Civil Affairs School To
pp. 63-64 · Read in the full issue
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THE School for Civil Affairs, which un til recent months was conducted at Duntroon Military College, Can berra, now is carried on at Holdsworthy, near Liverpool, NSW. It will soon close its doors permanently.
With the termination of the present 15-weeks’ course, the Armv will cease to operate the school and will turn out no more patrol officers for that portion of New Guinea still run by the Army. The present class numbers 40; they will gradu ate (or fail) in March, and the success ful ones will go to work for ANGAU in that part of the Mandated Territory not under civil administration.
The first principal of the school was Col. J. K. Murray, now administrator of the Provisional Administration in Papua and New Guinea. His place at the school has been taken by Col. J'. R. Kerr, a Sydney barrister.
No indication has been given as to whether the school or a similar institu tion will be carried on by the Depart ment of External Territories, who helped father the original scheme. Last month, applications were called for patrol offi cers. medical assistants and clerks for the Provisional Administration, or whatever
administration ultimately succeeds it. It was not stated that successful applicants would be required to attend a school of colonial administration.
The 85 men who have now passed through the Army school are of a fine type, most of them keen to have a post war career in the Islands. It might have been imagined that sufficient patrol officers for civilian administration could have been obtained from these graduates.
Dr. F. J. Williams, who has been a Government Medical Officer in Fiji for some two years, is going to Wellington, New Zealand, where he will engage in private practice. He has had much tropi cal experience in the past 20 years. He went to the New Hebrides as a medical missionary in 1923; he spent two years in North and Central China, in 1925-26, as a medical man in the service of the LMS; he served the Methodist Mission in Papua for some little time; and in 1930 he entered the Papuan Administra tion service, and he was CMO at Port Moresby when evacuation occurred in 1942. He would have liked to have re turned to Papua; but the claims of a growing family, plus “a skinful of malaria,” induced him to settle in a cold country.
Any news of the fate or whereabouts of Mr. Arnold Davies, who was a well known resident of Wallif and Tarawei, Wewak area of New Guinea, before the Japanese invasion, would be gladly re ceived by his wife, Mrs. M. Davies, of 328 Kooyong Road, Caulfield, Victoria. Mr.
Davies was well known among the old hands in the gold-mining areas as “Uncle”—but he seems to have been lost sight of between 1938 and 1940.
The Rev. Harlan and Dr. Dorothy Del bridge, of the Methodist Mission, Fiji, with two of their children, are now on furlough in Australia. Mr. Delbridge is having his first furlough for eight years.