Young Australia Returns to the Sepik

QNE of the very few Australian

journalists who, after a visit to

the Territories , have been able to write articles about Papua and New Guinea are superficial and silly, is Mr. Frederick Howard, representing Melbourne “Herald” and Sydney “Sun” Mr. Howard, in

March, sent the following description

of the restoration •of the Australian Administration to the Northern New Guinea regions, recently taken over from ANGAU by the Civil Administration.

AVAST waterland of river, lagoons, and swamps, the Sepik River area of New Guinea covers 30,000 square miles. Some of its remote tribes are now violently hostile to the white man — and among them to-day are the survivors of 1,000 Japanese for whom General Adachi could not account when Ije surrendered Into this region, however, the white man’s law is going back. As I write this, a small launch is hammering Its way up the mile-wide reaches of the Sepik, taking an officer of the District Service to establish a Dost 150 miles up stream.

Others will follow. The village areas which were under control before the war will first be contacted. They comprlse some 150,000 known inhabitants.

Beyond them is uncontrolled territory, with perhaps scores of thousands of natives. In due course, the Administration will move in. bringing instruction in hygiene, a medical service, a concept of justice—and a call for taxes by way of payment.

I have been learning about the area by

sitting in at Wewak and Aitape on the conferences of the men who will govern it. rpHE most significant touch was the X plea put to the Assistant District Officer at Aitape (Mr. Frank Moy), by a man who is about to rejoin the District Service after a long term in the AIF. He begged to be assigned to the Sepik and not to be transferred from it until he had had five years in which to see some result from his labours. It was a plea to be sent to the “Siberia” of New Guinea.

Service on the Sepik is notorious for its isolation, physical hardship and danger.

But it is a strange and heartening fact that this quixotic applicant is only one of many coming into the post-war admin istration with a zest for the frontier life.

Among those who served here before, it is more than a zest. New Guinea is their vocation. They have an almost paternal affection for the childlike, proud and direct-minded natives whose trust they won. These public servants will go back to re-establish that trust and dispel the Japanese gospel of hatred for Euro peans.

In their wake will come the fruits of a new policy of research in tropical agricul ture. The tribes will be taught to live better off their weird waterland. Then, on the basis of an improved living stan dard. cultural and technical education can begin.

I GOT some idea of the immensity of this project by flying over 500 miles of the Sepik’s course from the fron tier of Dutch New Guinea to the river’s mouth.

Much of the landscape is a mad scribble of muddy waterways in horizon-wide plains of kunai grass. On the lower Sepik there are patches of higher wooded country. The villages which you may detect here among the trees are mainly deserted. The Sepiks congregate in them only for tribal ceremonies or in times of danger. Normally, families are scattered in their garden patches.

In areas where swamp predominates, natives have carried in soil by canoe to build up mounds in which to plant coco

nuts. In the great flood seasons, water will rise to the floors of their built-up huts, and at night a household may be kept awake by the bumping of crocodiles against the flooring.

You do not slap at mosquitoes in this country. You brush them off your arms 50 at a time, leaving long smears of blood.

To escape them, natives climb into basket shelters at night. The general idea is that it would be courting death to sleep without either one of these semi suffocating shelters or a mosquito net.

In the “little Venice” villages of the Sepik, even the domestic pigs have learned to swim. All life is amphibious here. Because only the fittest survive in the pestilential place, the Sepik native is a rugged type, his shoulders magnificently developed by canoe-paddling. The soles of his feet are soft and near-white, for he hardly ever v/alks on dry, hard ground.

ONE of the “old hands” of this territory, Colonel W. R. Woodman, now Acting District Officer at Madang, told me he built himself a travelling office and home when he went on circuit through the Sepik. On two long canoes lashed to gether he set up a fly-wired office, with tmy kitchen and bathroom.

In this houseboat he lived for months, paddling “overland” in the flood times and moving back through the lagoons to the serpentine river. only traffic that passed him were big floating islands of debris, and once a chieftain’s 60-foot war canoe, hollowed from one log and manned by *4B paddlers.

Such is the Sepik District. It is only one of the remote regions over which Australia now resumes the responsibilities of civil Government. It is perhaps the toughest, and certainly the most out landish. On its borders, in behind Aitape, there is gold, and it is thought that there may be oil.

There are also gentlemen with exqui sitely fashioned bamboo spears and a dis like of strangers. The Sepik is no place for softies.