Melbourne Firm Seeks Pacific Mutton-Birds

A Potential Industry That Could Rival Cod-Liver Oil Production

ANEW industry may result in the Pacific if a survey, at present being carried out by Mr. John Paterson, of Paterson Laboratories, Melbourne, is successful.

Mr. Paterson, who has made his tem porary headquarters in Papeete, Tahiti, is on a quest for mutton birds, from which is produced, among other things, a valu able medicinal oil with a high vitamin content that makes it compare more than favourably with cod-liver oil.

Several products are made from mutton bird oil by the Paterson Laboratories — one of them an emulsion developed by the late Dr. J. S. Purdy, who was City Health Officer in Sydney between 1918 and 1936, and who spent a life-time on mutton-bird-oil research. But the chief sources of supply are Tasmania and New Zealand which between them produce about 2,000 gallons of oil yearly; and this is thought to be inadequate for any large scale boosting of medicinal oil and other products. It is Mr. Paterson’s contention that a profitable market for this oil could be found in the United States and Europe. But he wishes to avoid the mis take made with dugong oil at the end of last century when a world-wide de mand was created before adequate sources of supply were found.

In that instance, racketeers entered the industry when the genuine oil reached £3 per gallon and foisted some rubbishy sub stitute on an unsuspecting public. Many were made 111 by this bootleg oil and that ended the dugong oil industry over seas.

As well as in Tasmania and New Zea

land, mutton-birds have been found on the Queensland Barrier Reef, on the islands around Coff’s Harbour in NSW, on islands off New Caledonia and Lord Howe Island and in some of the isolated Groups of French Oceania—Tuamotus,

Marquesas, Gambias and Christmas Island.

FATHER ROUGIER, of Tahiti, evidently realised the value of the birds. In a prospectus for his Christmas Island Plantations he wrote in 1905 that these birds had fine eating qualities and that the Japanese used to poach them in hundreds of thousands —apparently they knew the value of the oil because their camps, Father Rougier points out, were

littered with the skeltons of more birds than could ever have been eaten on the spot.

Mutton-birds in New Zealand are prized as an article of diet by the Maoris who alone, in that country, are allowed to hunt them. Some Europeans like them, although their fish-oil flavour is not relished by others. A firm in Tasmania preserves them now and sells its product at 2/8 per can of two birds as “Tasmania Squab in Aspic.” For years before the war there was a thriving industry in Bass Strait in salting mutton birds for the Australian market.

As so many Polynesians contract TB,

Mr. Paterson’s quest has excited con siderable interest in Papeete. The Gov ernor and the Director of Health have arranged for the mutton-birl oil emulsion, made to Dr. Purdy’s formula, to be tried at the Colonial Hospital In Papeete, as a resistance-builder against tuberculosis.

Paterson’s Laboratories have already put mutton-bird oil to other uses—em brocation for rheumatism, and (de odorised) in cosmetics, hair tonics, sun tanning preparations, etc. It is naturally suited to skin protection as it is by its own oil that the mutton bird protects its feathers from salt water and the sun.

A by-product of oil extraction is the

collection of feather-down from the bird.

This can be used as a substitute for eider down.

Should any Pacific Island reader know of possible sources of supply of this oil, other than those mentioned, Mr. Pater son, or his partner (Mr. J. S. Purdy, 1 Bond Street, Sydney) would be interested to hear from them. If the birds are now found in localities as far apart as southern New Zealand and French Oceania, it is likely that they are to be found also in some of the other Pacific islands. Information supplied may be in strumental in assisting the establishment of another new industry for the pacific.