Plan To Provide Trade Unions For

The "Fuzzy Wuzzies"

Another Queer Manifestation of Australia's New Pacific Territories

Consciousness

By Judy Tudor

A N article headed “Trade Unions for Fuzzy - Wuzzies,” from Brisbane “Truth” of January 23, has been sent in by a Queensland reader of “PIM” It reads like a joke; but, as a straw in the wind, has significance.

The author obviously has made no use of the many excellent volumes that have been written about New Guinea or the native; nor has he learned anything under the spot-light of publicity that has been focused on the South-west Pacific for the last two years. He does not, for instance, know the difference between Papua and the Mandated Territory. Yet his ill-formed, hide-bound notions have received a paternal pat on the back from an Australian newspaper.

He thinks that Australian trade unions should form a delegation to study native customs and culture with a view to creating contacts. Is the Australian “proletariat” capable of studying any thing but their own back-yard problems, or bringing an unbiassed mind to bear on any question beyond their own mud puddle. These people who go off half cocked every few weeks seem to indicate an answer in the negative.

TERRITORIANS are notoriously “prophets without honour” these days. They have also become inured to such catch-cries as “Papua for the Papuans” and “No exploitation for the Fuzzy-Wuzzy” and all varieties of woolly brained schemes for the betterment of the natives and the advancement of New Guinea itself in the post-war set-up.

But none of these things, surely, quite prepares them for the latest plunge into the murky waters of New Guinea post war reconstruction, that has been taken by Railway Union representative W. H.

Coull, in Brisbane “Truth.”

Mr. Coull, in his boundless generosity, advocates trade unionism for the natives of “the Australian Mandated Territory of New Guinea,” as a solution to their problems, and as a reward for the loyal help they have given the Allies through out the New Guinea campaign!

He has, “Truth” says, made a “deep and intelligent first-hand study” of the subject, and his views are said to be worthy of the attention of Senator Codings, described as Minister for Ex ternal Affairs, whose job may be “to protect the Fuzzy-Wuzzies as workers competing with those on the mainland.”

Mr. Coull believes an imposing list of strange things. One belief is that unless the native worker can be organised with the fraternal help of Australian trade unions, he will be well on the way to final extinction. Unionism, he thinks, will give the native a feeling of self-respect and allow for his proper development.

FT\HE following—so help me! —is the X data on which Mr. Coull, through his intelligent investigations, has based his conclusions:— • Natives should be first educated, not in class-rooms, but to their re sponsibilities as workers. • The present £42,500 annual Common wealth grant should be increased for this purpose. • There are at least 30 different languages in New Guinea; customs of some tribes are still primitive. • Although much of the country is fertile, the natives still use digging sticks instead of ploughs. (Pause, Mr. Coull, and think of the per

pendicular state of the terrain— and the beauties of an undisturbed sub-soil in that land of torrential rain.) • Their moral standards are some times high. Adultery in some tribes is punishable by death. • All edible plants are regarded as male; poisonous plants as female.

This reflects on their primitive philosophy and the inferior status of women. (Or does it?) • After the war tens of thousands of these natives will be looking for work on our standards, and it is only fair that they should be educated to take their place on the higher plane. • The help of the Australian Govern ment must be obtained to guide the natives to our own stage of develop ment and sense of national con sciousness. • Mr. Coull feels sure that these people can be educated and organ ised, until their future prospects become much happier than they are at present, and one of our first steps towards this is governmental co operation in the establishment of trade unions for the “proletarianised native.”

IN the interest of further deep and first-hand study on the part of Mr.

Coull, I should like to bring the following facts to his notice: — He confuses Papua and the Mandated Territory of New Guinea. Present-day Papua was annexed as a British Pro tectorate, administered by Queensland, in 1884. In 1906 it became Common wealth territory and its name became Papua. It was Papua that had a yearly Commonwealth grant of £42,500.

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The Mandated Territory was German until Rabaul was taken by the Australlans in 1914. It became a League of Nations Mandate in 1920, and until the Pacific war was administered by Australia (but quite independently of Papua).

The Mandated Territory had no Commonwealth grant of £42,500. Prior to the depression, £lO,OOO was made available by the Commonwealth for native welfare, but it was discontinued in the early thirties, and the New Guinea Adminis tration, from revenue, spent about £!00 000 per year on this purpose.

The Mandated Territory was unique in that even during the late and unlamented depression it had a balanced budget—due in no small measure to gold royalties. That fact should be dwelt on by both trade unionists and other kindhearted reformers: So-called “exploitation filled New Guinea coffers, when the rest of the world was rejoicing on the dole. To-day’s sentimentalists lose sight

of the fact that cold cash has Its place in the scheme of things, The natives have not changed since 1934—their need was as great then as it is now. But it is doubtful if either the Labour Party, the Australian Govern ment, or the Australian public of that day would have sat back on their heels and howled for the uplift of the New Guinea native if that uplift had to be financed from their own pockets mHE New Guinea native was well 1 established in New Guinea a few hundred years—maybe a few thou sand—before we got there. He has always been able to care for himself. In his village the necessities of life, as they saw them, were provided for all who cared to work. Therefore there is no need for him to come on to the labour market to compete with European labour, as Mr. Coull appears to imagine, The native works for a European for

some reason of his own: maybe he wants to speed-up the process of getting him self a wife and can’t wait until his family get around to helping him; maybe he has a “cross” with his uncle or his father and thinks work in foreign parts as good a solution as any. Maybe he just wants to try working away from his village, anyhow.

But, whatever the reasons, he comes to work for Europeans of his own free will; and, come depression, he can return to village life and soon take up the threads —which is more than the proletarian, white or brown, can do.

The most sophisticated of these natives is only two or three generations removed from the Stone Age—hundreds of thou sands of them have not yet emerged.

There seems no good reason why they should be expected to embrace 20th cen tury civilisation, with all its attendant flap-doodle in a month, or a year, or a generation, when it took our race a couple of thousand years to travel the same road.

MR. COULL apparently sees the New Guinea of the future as a highly developed machine for churning out tropical produce to flood the world’s markets, and brown and white people competing with one another for jobs. No one doubts that New Guinea could grow a great deal of produce; but there ts the everlasting question of markets, and the fact that, in the past, tropical produc tion was based on cheap native labour— Indonesian, Melanesian, African or Asiatic.

NEW GUINEA takes in a lot of terri tory. It is a land of paradox. It divided into rigid segments, each with its own social set-up, each with its own language. And there are hundreds of languages—not 30.

It is impossible to generalise. If one community has, to our standards, no morals, then the adjoining community, as like as not, has a moral code as stringent and unbending as that em braced by our Victorian grandmothers.

And so on, ad infinitum.

The ways of rewarding the native for his loyalty grow in variety and in strangeness, but inevitably tie in with the activities of the would-be reformer.

It is apparently impossible to take this loyalty for granted, or to assume that the New Guinea native will be loyal for the same reason that Australians are loyal. If the native is ready to em brace the more rarified embellishments of our civilisation, then he should be advanced enough to be loyal. That he has been, to a point, proves that the New Guinea Administration of the past was, on the whole, good. Contributory reasons are native recognition as to which side of his bread is buttered, and the fact that, past and present, there have been men strong enough to turn the native nose in the right direction and administer occasional prods in the rear to keep it in that direction.

There seems to be a hiatus in trade union circles between Mr. Coull’s pro posed native unionism and Mr. Ward’s “no exploitation.” Or is there? Will “No exploitation through unionism”? be the next phrase minted? Anything is possible in this world of regimentation and regulation run riot.

Miss Christine Woods, of the Mela nesian Mission, left for the Solomon Islands in December. She will be associated with Nurse Ada Moore, a re cent appointee of the mission, at a Solomons medical centre, which is be ing established. Miss Woods previously served at Kerepei Mission hospital.