There Are Ladies In

The Snakepit Now

From an AAP-Reuter Correspondent in Port Moresby Two native girls are making history by setting out on possible careers as barmaids.

The girls, Joyce Mahiro and Mary Lewis, are getting their train ing in a hotel bar in Port Moresby known as “The Snakepit”.

The manager of the Moresby hotel, Mr. Anatole De V. Ivanoff said he hired the native girls because he had found the presence of females of the same race as native drinkers sharply reduced “rowdy and boorish behaviour”.

Ivanoff —known simply as “Mister Anatole” during his culinary catering days in Sydney and other centres —said he expected his experiment would spread throughout the Territory.

Legal drinking is comparatively new to natives of Papua-New Guinea—they gained the right only last November.

“The Snakepit” bar is known far and wide.

Before native drinking became legal it numbered among its customers —in the words of one Port Moresby resident—“respectable citizens, no-hopers, crocodile shooters and half-castes, not necessarily in that order”.

Since then, drinking patterns in Port Moresby and the Territory have changed considerably.

For the most part Europeans have withdrawn to hotel lounge bars and private clubs.

One barmaid — European—estimated that in any day of the week the percentage of natives in “The Snakepit” would “come close to 95 per cent”