Tropicalities

Pacific Islands Monthly

Magazine Section

Tarawa Today

Hfre is “A Short Guide to Tarawa” as the Gilbert and Ellice glands monthly news- ‘is the Colony Head- Christmas (anything up to y 2,000

Imorphous collection o£ telegraphic

iddresses each with a penchant lending ridiculous, a S| n ce nfuriating signals At that distance

■Jolaudit, Trade, Educaiiuii,

ind SECGOV are all one part of °a bffcloser. Tarawa -ufns out to a be quite different from Ihe headquarters, capitals, or what have-you of other places.lt is, like Gaul, split into three parts 1 , but the separating element is water and not a !n nC thT a western tip of the atoU lies Betio, home of the Wholesale Society, the wirel^%^ e atl Co-operatives, and the DiStne Commissioner’s station. Fom miles to the east lies the islet of Bairiki, the administrative centre of the Colony, with Secretariat, Treasury, and Audit plying their pens and adding machines aiongside the white-collar section of the Works Department. And then, 16 miles over two reefs passages, is Bikenibeu, the home of the Education and Medical Departments, the hospital schools, the pedagogues and m What' follows in inevitable Betio becomes known as the wild and boisterous dockland. Quite in offensive Administration co-operators, or clerks assume, when they have been in Betio a few weeks, a je ne sais quoi, an air of raffish brigandage. They are the rough wharfies, the teddy-boys (inclined to sport side whiskers) and the city slickers; they’ve seen the seamy side of life and. of course, they are rebels. Authority should be observe* d if you’re likely to get caught, but if you can get away with it, then. what’s a vote book for anyway?

That is Betio, rough, tough and rather disreputable.

The contrast at Bairiki is strik ing. Houses are in rows, and life is ordered. Roads are well swept and the solid respectability of a middle class suburb lies all around. To the

imperturbable officers of Baniki the smell of copra, the creak of winches, ships setting sail for Christmas Island, Abemama or Amsterdam are all things to read of m a file.

The outside world is, for them, peopled with lesser beings who seek permission or advice, who make elementary errors of addition, and strange rustics who seem unwilling to acknowledge the infallibility and the impermeability of General Orders and Financial Instructions.

To everyone else, Bairiki is where “they” live. It is the land of they .

It would not take Bairiki long to put its stamp of conscious

superiority on any provincial

peasant, but it is generally admitted that it would find the frontiersmen of Bikenibeu the hardest nuts to crack. (“You have to cut their tails off first, you see”). Here again we have rebels, but of a different ilk.

Men are men in Bikenibeu and it is sheer ignorance of the law, and

using ignorance in its purest sense of nescience, that makes them rebels. One would like to see them thunder into Bairiki and tie up their steaming horses to the hitch ing bar of the club. That cannot be, but even so, the Land-Rovers from Bikenibeu are driven with a panache quite foreign to the low-gear Olympians of Bairiki, and the out landish dress, the unsophisticated language and quaint customs of the outback, when seen in the metro polis, add charm and interest to fhp QPPHP All this adds up to Tarawa, a gem of many facets.

The Mixture As Before rjIHE dalo men will eat dalo, the X curry men curry, and the remainder will eat dry hash in Fiji’s gaols, as in the past. At least that appeared to be the outcome of a recent Legislative Council debate on the subject of a standard prison diet. .

The question of a standard diet had been raised by the Fourth Fijian Member, Semesa Sikivou.

He said that he felt there should be no discrimination in standards of accommodation, and that as far as religious beliefs permitted, there should be a common diet for all.

He said: “I don’t believe in certain prisoners being allowed to sleep on mattresses while others are not allowed mattresses, and I don’t believe in some people getting bread and jam while others don’t.

Whm these things are done on a racial basis it is wrong”.

No other member had comment on the mattresses, but when it came to the turn of the Director of Medical Services, Dr. Dill-Russell, he commented on the diet question.

Dr. Dill-Russell admitted that there was a diet scale laid down for Europeans, Fijians, and Indians, There was a great difference in the staple diet of the three races in Fiji, he said. The Europeans did not in general eat what the Indians ate, nor did the Fijians eat what the Europeans ate. .

At that juncture Semesa Sikivou rose to interject that he entirely disagreed and that he was extremelj disappointed with the Director ol Medical Services Dr. Dill-Russell repeated There is a difference in the diet of the three races and I do not believe that a common diet could be introduced”.

Post Offices Please Copy

MAIL comes in lots of differen ways but the other day hen in Lae we had a sample o the bamboo mail. The letter wa from medical student Michae Powell, of Lae, who was on patrc

According to the poet it was ' stout Cortex who, with eagle eye, first looked on the Pacific . . . "silent upon a peak in Darien .

But the poets are notoriously bad historians and the Panamanians, anyhow, know that it was in fact Balboa who first saw the not always Pacific Ocean. Here, in effigy, Balboa looks Pacific-wards from Panama City—as roving editor Judy Tudors camera sees him.

in the Sarawagat Ranges, which run roughly down the centre of the Huon Peninsula, and it was ad dressed to his mother in Lae. He encased it in bamboo, tied it with adhesive tape, cut the address into the bamboo, and then a runner brought it in a lot quicker time than some of the mail we get across from Port Moresby. And was de livered right to the front door, with a broad smile! — Pat.

Robbery On the Queen's Highways

SUVA City Council is considering installation of parking meters.

Some people in Suva are for it and some are agin it, and among the agins is Mr. A. H. Marlow, rep resenting the Automobile Associa tion, who has gone on record as saying: “These are the Queen’s highways. Why should we have to pay for parking? We pay enough in wheel tax and licences.”

We’re all for Mr. Marlow.

From what we’ve seen, parking meters can be highway robbery. In Sydney, since the meters were in stalled there a few short years ago, ostensibly to ration space in the

busiest streets, they have blossomed out to streets, and even to suburbs, where they are used merely as a tax gathering gimmick. Some people now have to pay to park in front of their own houses! Suva beware!

They've Dragons in NG

CARNIVOROUS, tree- climbing “dragons” which will attack humans if provoked are well known to coastal natives of Papua- New Guinea, according to P-NG Patrol Officer Ian Gibbons. He said natives had told him the “dragons” grew to 20 feet in length, and lived on the flesh of wallabies and other animals.

“I believe these giant lizards are ‘Komona Dragons’, which generally are believed to exist only on the Japanese island of Komono”, Gibbons said.

“Wherever I have gone in the coastal districts of TGE Territory where wallabies are common, I have found natives who know of these dragons.

“In several places I had natives do drawings of the dragons, which they call tree climbing crocodiles,”

Gibbons said.