The Missionaries, and the Returned Soldiers, and New Guinea

THERE are reports that the Australian Board of Missions—which represents in Australia the Church of England missionary organisation in Papua—is promotmg a petition to the Australian Government, asking that steps be taken to prevent returned soldier settlements in the Territories. They want the land kept as a close preserve for natives—and missl ° l a^. s - .

If this is so, it almost certainly will provoke a lively exchange with the Returned Soldiers League. The Australian president of the latter organisation, very recently, in urging Australia to properly recogmse her defence obligations in Papua-New Guinea, said that the Pacific lerritones which the Commonwealth

controls should become “Australia’s Seventh State.”

The President of the RSL, perhaps, was almost too realistic. The Anglican mis sionaries, unquestionably, are not realist enough.

This is no Christian world, in which the fundamental rights of man take pre cedence over all other considerations.

This is a cruel, brutal, ruthless world, in which we now have little choice; we must align ourselves with one side or the other in a struggle in which only one side will survive. The plain choice is between Western civilisation, in which the com mon man is conceded some rights as an individual, and Muscovite Communism, in which nothing counts except the dic

tatorship of a brutal and merciless materialism.

With the greatest respect and sym pathy, we listen to the pleas by the Colonel Murrays and Father Bensons of the Territories on behalf of the natives.

In anything like normal times, we con cede much to such men, when they give their first thought to native welfare. But these are not normal times. Our first con sideration, surely, is our own defence, and the protection of the standards of human conduct and decency which we have created in a thousand years of sociological struggle.

We are in Papua-New Guinea primarily because that is our first line of defence against Red Asia. The better the economic organisation we can establish in Papua- New Guinea, the stronger is our defence line. The more Europeans we can settle in P-NG, the greater will be our economic strength.

Even if soldier settlements are estab lished all over P-NG, the good Anglican missionaries of North-east Papua should not worry—there is plenty of room in the huge islands for hundreds of thousands of Europeans, plus the present li million natives. There is not the least chance, with the present Administrative set-up, that the natives will be “exploited.” As a matter of fact, they never were ex ploited. The myth of exploitation was deliberately created by the Wards and Evatts of Australia to open the way for the introduction of their disastrous Socialist Administration. That unhappy era is ended—or about to end.

The Anglican missionaries seem in clined to become emotional over the suf ferings and sacrifices and loyalties of the natives who carried for our troops in war time. Those natives gave splendid service —but the real heroes of that jungle war surely were the Australians and Ameri cans who fought it out to the death in the most ghastly campaigning terrain in the world. Do the Anglican missionaries ig nore the appeal and the logic of those endless lines of white crosses in the Aus tralian cemeteries of Papua-New Guinea?

The ‘‘Fuzzy-wuzzy Angels” were fine.

But if they had not been kept on the job by the example and spirit of the Australian soldiers they would never have been heard of.

If Australia does not hold New Guinea.

New Guinea almost certainly will be over run by Asiatics. Let the missionaries ask themselves what then would be the fate of the natives.

The Christian missionaries of Papua- New Guinea—and, prominent among them, the Anglicans of the north-east coast—have done a magnificent job. Let them, as in the past, give their energy and devotion to the mission field, and leave politics and policy-making to the realists of this tortured world. Otherwise, they may blot their record.