Papua-N. Guinea

Problems of Education Papua-N. Guinea

THE Director of Education in Papua- New Guinea, Mr. William C. Groves, left Australia by air at the end of Aug ust on a special mission to the United Nations Headquarters in New York, where he represented Australia before a special UN committee on colonial education.

According to newspaper reports Mr.

Groves said that the first step in dealing with his department’s greatest problem— namely, the reduction of illiteracy—was to instruct the native in his own tongue.

He also indicated that in his view the removal of illiteracy was closely tied in with the solution of economic and social problems.

Editorial Note.—lt is, of course, a matter of common knowledge that little, if any, progress can be made in the spread of literacy in Papua-New Guinea until there is establishel some common medium of speech. Among the li million or so natives in Papua-New Guinea there are hundreds of languages; and the only thing resembling a common language is Motuan (brought into use in Papua by the late Sir Hubert Murray, and now partly discontinued) and Pidgin—a bast ard form of language which is condemned by all education authorities, but which is so easily picked up by the natives that it is coming more and more into general use.

Captain George O’Brien, well-known skipper of Islands small boats, who re cently took the Marist Mission’s Halgard from Sydney to Fiji, delivered a 56 ft. vessel, Gumleaf, equipped with an 80 HP Vivien marine engine, to Messrs. Bryan and Williams (Guadalcanal Planting and Trading Ltd.) in the Solomon Islands in August. He returned to Sydney from Honiara by TOA flying-boat late in August, and was off again for BSI early in September to deliver another 50-footer,, the Aldebaran, to Fairymead Sugar C 0.,, Ltd. Skipper O’Brien has delivered so< many boats to the Islands in recent yearsN that one of his Solomon pals now de scribes him as “a nautical midwife.”