Baby Sitting Comes

Easier At South Seas’

First Drive-In

From Renata Cochrane, in Port Moresby

In London, Paris and New York fortunes are being spent these days in creating a South Seas

atmosphere. Girls, suspiciously un-Polynesian,

undulate on a tiny stage while hidden fans set up a rustle of the Trade Winds in dusty palm leaves, and exotic phoney perfumes drift across the tobacco-laden air.

While the great capitals of civilisation do their best to attain the charm of the Islands, Port Moresby has recently opened with fanfares its

streamlined, asphalted, piped-in, organised,

American-type drive-in picture theatre. We have just paid a visit to it.

IT’S called the Skyline Drive-In, and white overalled Papuans with musical comedy caps were lined up to wave us to our parking space with the aid of long, important-looking torches. We found no scent of frangipani, but there was the comfortable smell of fish and chips, coffee and hamburgers.

We could buy them at a modern glittering snack bar

and take them to our car or have our steak and barbecued chicken at small tables set out on a brightly lit patio.

We could even have a bottle of wine or a glass of beer with our dinner! (However, the police were not in favour of this, so the licence was granted for a temporary trial period of only two months).

The Port Moresby Skyline is the first drive-in picture theatre in the South Pacific. It’s operated as a partnership of Far Northern Theatres, of Cairns, and D. C. Watkins, of Port Moresby, and it’s an £85,000 project built at the old war-time bomber base of Ward’s Strip. It was opened on July 7, and takes 300 cars a “sitting”.

There is no dressing up at this theatre. Mum comes in tight pants, dad in a beach shirt and shorts, the children in pyjamas. But the well organised family also takes a bottle of mosquito repellent. For Waigam swamp is not far away and mosquitos

all concrete and spick-and-span uniforms at the South Pacific's drive-in theatre, opened in Port Moresby in July. The giant [?] overlooks once busy, now overgrown. Ward's bomber strip, a of the Pacific War. There is a restaurant on the drive-in site, [?]e employees take the cash from the customers, and adjust the speakers used by car drivers out for their night at the pictures.

no respecters of capital invest t m will probably find you are i doing your baby sitting in :of that giant screen. Most of :ars are festooned with cushions pillows and one by one the small s that bobbed up and down so edly at first subside and drop of sight. By the time interval es only the bigger children are to go with dad to buy an ice n or a cold drink, hat do you see on that giant hair screen? bthing very new, for drive-in Motors tell you their policy is to r only second releases. They to attract the family audience, mum and dad can catch up on ilms they missed while they were '-sitting. Admission price for the Iren is only 1/6. isitors will notice one difference, re are no native people among the ence. They won’t take their ey, and you can’t invite them, >ly because the law in the Terri insists that all pictures to be vn to the native people must be ed by an Administration censor, here are some people who think films passed by mainland censors fid be good enough to show to in P-NG, and the powers

that-be are doing their best to have the out-dated and frustrating circumstances altered. But like the drink question it is a problem that is con stantly being shelved.

When the show was all over our engine roared into life, in company with all the others, we put our loud speaker carefully back on the stand outside our window and began to head for home. The road in that area is not the horror stretch that it was (before the drive-in people came) but you still have to be very careful as you skirt Ward’s Strip.

Behind you, the bright lights go out on a good night’s entertainment,