It's Cannery Row, Ng

Cannnery Row in Monterey, California, is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. ... If you look through the peep hole into it you can see saints and angels, and martyrs and holy men.

That's the way John Steinbeck pictured it in his novel.

But Cannery Row, in the Western Highlands of New Guinea, is some what different to Steinbeck’s town ship because, for one thing, the New Guinea one exists. It’s at Mount Hagen, on the other side of the airfield—and it’s “home” for numbers of Administration em ployees with a sense of humour.

The houses in Hagen’s Cannery Row are made not of rusty iron and splintered wood but of native thatch and pit-pit. From Hagen’s Cannery Row you don’t see the sardine fleet go out, but you see the planes from the coast come in.

Seen below at the door of the single men’s quarters is Public Works Department tractor driver, Charlie Equinox, who left New Guinea for Australia a couple of days later after many years there and probably he won’t be going back. But not because he has any thing against the Palace Flop House.

A good place, said Charlie.