Do Yor Remember?

“Britain in all her colonising cannot equal what Australia has done in her first colonising effort,” said a West Australian MP, A. E.

Green, when he returned to Australia after a visit to New Guinea, in August, 1938. Said PIM: Anyone but a jaunting politician would know that Australia, officially, could take little credit for colonisation in New Guinea—progress since the German days was all from the private-enterprise development of Morobe goldfields.

Here are some other extracts from the PIM, August issue, of 20 years ago; Birth of the air age: Royal Dutch Air lines and associated companies, announced that London was “only eight days away from Sydney” via Brisbane, Dutch East Indies, India, Egypt, and the Continent.

The through fare was £l6O (plus ex change) which “includes all hotel accom modation, meals and tips en route, and proves itself, in actual figures, an in expensive mode of travel, clipping weeks off the journey to England”. (In the inter vening years, the air-fare, Sydney-London, along the same route has risen by a little under three times; and the elapsed time of the journey cut to a little over one third. Which is fair enough). * * * An ingot of gold, valued at £2,000, had been stolen from a safe in the Wan, NG, office of New Guinea Goldfields, Ltd. As this represented anything up to 500 oz of gold, at the prevailing price for Morobe gold, it was believed that no one could get the ingot out of the Territory—all in one piece, anyway. All travellers leaving were being examined by the police. * * % Writing from the Dutch East Indies, that peripatetic US pre-war journalist,

Marc T. Green, had a lot to say. One thing was that he thought Willard Price’s “stuff is absolute rot’’; another that we “need not concern ourselves with Japan”, which would be so weakened by her China adventure that she would not be “any menace to anyone for a long time to come, of ever again”. In the light of subsequent history, it seems that it might have been Marc T. who was writing absolute rot. (Oddly, after Pearl Harbour PIM never heard from him again.) * * * Pan American’s giant flying - boat, “Hawaii Clipper”, disappeared on a routine flight between Manila and Guam.

Six passengers and nine crew disappeared with her. This was another set-back to the projected trans-Paciflc service to NZ.

The first had been the destruction, by ex plosion, of “Samoa Clipper”, in the South Pacific, in the previous January. * * * Hot arguments against the creation of a new New Guinea capital at Salamaua— as decided under the Hughes-McNicoll plan—were in full spate. Cost of establish ing the capital there was estimated at £900,000 —including £250,000 for reclaim ing the swamp. “Do you see them spend ing that kind on money on New Guinea,” demanded one irate Territorlan.