Probably be a Navigation
p. 50 · Read in the full issue
Coastwatchers’
Memorial
Probably be a Navigation Light
MORE than £l5OO of the target £2,000 for the Coastwatchers’
Memorial Fund had already been collected in early October. In the hope that the last £5OO will be forthcoming before Christmas, the Committee (c/o Naval Intelligence Division, Navy Office, Melbourne, S.C.I) is making a final drive.
Recently the fund received a don ation of £3 from Siarua, Giwa (his wife) and Eima (an adopted daugh ter), who work on Mr. Fred Archer’s plantation at Jame, Buka Passage.
These three natives were with the Coastwatchers during the war and some of their adventures have been told in FIM by Mr. Archer. They escaped in a submarine to BSI in 1943.
The Memorial will probably take the form of a navigation light which will certainly be appropriate and useful among the thousands of miles of New Guinea’s unlighted coastal waters.
Let us hope that the memorial light goes to Bougainville, where Coastwatchers did some of their most important work and which boasts a maze of coral reefs, and not one light among them. The names of the Coastwatchers would
then be twice blessed particu larly by mariners who now, if they wish to crawl out of these “ports” in darkness, send a boat out first to hang a kerosene lantern on a stick off the worst of the reefs.
II A former Anglican, and the first Benedectine Abbot ever to visit Fiji,
Dom Wilfrid Upson, 0.5.8., Abbot of Pinknash Abbey, Gloucester England, paid a four-day visit tc the Colony recently. He addressed £ crowded congregation at the Sacrec Heart Cathedral, Suva, and was ac corded a ceremonial Fijian recep tion at Votua, before continuing hi! journey home by air from Australia