Tea From Nondugl

Sydney Newspapers Think It

Won't Be Long, Now BEFORE he left for a 10-day visit to the Central Highlands, New Guinea, on January 31, Mr. E. J. Hallstrom, Sydney refrigerator manufacturer and owner of the 700 acre experimental sheep station at Nondugl, NG, said that he had bought land adjacent to Nondugl and would soon start an experimental tea plantation.

He was of the opinion that New Guinea could supply all Australia’s tea require ments; that experts had said that the Highlands area was suitable and that he would obtain suitable plants in India or Ceylon after a visit to Europe in a few months.

He expected that natives under Euro pean supervision would soon begin plant ing the first 20-acre plot.

These statements Mr. Hallstrom made to Sydney newspaper reporters on the eve of his visit to New Guinea. They were duly reported under large headlines which indicated that it was only a matter of months before New Guinea native tea growers would be flooding the Australian market with a first grade product.

As Mr. Hallstrom is no doubt fully aware, the problems of establishing a tea industry in New Guinea are formidable and for the next generation are not likely to amount to any more than an interest ing hobby to prove that it can be done.

The Papua-New Guinea Administration had an expert make a thorough survey a year or 18 months ago. It was agreed that there were several localities suited to tea culture but that problems of labour and transportation were so great as to almost make the scheme economically impracticable. There is, in addition, the problem of getting seed. None of the great tea-producing countries—lndia, Ceylon or NEl—are anxious to set an other country up as a potential rival.

Tea Seed Smuggled Out Of India

—Then Lost IN the Melbourne Argus on February 1, the Commonwealth Tea Controller, Mr. H. A. Bennett, told a remark able story of how he smuggled young tea plants and seed out of India in 1946, in order to start tea planting in New Guinea.

His enterprise has, however, availed us nothing as the plants have apparently been lost.

It is known that test plantings have been made in the NG Central Highlands —so maybe some of Mr. Bennett’s seeds were saved.

He says that attempts to establish a tea-growing industry in New Guinea would be seriously hampered by the total prohibition on removal of tea plant seed from Indian and Ceylon.

“In about 1946, when I was leaving India after a visit, I got hold of some young tea plants and some seed and brought them out of the country hidden in my luggage.

“I gave them to the Government agri culture people in Canberra, and they sent them up to New Guinea and appointed a former tea planter from India to look after them.

“I got several letters from him and then I heard no more. As far as I know, they lost the tea plants and the planter went back to India.”

THE stealing of protected plants and seeds from one country by a citizen of another is usually looked upon as a crime of honour; If you get away with it, good luck to you. It is doubtful, however, if the New India will have such a highly developed sense of humour in this regard.

The story is often told of how the late George Murray, Director of Agriculture in New Guinea between 1932 and 1941,

caused to have smuggled out of the Nether lands Indies through a friend in Batavia, the cinchona seeds that started the plantations in the New Guinea highlands area. Cinchona is, of course, the source of quinine and at that time NEI had a virtual monopoly and guarded the seeds ferociously. The bad results of this monopoly were not seen fully until the Japs overwhelmed NEI in 1941-42 and the world was suddenly cut off from sup plies of this essential drug.

Tens of thousands of young cinchona trees are now growing near Aiyura in the Central Highlands of New Guinea.