Difficult Rehabilitation

of Looted Thursday Is.

From Our Brisbane Correspondent RECENTLY, Mr. Cliff Stanaway of the Brisbane “Courier-Mail,” visited Thursday Island, as an independent investigator. When he returned, he des cribed the island £S a “sad record of destruction and looting by members of all the services since the civil population was evacuated at a few hours’ notice in 1942.”

He estimated damage at £200,000. He claimed that government buildings suf fered less than civilian homes, but that many items of furniture had disappeared from them; fifty per cent, of the 300 homes and business premises on the is land, were torn down during occupation by the services, and that every home, hotel and business house was looted and damaged.

He said tanks had been machine gunned, houses had been altered by tear ing down partitions, and sheets of galvan ised iron, pieces of packing case and bits of plywood served for half the windows on the island. Evidence of many other forms of destruction and pillage were found by Mr. Stanaway.

With the wet season starting in January, torrential rains will pour down on holed and rusted roofs and windowless homes.

Building supplies must, therefore, reach the Island before the end of December; otherwise, according to Mr. Stanaway, many homes and business houses will suffer. rRRES Strait islanders, Mr. Stanaway stated, were among the willing vic tims of a flourishing black market at TI, and they paid ridiculous prices for every-day household commodities.

There was a keen demand for kerosene, owing to the shortage of wood. Firewood, which had to be bought from a neigh bouring island, was sold at £6 a load. (It was 25/- a load before the war.) Nearly all vegetables, meat, fruits and soups, come out of tins; there was no fresh milk; butter is rationed at the same rate as on the mainland, and eggs,, which are scarce, are sold at 3/- a dozen.

The .natives, particularly those from, neighbouring islands under the Protector of Islanders, are receiving more consider ation than the Europeans, and gradually, the white population is being squeezed from the Island.

Mr. Stanaway urged that action loe taken quickly by the State Government to rehabilitate the white people of TI.

COMMENTING on the report, the Queensland Health and Home Af- Fairs Minister (Mr. Foley), said he could give a definite assurance that Euro peans were not being squeezed out of TI.

He would like to see them returning to the Island, but naturally, his Department was interested in fostering the native pearling boats and in looking after the affairs of the natives.

Mr. Foley said, that the Department in tended to make provision for the supply of foodstuffs to Europeans through the Island Industry Board, and that they would be given reasonable assistance.

Plans, he said, were in hand for the establishment of a fuel depot, a bakery, and a butchery under European control.

Mr. Foley thought the island was over the “worst of its shipping difficulties, and that from now on shipping services to the island would improve.”

British officials in the service of the New Hebrides Condominium now receive a special cost-of-living allowance. A bachelor receives £5 (sterling) per month, and a married man about £9 per month, plus about 10/- per month for each child.

Mr. Ragnar Hyne, who was a wellknown legal officer in the British Territories of the South Pacific for many years —he was in Tonga between 1920 and 1938, and in the Solomon Islands from 1938 until the Japanese invasion—has recently spent long-leave in Europe. He is now an officer of the Law Courts in Sierra Leone, West Africa.

Major S. G. Masterman passed through Sydney lately, on his way to Suva and the Solomon Islands, where he will re-enter the Administrative service, which he joined originally in 1922, when 23 years old. He was Native Labour Inspector when war came in 1939, and he went off to re-join the colours. He had a distinguished war career. He was wounded at Dunkirk in 1940; and the lady who nursed

him in an Army hospital is now Mrs.

Masterman, and is accompanyig him to the Solomons. He was well liked by BSI civilians; but as few of the latter have yet returned to the Group, there will not be many “old hands” to give him the welcome he deserves.