New Guinea of the

Future War Opens Vast Areas

IX/JANY Australians are, for the first time, seeing New Guinea as poten tially—even fabulously — rich. This is how Osmar White, correspondent for the Melbourne “Herald ,} views the situa tion —but he sagely prefaces his remarks by reminding the public at large that economic and political obstacles can be just as potent handicaps to development as geography.

WHEN Moresby became a great war base and troops had to be put on to the Owen Stanleys behind it, Australian and American military engin eers built a highway leading into the Rouna tableland, which has opened up thousands of acres of the most promis ing rubber country in Papua.

Even before the war, when that area was served only by a hair-raising, pre cipitous mule track, there were already* established a number of prosperous plan tations which produced, at economical cost, a fair proportion of the 100 tons of raw rubber (one-sixteenth of Australia’s pre-war consumption) grown annually in Papua.

Even with such lamentable communi cations as then existed, it was officially estimated that this rubber land could be brought to a rate of production in from five to eight years, sufficient to pay 17£ per cent, on capital invested.

In addition to its rubber lands, the region has considerable tracts of country suitable for coffee, tea, cocoa, cinchona, tobacco and kapok.

At the eastern end of the island, about Milne Bay and along the coast westward to the mouth of the Mambare River, military works have also provided com munications in extensive areas which could be developed for the production of copra, millet, sugar, soya bean, rice and other tropical food crops.

IN the former Mandated Territory, an era of energetic experiment and development, made possible by the prosperity of the Morobe goldfields, pre ceded the war. The campaign to hold the Bulolo Valley and evict the Japanese from Salamaua, the Huon Peninsula and the valley of the Ramu River, drove arbitrary airfield and road wedges into some of the most difficult country in the incidentally provided access to thousands of square miles of rich country, both in mineral resourced and agricultural potential.

Near Wau, plantations produce Arabian coffee as fine in quality as any in the world, including the famous product of the Blue Mountains of Jamaica, whence the original seed came. Production costs before the war, however, were trebled because all freights had to'be carried by air.

Tobacco (equal in quality to the best Sumatran cigar leaf), kapok, cocoa, cotton, hemp, nutmeg, vanilla, rice and peanuts had been grown on a scale sufficent to indicate that the land could produce them economically.

The road which followed the Australian advance through the Upper Ramu may not yet be a high-speed, heavy-duty highway, but it at least permits entry of wheeled traffic into valleys of magnificent high-altitude pastures and to stands of hoop pme, screw pine, cedar and hardwoods sufficient to supply the island’s lumber requirements for more than a century.

Whatever eventually happens to the roads, harbors and aerodromes, the knowledge of how to live in the tropics, won from experience of war in the Western Pacific, will never be lost. And it is inconceivable that this knowledge should fail to have a very profound effect upon tropical colonisation and tropical economy in the future