Where Should The

Ng Natives

Be Paid Off?

ON this question of where time expired labourers in Papua and New Guinea can be most con veniently paid off, it is interesting to examine the practices of former years (writes Mr. S. H. Chance, a former RM in Papua).

On the Manus plantations in 1920 most of the natives from othfer districts were sent with their con tracts of service to Rabaul, and there paid off and sent home. This system was bad. The locals were paid off at Lorengau, and were able to buy their needs locally, at Makaring, and get home with them.

This was a good system.

In the Western Islands (the H. R.

Wahlen-GMBH concerns) the pay ing off of labourers in “trade” was still permitted (early 1920). The common labourers were very prim itive and it would take 6 months to tame them enough so they would not go bush when a white overseer appeared. A trade-box of goods was made up at the local store, and the T/E labourers would be handed it, with no questions asked or desired.

All the goods were invoiced out, and all seemed fair; but such a system could not possibly work these days!

In Papua, for many years after 1922, paying-off was mainly in Samarai or Moresby. The natives would be herded into the stores, and expected to spend most of their earnings! What was not thieved from them (or lost in gambling) before they got home was, appar ently, no concern of the employers.

This system was wholly had. Trade stores along the coast were kept mostly by poor-white types, and the goods available were so much trash. Once, on my way to the Delta Division with about 60 “Pay offs,” several boxes were lifted from the native owners while their at tention was distracted, and the re sult (bad for recruiting) was that the “pay-offs” got home with next to nothing.

When the late Commissioner for Native Affairs, Mr. J. T. O’Malley, brought in, with certain exceptions a law enforcing “pay-off at home stations” he was attacked by every body except the outside traders (good types like Percy Hinds—who had to stock up with lots of good lines) and the shipmasters who got the freight on the bulk goods. That system worked admirably.

Except in very special cases, a native should always be paid off at the Government Station nearest his home. It is better for the native himself, and for his past and his

future employer; it makes for a healthier coastal shipping service, and decentralises the white popula tions, and the centres of industry, stores, etc. A good thing for any Territory.

An Auckland Provincial women’s hockey team is to visit Fiji for a short tour in July, arriving July 18 and returning at the end of the month. Managed by Miss P, Hick son, the fifteen players are paying their own expenses.

Twenty-year-old Diane Cilento, daughter of Sir Raphael and Lady Cilento, made a big hit in London recently in a Shaw play. She was born in NG when her father was CMO there.

Mr. H. Standen, of the Bamu River Mission, Papua, was in northern NSW on leave recently.