The Change Among The

Territories' Costs

The Change Among The Natives

Prom a Special Correspondent

Port Moresby. Jan. 17.

ALL costs in the Australian Pacific Territories are soaring, and it is be coming increasingly difficult to pro fitably conduct any kind of enterprise, in the face of an unsympathetic Admin istration.

It now costs 18/- per week to feed a native labourer, and it is common to hear of them getting £lO per month, and found.

Even so, most of them seem to have lost the will to work, and their ways of life are changing. By the appearance of some of them—who prefer a bottle of lolly-water and a loaf of white bread to their old kai-kai of rice and bully beef —the change is not to their advantage.

It is sheer folly to try to bring them from the Stone Age to the present period in one generation.

We have been accused of “exploiting” the natives, in the 20 years between the Wars. But, by comparison, the New Planners have done the natives far more harm in the last seven or eight years than we did in 20 years. Our natives were much better off, happier and healthier —they were making the grade, from Stone Age to Petrol Age, quite sat isfactorily. The present-day natives are bewildered, depressed and unhealthy— they don’t know where they are, or where they are going.

One never hears natives nowadays sing ing, as they used to do. Now, when they put on a dance or sing-sing, they dodge the native dress, and wear singlets, shorts, shirts —almost everything except a mess jacket and black pants.

They are now full of big ideas about what their pay and conditions should be —the New Planners have crippled the white employers and more or less ruined the native labourers.

I sometimes wonder what our old friend Sir Hubert Murray would say if he could see the conditions that have developed within so short a time in the country he loved and understood so well.