Do You Remember?

From PIM of 20 Years ago.

ALTHOUGH the price of copra was still at a disastrously low level, strangely, we said little about it in our March, 1934, issue of PIM. Although planters every where were still taking it in the neck financially, most of our news that month concerned New Guinea and Papua, where gold-mining was very much the thing. In those days “Gold” and “New Guinea” were almost synonymous terms. A great many of the advertisements con

cerned gold mining machinery, or

were directed at gold miners.

Here are some other extracts from the March, 1934 issue: Japanese MOP poachers were reported up around the Torres Strait. It was said that, as well as stealing shell, they were trafficking in lubras, ruining the northern shell beds and causing prices of MOP to fall. * * * Due to representations of the Governor of Fiji, Sir Murchison Fletcher, who had journeyed to Australia for that purpose, it was reported that Australia ‘‘take a more reasonable attitude on the importation of Fiji bananas in future.” (Hard results seemed, subsequently, to be nil; Australia did not get any more Fiji bananas). * * * Another expedition, all British this time, had set out from Papeete, Tahiti, for Cocos Island. They hoped to dis cover the Peruvian treasure said to have been buried here in the days of pirates and Spanish galleons. * * * Mr. O. F. Nelson, Man leader in Western Samoa, was convicted of sedition after a long-drawn-out trial in Apia, and had been sentenced to 10 years’ exile in NZ as well as eight months’ imprisonment.

He had, only a few months previously, returned to Western Samoa from five years banishment in NZ. * * * Prohibition had ended in USA and we reported “. The S-masted vessel •Marechal Foch’, now owned by the heirs of Pere Kogier has just returned to Papeete after delivering the last load of whisky to the bootleggers’ mother-ship stationed off the Mexican coast. V* said that Tahiti mourned the end of this profitable grog-running industry. * * * Under a heading: “Twin Sisters Spit at Each Other,”, we said that the plan to amalgamate Papua and New Guinea was not popular. A Rabaul correspondent wrote ‘‘The Legislative Council scorns

the idea and insists that NG be left alone to develop along her own lines.” A Port Moresby correspondent had this to say; “. . .So New Guinea thinks it would be an ‘insufferable indignity’ to be tied to a ‘stagnant Territory like Papua.’ Let us say that Papua has never seriously considered the idea . . . Papua has not the slightest wish to be merely a port of entry and recruiting ground for NG.” * * * There had been a series of clashes between wild bush natives and Ad ministration forces, NW of the Morobe goldfields area in New Guinea. One European, Captain B. McGrath, prospect ing for a Melbourne mining syndicate, had been killed by natives and in a six hours’ battle between native police under District Officer E. Taylor, 19 natives were killed and 16 wounded. There were also some wounded on the Administration side. (And strangely enough, there then was no one in New Guinea or without, to shout “Mau-Mau uprising!”)