Field Day For Planes And Shutter-bugs

Like Mr. Wordsworth’s daffodils, these planes stretch in never ending line around the edges of Goroka airstrip, Eastern Highlands, New Guinea. There were 23 of them at this count, including one representative of the newest comer to P-NG aviation, Ansett-ANA.

The occasion was the 1900 Goroka Agricultural Show. It at tracted 500 visitors, who flew in and out in chartered planes from Lae Madang and Port Moresby in May, and something like 20,000 Highland natives, many of them—although not as many as in former years—in all their war paint, fur, feathers or plastered with mud.

The agricultural exhibits —which is what the show is supposed to be for, anyhow—were up to the standard of previous years, and maybe even better. (The Highlands produces everything from coffee to potatoes, and gladioli to strawberries, to perfection). And a lot of people seemed to get fun from the ring events. But the big thing at the Goroka show is the natives.

Wig-men came from Wabag; Mt. Hagen men were there in mob caps and string girdles; mud-men arrived in their hundreds from Asoro. A couple of years ago, these mud-men made their first coy appearance. This year they were coy no longer. Using the look out hill as a dressing room, house-boys and labour-line gentry were turning into mud-men behind every bush.

Estimate was that it was 200 mud-men (clothed in nothing more than a thick coating of grey mud, with a few ornaments in the most 'provocative places) who finally got together to stage a mock battle .

Judging by the noise, and the scrimmages, it could just as well have been 2,000.

Because of this feast of primitive native life —which is getting steadily less primitive year by year—Goroka Show is the mecca of every amateur and professional photographer in the Territory, and attracts people from overseas as well.

Virtually every European there is hung around with cameras, light meters and other photographic paraphernalia. Here and there you get the odd native who wants money for being a model, but by and large, these people pose endlessly, gracefully and just for the fun of it, for every shutter-bug who desires it.

Someone should think seriously of changing the name of the show to the Goroka Agricultural and Photographic Show.