The O’Keefe Story

Death of Mrs. Janie Brown

END of a chapter in the O’Keefe saga came on March 4 this year with the death of Mrs. Brown O’Keefe —O’Keefe’s daughter, Janie —on Biak Island, Dutch New Guinea. Mrs. Brown was 73, and had been ill for some time.

This news has come to us from Mr. Fred Ellis, who with other members of his family, has been associated with the O’Keefe family all his life. He is the son of a Welshman, who was mate on one of O’Keefes schooners, and the grandson of Radja Marwedi, of Mapia.

Ellis, with his brother and sister, were on the Mapia plantations with Mrs. Brown, Mrs. Eugenia Scott O’Keefe and Miss Daisy Q’Keefe when the Japs arrived in 1942. They were all sent by ship to Indonesia and spent the years of internment there.

During the war, about £30,000 worth of damage was done to the plantations and installations on Mapia but Mrs. Brown—the ack nowledged head of the family— could get no compensation from either the Dutch or the Americans and the two elder sisters lived, since the war, in somewhat straitened circumstances in Biak.

We understand that the Ellis

family and Mrs. Scott recently went back to Mapia and intend to clean up the plantations and work them and also to organise trochus fish ing thereabouts.

A Government -meteorological station, with Ellis in charge, has been installed at Mapia to supply

weather notes for aircraft—Mapij lies directly on the KLM Biak Manila air route.

Mr. Ellis says that Mrs. Brown was a noted beauty in her youth and travelled extensively in Europe and the East before settling on Mapia permanently in the 30’s

f She was educated in Hongkong and after her marriage to Mr.

William S. Brown, an English marine engineer, lived in London for a number of years. At one stage of her life she managed the Station Hotel at Kowloon, on the mainland opposite Hongkong.

Mrs. Eugenia Scott O Keefe now inherits the Mapia property.