Cause Of Cockeyed

Australians Need Educating

Cause Of Cockeyed Ideas On P-NG

“What’s needed isn’t just more ichools for promising Papuans but more schools for backward Aus tralians.”

A very senior officer of the Ad ninistration smiled as he spoke.

But it was a bitter smile (wrote Mr.

Douglas Wilkie, a correspondent of Melbourne “Herald”, in a despatch rom New Guinea in July). aE told me of the anger, resent ment and even despair of the white community here when tewspaper clippings come back from Lustralia of stories about the way lew Guinea natives are kicked round, exploited, segregated and iscriminated against.

The trouble is that a few of these bories —a very few—are true. Others re true, but false in so far as they ppear in quite a different light 'hen set in a fuller context.

The sum total of truth and ilsity is trifling when weighed gainst the enormous patience— normous is the only word —kindess and goodwill shown by a vast lajority of the whites in their very day dealings with natives.

Australian Second-Raters

Main exceptions are a residual nd fast vanishing breed of old me planters who have been too >ng in the country for the good f their lives, and newly arrived lungsters who have come to take ;mporary jobs in shops or work a building contracts.

They include second-raters in ustralia who delight in their first ranee to shout and shove around rnieone whom they can at last itisfy themselves is inferior to lemselves.

They also include foremen trades men who don’t take easily to the isk of supervising native labourers id junior tradesmen.

Doubtless the exasperation of the hiding foreman would be just as ircibly expressed down south if he ime up against the same sort of lefficiency and seeming sullenness i a weird mob on the job.

But add to this the human T)blem of dealing with people

hose temperament, language and

istoms he had not begun to under and and he may be tempted to be )me a raving nigger-driver or sack ie lot.

In fact, neither of these altern aves is allowed to eventuate but ie end compromise is good for either black nor white.

It inspires officialdom’s earnest

but, alas, impracticable desire that anyone coming up to wield any sort of authority in New Guinea —especially a little brief authority—should first be pushed through a course of primitive anthropology.

The White Man's Burden The overall result of Australia’s experiment in paternal colonialism is unlike anything attempted else where by the white man in the tropics.

Elsewhere the white man has taken up his burden in return not only for commercial profit but for an assurance of living conditions made tolerable by cheap native labour and financial privileges allowed him by his Government back home.

White settlement in New Guinea was a response to some of these inducements. It is not mere coincid ence that the 20,000 Australians in New Guinea outnumber the Aus tralians in Northern and Central Australia, which would be even more thinly populated today but for cheap aboriginal labour to lighten the white man’s unnatural burden.

But in New Guinea the burden is growing heavier proportionately as compensations for bearing it tend to decline.

Native labour, always inefficient, seems likely to become more ex pensive and under external political pressures—more unreliable faster than it becomes less in efficient.

NG Taxes and Wages Residents claim that the taxes they now pay direct and indirect are higher than in Australia, which doubtless looks good in the UN Trusteeship Council but not so good to the man who suffers the discom forts of New Guinea in order to save enough money to enjoy later the fair share of civilisation back home.

After more than half a century of “colonialism” Port Moresby still has much of the atmosphere of a frontier town in the midst of a curious sociological experiment—a halfway house between Charters Towers and Singapore.

It is a freak combination in which the comforts of Singapore are parodied in a few ramshackle forms and in which the white man’s burden is evident in the Australian doing much of the sheer physical labour while his wife bears the brunt of her own house-work.

Most housewives have native domestic help but more and more are finding that an automatic wash ing machine has economic ad vantages over employing a native “boy” at £2/10/- a week, plus pro viding him with quarters, medical care and rations for himself and as

many dependants as he can muster.

If the process continues until most of the whites find themselves going down economically as the black man comes up socially, they will begin to move out—all but a few dedicated civil servants.

It has not come to that. But it will unless Australia shows more psychological and practical sympathy with New Guinea settlers who are earnestly trying to help the native Papuans to share a common burden.

"Discrimination"

LMscnmmarion Until the native has been taught there will inevitably be cases of “discriminations” such as those against natives likely to spit betel nut juice in cinemas or to bring their skin ulcers and worse into club swimming pools.

Past Australian Governments and Australian taxpayers may be to blame for the persistence of betel juice and ulcers. But why blame the New Guinea whites for an elementary act of apartheid based not on dif ferent shades of skin colour but different levels of culture and hygiene?

On first impressions, I would prefer to judge the majority of New Guinea whites by a young Australian father working here, who told me his daughter would soon be going to primary school, I asked him if it was a mixed school for both whites and natives.

“I never thought of asking,” he said. “I expect so.”

His expectations were admirably correct but his not having troubled to ask wa»s perhaps even more ad mirable