Handling The Ng Native

An experienced public servant—he has been in New Guinea since 1921 has addressed the following advice to the students of the Australian School of Pacific Administration: — [THINK your task will be more difficult than the task of those who have spent the last 28 years or so here, because if the increasing tension of International lolitics. Where we entered a virgin field, ou will have to deal with an advanced ituation of global unrest.

First of all, it may be helpful to give ou my impressions of the indigenous eople with whom you will have to deal.

The natives of Papua-New Guinea are o better or worse than their past environ lent has made them; and a cross-section f native psychology compares very ivourably with a similar cross-section of ny other race of human beings. Adverse ifluences have certainly been thrust upon lese peoples during the war years, and lis will make the task of those im lediately responsible for their control and uidance much more difficult than here )fore.

The salient features of the average ative character should be born in mind.

The native has a fair amount of >mmon-sense and natural ability, and >ur task will be to develop these traits, o native has much respect for an in itiating approach, which usually tries to >ver its uncertainty by undue familiarity, • a cajoling attitude.

The native is quick to appreciate a ;rson’s worth, whatever his social grad g, and consequently responds to ex nples of conduct and character.

My advice is summed up in the old cry be firm, but fair. Do this, and you will

be carrying on that saving grace of benevolent feudalism (of which the old warrior, Mr. Winston Churchill, has been the prophet), and will be efficient where appeasement will fail.

Whilst you are absorbing what the School can give you, you must not be unmindful of the fact that the School can create a type, but not a will. If you are successful in passing out, you will take with you an autobiographical blank—that is, a mind on which only a water-mark has been stamped. The mark may be a good one, but it is in your hands to fill in the blank given to you.

Another warning which may help yon in dealing with the native is always to keep in mind that he, owing to his abrupt impact with civilisation, will tend to agree with anything you say. Do not be misled by this attitude, and think that you have solved the problem of the ages, and that you, by your own personality, have im pressed him with the creed you have been instructed to bring to the native peoples as a representative of what Sir Oliver Lodge in his erudite book “Man and the Universe” calls “the best of all possible worlds.”