should these natives be put NOW to clearing thousands of acies of jungle f°L,these future settlers?

The trouble with most of these people with theories is that they see affairs as they were prior to the war—but with the addition of a whole lot of pretty notions that happen to suit their own wishes or conceptions. Why send ex-munition workers or soldiers to Papua, anyhow— under a mass rubber-growing or any other scheme, wherein they would be lucky to earn a few pounds a week—when they can farm just as profitably right here in Australia where, God knows, we need a “back-to-the-land” policy if ever we needed anything.

Men will settle m our tropical Territories in the future, as they have always done, but they will be the individual few, with the fortitude necessary to adapt themselves to circumstances And in the future, moreover, they will have to be realists who will visualise us British of the South Pacific—as someone has aptly sea ”*1 aS W 16 ISlandS m * COl ° Ured BUT what are we to do with our brown Islands people? Regard them as perpetual hewers of wood and dowers of water for Mr. dune's munition ld(^ ls of Ch fv. r i er ke6p t^ iem as me r e 5? an 1 econ ° mic machine. Fence them off and keep them as a human zoo? Label them all Fuzzy-

Wuzzy angels” and treat them, at best, as saints, and at the worst, as brands to be plucked from the burning?

Can we hope that out of this conglomeration of ideas evolved by sundry theorists, will come a sane, realistic plan, shorn of sentiment and Imperialism alike, that will fill the bill?

Left to a free choice between the rule of the Asiatic and the rule of the European, the New Guinea natives have shown definitely enough where their sympathies he. But, whether we like the idea of change or not, change is coming. It is strictly up to us whether that change is made by us, or forced upon us. It is hardly likely that, if we do not bring any more realism to bear on the subject than we have up to date, the Pacific scene of 2043 will bear any resemblance to the Pacific scene we have known in the recent past. Administrator, missionary, miner, trader, planter, anthropologistall see the native and his country from a different angle-and each will have to give something before a solution is found to the problem of what to do for our Pacific Territories.

Mr. Burton says that it will have to be a policy of gradualness—for fear we destroy what is useful and fail to replace it with something of lasting value-and that it will need the co-oneration of Governments, missions, educltfonahsts anthrocCmfrcia1 n worid e to e see e , ? t e, ?h?nLl 0f and others, of late, have applfed thl example of some African territories to the problems of the Pacific, and have seen a solution m systems of indirect rule, agripoltural education, and communal farm- . .. , T H E whole question is a number-one X headache for who ever tackles it, whenever he tackles it. For cen-

turies the Pacific has slumbered in sleepy obscurity—there was much that was good and pleasant in it, and much that was bad. But now for good or ill, sleep is over and the Pacific is wide open. Its problems must be tackled, or sooner or later they will tackle us; the old era died when Japan attacked Pearl Harbour.

The Atlantic Charter “affords assurance that all the men in all the lands may live out their lives in freedom from fear and want.” These things cannot come about b v talking about them. Nor can they come about without sacrifice. We are all kee n on sacrifice—for the other fellow, tHp Atlantic (""barter mav nrnvide some bitter pills to be swallowed by Pacific interests—and not exclusively commercial interests Theorists at least are ae-reed imon one thine—that thenativemuft not be turned i“£J g a bad imitation o?a Euronean and th at whfle wTslekto Le h?m the bene ms of™inrrivnfsation health education and^mSral incentive our main shouldbe to make him a better „^ v< f noiua De 10 maKe nim a Detter i-4.4.1 i, u . . ,

education*

afwenas th 2 the native Ys

f ik eTv to have thrust unon Ifm y JS h all o? he is unfitted to mm ’ w a all °i nicn unfitted to

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to r ie S but was the result of nadequate 'gSntf from Canberra able to millions to

ge for warshould beabi“ afte? the

war, to supply money for native education and medical work as the first step towards fitting the New Guinea natives for their place in the “co-prosperity of the Pacific.”—J.T.