A Hymn Of Hens And Cucumbers

Australian Poultry Men and American Gardeners Are Again Discovering New Guinea

By Judy Tudor

rRRITORIANS can stand a lot— which is as well, because they have had a lot to take. But this con stant re-discovery of their country by military wallahs and tame news-hounds makes them, one and all, fighting mad.

A particularly virulent dislike—com parable only to the pre-war “first-white woman-to-do-something” hate—is for the assortment of captains, warrant-officers, pilot-officers and plain privates who are growing vegetables in, or introducing poultry into, a land that was supposed to have been previously sans vegetables and sans poultry.

Never a week passes that we are not entertained by accounts of new Army farms or gardens in the New Guinea area —all of them large, successful, arid the first of their kind.

Now “Smith’s Weekly”—which should know better—runs to column length to describe the doings of a pilot-officer and a warrant-officer who have gone into the egg business “somewhere in New Guinea.”

Territorians will be pleased to know that the whole thing is a wow—and that the hens are laying fine: hitherto there have been some doubts whether hens could be made to lay in New Guinea.

Maybe the Army had its doubts—no Territorian ever did. There are, of course, more ways than one of making hens lay—if one is really desperate about the business. For example, once in a village outside Rabaul I saw a boy on a wobbling bike run over a straying hen— and it laid an egg. And there are other methods—some a little more natural.

AFTER a year in an entirely eggless world, back of Wewak, we brought back from South eight Black Orp hington hens and what the boys called a “boss-boy.” It took three weeks by two ships, Melbourne to Boram; one night by schooner, Boram to But; and four days per boot to lug the two heavy crates that held the birds over the mountains to the Ulahau River.

It took further weeks for the hens to recover from their travels but when they did become acclimatised they showed no temperamental coyness about laying.

They produced big, pale brown eggs, almost too precious to eat—which for the first few weeks were, in fact, not eaten without due ceremony and until they had been gloated over, crooned about and then cracked with prideful care into a basin. Those who have also lived in an eggless world will know what I mean.

SOME time went by; and then, to our consternation, the biggest, blackest and best hen disappeared as cleanly as a puff of smoke in a gale of wind.

We, following the usual line of reason ing, lined the boys and accused them of “pinching” it. But this they denied, even more enthusiastically than usual.

It was a snake, they said; this clearly was the “fashion belong snake,” and we were given to understand that they had been expecting something of the sort.

“Snake be jiggered,” we said, in effect.

“No snake has yet been hatched that is large enough to eat a hen that size.

Come again!”

Whereupon the cook-boy said that these snakes savvied plenty, and gave a demon stration of how one would dislocate its jaw to accommodate the fowl—a fascinat ing exhibition that we had to call off in case he did himself some permanent injury.

We listened, but believed not. Then we took every precaution, and bided.

Boys or snake? Snake or boys? To the devil with gold for the time being. Eggs were more precious than gold nuggets.

AT last, the climax: in the dead of night came a commotion from the house-cockeroo. It was on!

We gathered up a hurricane lantern, a torch and a couple of guns, sneaked through the garden and down the hill to the fowl-yard, prepared to battle to the death. Cautiously, we opened the door of the house, expecting anything from a “tamberan” to a tornado to slap us in the face.

The boys were right! There were yards of snake still coming through a hole'near the roof, while the hens had gone back to their slumbers on the perches. The guns went off with a deafening roar in that small house —the ‘concussion blew out the lantern, the hens woke up, squarking as though dying by inches, and the “boss-boy,” his tail feathers dragging, flew out between my knees and into the night.

I dropped the torch; and all was cursing and confusion, coils of dying snake and frenzied hens.

When light was restored we dragged the snake outside with the help of a long-handled shovel: 12 feet of as pretty a piece of nastiness as ever festooned a drunken dream.

That is all by the way, to prove that fowls reached New Guinea before the Army. Nothing has been heard, as yet, of the Army-farmers’ snake-troubles; but they will have them. Snakes and poultry are synonymous in New Guinea.

THUS concludes “Smiths”: “Thus, besides opening up New Guinea with roads, Army is laying the foun dations of a new peacetime agricultural and stock industry there. Result of the 69-acre vegetable garden established there by Army was so encouraging that the garden has been increased to 120 acres, from which Army is getting not only fresh vegetables, but a large amount of corn.”

There were about 6,000 Europeans in Papua and New Guftiea before the war; something-nothing compared with the few hundred thousand other people who have just discovered it, and are finding it extremely hard to stop discovering it.

The darned place was practically virgin territory. If those 6,000 pre-blitz Euro peans did occasionally grow a lettuce or induce a hen to lay an egg—well, what the hell!

ANOTHER sad sob-story is told in “Yank” (the American Service man’s weekly magazine, published in the SW Pacific area), of a battle against bully beef, dehydrated chow and dog biscuits. The battle now is won. and the news can be released for publica tion;— Beyond New Guinea’s Owen Stanleys, a farm complete with hens, water-melons, radishes and whatnot, has sprung into being, and “US soldiers are wresting thousands of pounds of produce from soil that hitherto grew nothing but kunai grass.” Yip-e-e!

The desire for an American Army-farm grew from the need for fresh food for convalescent soldiers, and the lack of shipping space for refrigerated goods from Australia. So the Americans called in a captain who was a former agricul tural research worker in the Philippines, to investigate the possibilities of vege table growing in New Guinea: and two soldiers who had had experience at “truck” farminsr in California, to make experiments. The experiments presum ably were encouraging, so they collected 15 natives, two tractors, two ploughs, two harrows, and one tandem disc “earth clod breaker,” and they went to work.

Now they are producing: 650 lb. of spin ach a week, 6,000 lb. of com every 40 days, a ton of cucumbers and a ton of

tomatoes every 90 days, 1,500 lb. of pota toes every 45 days, 500 water-melons every 60 days, and enough radishes and carrots every three weeks to distribute among all units, of the base.

Lettuce, cabbage and lemons “are a few of the things that would not grow.” Why, many an old Territorian will want to know. Lettuce grows well in New Guinea —especially the “mignonette” variety; every miner in northern New Guinea, at altitudes of not over 1,500 feet, had his cabbage patch; and every native village owns a “moulie” tree.

The US Army farmers might also try French beans, pumpkins, spring onions and the unsung, dual-purpose kohlrabi.

Kohl rabi has a top that can be eaten like spinach, and a bulb growing above ground resembling white turnip, but with

a mild cabbage flavour. It flourishes in climates as different as those of southern New Zealand and northern New Guinea.

The Yanks have also imported 224 fowls from Australia and intend to increase the number to 10,000 if they pro duce well. Ten thousand is a lot of fowls in any man’s language, and it is doubtful if Papua and New Guinea, combined, could provide sufficient snakes to cope with a poultry-farm on that mass-producing scale. The farmers’ am bition is that some day soon every guy in New Guinea may sit down to a chicken dinner with all the fixings. So mote it be!

If they want to know more about hens in the tropics they could look up the

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records of Jacobson’s poultry farm at Lae. The “PIM” editor photographed a vast array of Wyandottes there in 1939, AND so the work of re-discovery con tinues. We admire the Americans and their methods—particularly the two tractors, the ploughs, harrows and the one tandem disc earth-clod breaker.

A few months ago, we were tickled to think that the Australian Army-farmers had introduced wasps into Papua to kill vegetable bugs; and a few months before that, to know that the Commonwealth Director of Agriculture was on his way to Papua to inspect vegetable and paw paw growing areas and that special paw paw seeds were being sent to that Ter ritory from Queensland.

The necessity of war is the great grandmother of all invention; and, with

out a doubt, catering for the troops in New Guinea to-day is a slightly larger problem than catering for the compara tively few pre-Pacific-war Europeans; but few of these publicised products are new to the Territories.

There were poultry farms at Wau, and Rabaul, and in the Markham Valley, and dozens of self-supporting plantations and countless thousands of paw-paw trees (not imported from Queensland) and most miners, after they were settled for a time, had their own gardens and a few hens. The only difference between then, and now, is that now New Guinea’s paw paws, wasps, gardens, natives, and crea tures of the land, and the sky above it and the sea around it, are red-hot news, calculated to build up the Australian public’s knowledge of these territories to the north, so that the public may, in due course, indulge in a lot of nit-witted theories concerning the future of the Territories and their inhabitants.

THESE be stirring times. And “when this long cruel war is over” (in the words of Scarlett O’Hara) and the tide of bloodshed and battle has receded from the land of the Fuzzy-Wuzzies, and the “new order” has come upon us like a rash, overnight, and there is “no exploitation” in the Pacific territories, we may expect to find each New Guinea native still tilling his taro patch, but now —having forsaken his bush knife and

digging stick—equipped with a rotary hoe, a harrow and an earth-clod breaker. And his Mary, no longer transporting his pig and her piccaninny, and half a hun dredweight of yams and two hundred weights of firewood and the family hound, in a series of bilums suspended from her head—but driving in a Jeep like a lady.

Progress is wonderful—and it’s an awfully poor war that doesn’t get some one somewhere.