De-Bunking Fuzzy-Wuzzy

Osmar White Says a Few Words In Season

That topnotch Melbourne journ alist, Osmar White, writing in the Herald, does a first-class job of de bunking.

THE Minister of the Army and Navy, Mr. Francis, is reported to have de scribed the proposed New Guinea naval patrol force as a “Fuzzy Wuzzy Navy.”

That is carrying colloquialism over the edge.

Baby talk and the harsh realities of our colonial responsibilities fn the islands are an unpalatable mixture.

This is not mere hair-splitting over a phrase. It is intended as a frankly angry protest against the extraordinary mental attitude so many Australians seem to have adopted towards the native people who inhabit Australia’s little “empire” in the Near North.

For a start, let us clear up this vapid “Fuzzy Wuzzy Angel” nonsense by ex amining its source.

It began, apparently, with some senti mental verses written by a soldier in 1943.

He described native stretcher-bearers on the Kokoda Trail as “Fuzzy Wuzzy Angels”—and thereby did more to harm the cause of native welfare than any 20 rapacious copra-planters in the whole history of island exploitation!

It is true that many native stretcher bearers on the Kokoda trail treated the wounded with great tenderness; and that many more displayed touching loyalty and devotion. I know this because I was there and saw it at first hand.

ALSO because I was there and saw it first hand, I know that the great majority of native stretcher-bearers on the Kokoda Trail were conscripted for the service and would have liked no thing better than the opportunity to go bush.

They did not understand what the war was all about. They stayed on the job only because white master threatened to skin them alive if they ran away I have yet to hear any Digger—wounded or otherwise —describe them as “Fuzzy Wuzzy Angels,’’ unless ironically.

The term was an amateur poet’s hyp

erbole. But for some inexplicable rea son it made a tremendous hit, passed in to the vernacular and has clouded our appreciation of New Guinea’s problems ever since.

The Fuzzy Wuzzy Angel complex was responsible for stifling much of the de vastating criticism that could justly have been levelled at Ex-Minister Eddie Ward’s New Guinea policy.

It prompted the idiotic waste of public money occasioned by the Labor Govern

ment’s war damage compensation for mula which came within an ace of wrecking the entire structure of native village economy in the war zones.

Is it now to be carried on so that we can comfortably imagine ourselves pro tected by jolly Fuzzy Wuzzy Jack Tarsies sailing over the boundless main in search of wicked infiltrating Malay pirates?

The situation in New Guinea is far too serious for grown-up people to in dulge in nursery nonsense.