Putters-Back of Clocks

A Reader Thinks Old-Timers Should Be Dumped

Letter to the Editor IDO not know whether it was accident or design that those two articles appeared side by side on pages 90 and 91 of June PIM.

Appropriately on our left, a Comrade spoke his piece. On the right, some old shell-back with a grouch, moans that someone is spoiling the Papuans.

Having had their say, both parties should now be put in a weighted sack and committed to the Deep.

Of the two I find it easier to forgive the Comrade. He at least knows no better; or is deliberately using the Brown Brother stuff for his own propaganda purposes. Mr. E. L. A. Beach, however,

whatever his own personal feelings, should have enough sense by now to realise that his kind of rabid conserva tism has provided more pegs for Socialists and Reformers to hang hats on than any other single factor.

I have read through the list of his woes and the burden of his song seems to be annoyance that these two Papuans actually ate with knives and forks like pure-white Europeans.

I wager that I am as good a Territorian as “Mr. Beach" and I certainly hold no brief for any Papuan or any other native.

I do not believe that the world owes them a living just because they happen to exist; or that, necessarily, the Melan esians or Polynesians or any of the so called backward races, would have reached the same degree of civilisation as the Europeans if given the same chance—if you follow that argument back to the beginning when the first man crawled out of some bit of dirt in Meso potamia, it does not hold water. But if Papuans can observe our social habits and niceties I cannot see that it is such a cataclysm when two of them appear at a public function in a country that does not have the same feeling of race super iority as our friend from Port Moresby.

OtTR Mr. B. apparently does not believe that old saw about doing as the Romans do, while in Rome. In P-NG the members of the various races keep to themselves. OK—that is something belonging to P-NG. In Australia, al though most Australians consider them selves socially superior to the nomadic aborigines of the Nullabor Plains, none of them would draw the line at attending a public function with the aboriginal tenor, Harold Blair. (I do not include that other star in Australia’s cultural firmament, Namatjira, as, according to June PIM he still eats witchetty grubs.) Guess Mr. B. is too old to change now; but if he reads his PIM closely he must have observed that what is happening to the Papuans now, happened to the Fijians (also Melanesians) three quarters of a century ago—no doubt accompanied by the dire predictions of the Europeans living there at the time.

There still is a proportion of the Fijians who are flash guys, bad eggs and plain poor types; but, on the whole, it is agreed that they have come out of it rather well —about 100 per cent, loyal to the hand that nurtured them. They have never “asked for their plantation back” and they have never shown any indica tion of “kicking the Europeans out of the land they developed and civilised.”

But I imagine that they do feel “equal to Europeans” (whatever that is).

What did those Papuans actually do at Brisbane’s Anzac lunch? Burp in their soup, get tight, or make themselves ob jectionable? A great many Australian ex diggers can perform pretty well along all those lines.

Mr. B. may feel that two Papuans at a public luncheon in Brisbane is the thin edge of a revolution in P-NG. He can not help what he feels. But he should try to prevent himself from writing it. Hark ing back to what was done or not done in those “good old days” is tedious and useless. It is about time someone started to make a job of the present.

In my humble opinion the European has just about had it: there are not enough thinking, commonsense, middle of-the-roaders left to keep our society sane. We waste our energy from within.

At one end of the scale we have all the Mr. B’s. wringing their hands and trying to put the clock back; and, at the other, there are the rainbow-chasing theorists, reforming crackpots and political oppor tunists. In the middle, like a great lump of raw dough, is the mob, whose chief interests are beer, horse-racing, food,

fornication, and the movies, in that order, and whose greatest cultural stimulant is reading the Sunday papers.—l am, etc.,

Martin Mackinlay.

Sydney, June 20.