Overwhelming Result of Fijis

Anti-TBAppeal

From Our Own Correspondent

Suva, Nov. 14.

ALL estimates of the success of Fiji’s War Memorial Anti-TB Appeal have gone overboard, and it now appears that the fund will close, for 1949, some where near £60,000, or approximately 50 per cent, over the target set on August 16.

This figure does not include the Govern ment’s donation of £20,000.

The astonishing result of the appeal has been due to the reaction of the “small people’’—Fijans. Europeans, Indians, Chinese, Polynesians and others alike.

Apart from the generous support of a few big commercial organisations, cf which the CSR Company, the Associated Goldmines (£3,000), and W. R. Carpenter and Co. (Fiji) Ltd., are by far the most outstanding, the response of the wealthiest sections of the community has done little to help achieve the total.

At times there have been flickers of criticism of the appeal, mostly from those who express distrust of anything of the kind in which the Government has a hand, but there has been an emphatic demonstration of public impatience with unconstructive quibbling—sc emphatic that the 1949 Appeal will go down as the first movement of any sort that has over ridden all the racial, religious and other sectional barriers that commonly divide Fiji into suspicious and sometimes bitterly opposed factions.

The central committee of the appeal organisation admits that in the early days £35,000 was regarded as a likely figure.

Administration cf Fund A BILL will be introduced at the Budget session of the Legislative Council (which was opened on November 25) providing for the establishment and ad ministration of the War Memorial Anti- Tuberculosis Fund.

Five trustees will be appointed by the Governor to see that “the purpose for which the fund shall be used and applied shall be the prevention and control of tuberculosis in the Colony and the treat ment and welfare of persons suffering from tuberculosis in the Colony.”

Some of the uses the fund —or

what remains after deduction of the capital expenditure of £30,000 —will be the erection and extension of wards and hos pitals for the treatment of tubercular patients; the erection of staff quarters, clinics, laboratories and other buildings; the equipment and furnishing of the new

wards and hospitals; the travelling ex penses of tubercular patients to and from hospitals or clinics; the supply of com forts to TB patients; the after-care of discharged patients.

Whatever portion of the fund is not re quired for immediate needs may be in vested in England or Fiji.

Mrs. Phyllis Keenan, wife of ADO J.

R. Keenan of Rabaul, arrived in Syd ney late in November on MV Bulolo.

Early in January she will leave for the United Kingdom. She will be joined there by her husband later in 1950.