It Mightn't Do For The Duke , Si

BE informal with the Duke, warned Australia’s Acting Prime Min ister, Sir Arthur Fadden, re cently-taking time off from an nouncing more taxes and further import restrictions to do so.

But Sir Arthur is right; inform ality is about the only thing that will save the Duke of Edinburgh’s 2 h November days in Port Moresby- Lae-Rabaul from being just the usual big run-round.

The programme announced in early June contains the regulation number of official calls, Girl Guides, Boy Scouts, native villages, and official dinners. It is what the Duke manages to see and do in the exceedingly limited time between these official duties that will make the visit memorable for the Duke — not a carbon copy of something that has happened to him a thousand times before.

The Duke of Edinburgh has seen Girl Guides everywhere from Nigeria to Nukualofa. And eaten dinner at Government Houses everywhere from Nairobi to Suva. The towns of Moresby, Lae and Rabaul — pleasant as they are—are duplicated scores of times all over the tropical world.

There are also more impressive hydro-electricity schemes than that at Rouna Falls —which as yet has set up no records except in the time that it has taken to build it.

But the Territory of Papua and New Guinea contains some of the few remaining, untouched, areas of the earth. Scientists from all over the world converge upon it to study its bird-life, its natives, its butter flies, its geology, its geography.

In the remoter outposts—at Tari and Mendi in the Southern High lands; at Menyamya, in the Morobe District; at Telefomin, in the Sepik, and at other places, a handful of young Australians are still on the fringe of contact with a primitive Stone-Age people.

If someone with bold and revolu tionary thought had arranged for Prince Phillip to spend his meagre 2i days in the Territory in one of these places, he might have learned a great deal more about the problems of taming a vast and back ward land than he would from a similar period of hand-shaking in the coastal towns, or from reading the reports of UN’s Visiting Missions.

This is not an “official” Royal Tour—or so we are informed. It is for

the Duke’s own purposes, so that H might learn something of the li; and problems of our few remainir frontiers.

Yet, in the programme set out fi him, we see all the old signs of schedule arranged more for tH entertainment and glorification the hosts than for the amusemei of the guest: Boy Scouts ar guards-of-honour and hand-shakin ad nauseam, the whole hedg» around by a swarm of press n porters and photographers.

The only thing that we do not si on the stereotyped agenda is tl presentation of a walking-stick—br it is unlikely that the Duke w: be spared even this. On the 1953 Royal Tour he collected about dozen of these tokens of esteen The fact that he is a young ma and does not use a stick should n. prevent Papua and New Guinea froi making this conventional gesture