Tropicalities

Pitcairn Island, the tiny, isolated home of the Bounty mutineers and their descendants for nearly 175 years, may be nearing the end of its romantic history. This is because the Pitcairners— by reputation strongly attached to their home soil—don’t seem to want to live on the island now, and are leaving it almost literally in droves.

AT the end of September, Pitcairn’s population was the smallest it had been since the early 1880’s.

More departures are imminent; and the Pitcairners, themselves, have begun to talk of the end.

The end could well come in the next couple of years as France pre pares its atomic testing centre at Mururoa Atoll, some 500 miles away.

In the nine months from December 31, 1962, to the end of September, Pitcairn’s population dropped from 128 to 98—or by almost 25 per cent.

Now there are barely enough able bodied men to man the long boats which are Pitcairn’s life-line to the outside world.

Pitcairn’s adult, able-bodied popu lation, in fact, is now only a little larger than it was when the Bounty mutineers settled on Pitcairn in January, 1790. There were then 15 men (nine mutineers and six Poly nesians), 12 Polynesian women, and one child. Now there are 19 men and 17 women between 16 and 60 years of age; 13 men and 13 women over 60; 31 children and five temporary residents. The number of men needed to man a long boat is 14.

According to veteran Pitcairner Roy Clark, who has lived on the island since 1909, there are several reasons why the islanders are desert ing their homeland.

Clark, who is American-born, and is the most articulate and thoughtful of present-day Pitcairners, has expressed his views in recent letters to Pitcairn Miscellany, the island’s roneoed monthly newspaper.

He says the Pitcairners are clear ing out because of: • The menace of radio-active fall out from France’s proposed atomic testing centre at Mururoa. • Insufficient ships calling at the island to enable the Pitcairners to obtain enough money, through the sale of their curios, to maintain

the standard of living they have become accustomed to. • The lure of high wages and a more exciting life in New Zealand. • Dissatisfaction over the fact that 15 families on the island receive Government pay while the other 14 do not. • Ever-increasing sickness, which has necessitated the departure of some islanders to New Zealand, from where they are reluctant to return. • Too much hard work for the few able-bodied men remaining on the island. • Blights, destructive insects and weeds which are making it in creasingly difficult to obtain food from the soil.

O Termites and wood borers that are wreaking havoc in the island dwellings. (The termites were introduced into Pitcairn several years ago in a church organ, a gift from New Zealand). • Lack of trees for lumber to en able the islanders to repair or rebuild their houses. (Two hundred years ago, Pitcairn was covered with trees, but clearing and burning have since practically denuded it). • Complaints by both young and old that Pitcairn holds no future for them.

In one of his most recent letters to Pitcairn Miscellany, Clark said it could be plainly seen that the only future for Pitcairn was decadence.

“Pitcairn,” he went on, “has not escaped the general downfall of civilisation, and has entered a vortex of unrest and uncertainty that, so it would seem, cannot be unravelled so as to restore peace and contentment and a well-balanced political and ecclesiastical situation,”

Clark’s statement on the lack of ships calling at Pitcairn was amplified in the same issue of Pitcairn Miscellany by its editor, Mr. S. A.

Cinder, who is the island’s school naster.

“Pitcairn,” he said, “is facing a erious financial problem. Due to he removal of the New Zealand Ihipping Company’s passenger ships —each of which carried up to 400 lassengers on this route —the income if the individual members of the ommunity has been reduced [rustically.

“Whereas, two years ago, we had egular calls from both the New Zealand Shipping Company’s ships nd the four Shaw Savill ships— -7 eramic, Corinthic, Gothic and ithenic —the latter are the only ones hat come our way today.

“The maximum passenger comple nent in each of these vessels is about 10, but on numerous occasions, they ravel with considerably fewer than apacity; and recently one of them :alled with only five passengers on >oard.”

Mr. Kinder said that to maintain he standard of living that had been ichieved over the years through the ale of curios, it seemed as if the

islanders would have to turn to other means of making money—and he suggested that coffee-raising and dried bananas were two potential industries.

In an editorial on Pitcairn’s future, Mr. Kinder agreed with Clark that, with the island’s population likely to be reduced even further by departures to New Zealand, decadence did seem to be the island’s only future.

“But,” he said, “will this prove to be the case? Since the founders of the community landed here from the Bounty, there have been several times when the island has faced predicaments of a similar nature— although not through the same causes —and surmounted them.”

• See "Last of the McCoys Dies on Pitcairn", page 125.

Cups of Tea and Hard

Work Build CWA

Although few visitors to Papua-New Guinea can fail to notice the part beer plays in the social life of the Territory, its monu ments to tea-drinking are not so conspicuous. But they exist.

Port Moresby’s £20,000 Country Women’s Association building was not all built by drinking tea—but tea helped. The work of CWA in P-NG began in 1951, when the Territory was still in its active stage of post-war rehabilitation; and when the demand for accommodation by families on the move was in inverse ratio to what was available.

The inaugural meeting of the Port Moresby branch of CWA was held that year and the ladies went to work soon after on fund raising the hard way. The Ela Protestant Church lent them their tin hut beside the church in Douglas Street. Mem bers of the association soon turned it into tea and rest rooms which were worked on a roster system — roster-workers not only supplying their labour but the cakes and sandwiches as well.

By 1956 the CWA had saved enough money to approach the Minister for Territories for a subsidy and when the Australian Government weighed in with £4,500 an early start was made on the present building.

Subsequent additions have extended the pleasant bed-room block where out-of-town women and their children may live at modest cost while awaiting hospital treatment or conducting other business in the town; and now it has large meeting and recreation rooms that are used by the members and also hired out to other organisations to augment CWA income.

But the CWA still makes tea. In fact, it’s making a great deal more tea now than it ever did before.

Not only is it still the only place in Port Moresby where, for the price of a few shillings, you can have morning tea or a light luncheon served with elegance and in pleasant surroundings, but the association goes in for such mammoth tea-making tests as supplying the morning and afternoon refreshments at meetings of the P-NG Legislative Council.

In this capacity theirs is the task of supplying buttered scones and sandwiches in such quantities that they fill even the hollow legs of the native observers at Legco, who obviously regard tea-breaks as com pensation for having to spend the rest of the time clamped into head phones, listening to political speeches.

Although Port Moresby CWA was first in the field it was soon followed by others. Sogeri Branch was formed in 1951; Madang, NG, and Samarai, Papua, followed in 1953; Popondetta was formed in 1956; Goroka in 1961 and Wewak, NG, in 1962.

All these branches have their own buildings or are in process of getting them. All are dedicated to work ing for women, girls and children in the Territory, to providing a means whereby they can get together socially or to work together as a group; and to providing pleasant accommodation for outport women when they must visit the town centres.

The CWA held its first Territory wide conference in Port Moresby

rom September 10 to 12 this year /hen all of the branches except iamarai were able to send delegates d undertake a crowded programme if business and social engagements.

Twenty Papuan women were in ited to attend the conference as ibservers but although native women re eligible to join the association ew have as yet done so —most of hem preferring to join their own women’s clubs.

One of the resolutions passed at he conference was that every branch »f CWA should extend the work it s already undertaking in helping jative women form their women’s :lubs and in giving them lessons in :hild-care, cooking, and other vomanly skills.

the Kukukuku Aren't

What They Used To Be

rHE old-time misogynists of the Australian gold-fields had a laying that when the women and ?oats arrived it was time to move Dn. The old-time miners of Morobe, New Guinea, could well have paraphrased it and said that when ;he Kukukuku were tamed it would be time for everyone to get out. Life then would surely have lost its old New Guinea flavour.

On this criterion the time could well be approaching. The Kukukuku (pronounced Kooka-kooka) still have their lapses but Nemesis in the way of civilisation seems to be catching up with them too, in a way that once would have been thought impossible.

These small people who inhabit a large area of Morobe District, New Guinea, and the Central District of Papua, were once regarded as the hatchet-men par excellence of P-NG, They put the fear of the devil into the early miners in Morobe —and that went double for the early miners’ carriers who fell into Kukukuku ambushes all along the back-breaking tracks between Wau and Salamaua.

The Kukus were regarded as re calcitrant and untameable before the war and even after the war, when there was more patrol activity in the very heart of their country, progress was slow. Anthropologists, who usually try to see the best side of any primitive people, were unable to come up with any redeeming culture patterns for them.

The Kukukuku weren’t artists; they didn’t go for decorating themselves with Bird of Paradise feathers; danc ing mostly left them cold. By and

large, they were just primitives who liked to dress in anonymous bark cloaks and whose whole culture and hobbies revolved around fighting, A lot of this now is, however, in the past tense. It was the thin edge of the wedge some years ago when Wau farmers induced some Kukukuku to pick coffee and some others were employed on local milk runs. But now they are actually signing on as contract labour and going away to

work on plantations in Bougainville and New Britain.

There are currently about 800 on contract and they are reported to be good workers, indistinguishable from any other time-expired workers when they return home, and while away from their own districts, no trouble at all.

What’s more, there is a very good chance that a reformed Kukukuku, dressed in what goes for gent’s natty

suiting in the Territory, will take tiis place in the new House of As sembly when it meets for the first :ime about April next year.

About 25,000 of the 40,000 in the Kaindi open electorate are Kukukuku (the others are closely akin but deadly enemies), and unless they refuse to play at all, victory for any candidates of theirs should be a push-over.

Some Kukukuku are, of course still capable of—as the Pidgin expression has it—getting up no good. This was the case with some of them near Menyamya a couple of years ago when they decided to go over to the Papuan side of the border and there teach a certain village something about political advancement. They “lined” the whole village—as the patrol officer does for census—and then fell upon them and butchered them. Only two people escaped—an old man who refused to come out of his house and got through the back of it when they later set it alight and a youth who left the line-up for private business of his own in the bush.

The murderers were finally rounded up near Menyamya and taken to Papua for trial, as the crime was committed there. They confessed and were found guilty but the Crown Law Department decided that the murderers had not been properly warned before they confessed and they sent the case to the Australian High Court where it got bogged down for two years.

Fortunately for the peace of mind of the murderers —who understand the law of an eye-for-an-eye and nothing about the intricacies of British justice—the original verdict was upheld.

They are now serving something like seven years in Papua.

Familiar P-NG Faces

Will Be Missing

THE coming 12 months or so will be a vintage year for retirements amongst the top brass of Papua-New Guinea’s public service.

Mr. Keith McCarthy, Director of Native Affairs, is due to retire to wards the end of 1964; and Mr. H.

L. Niall, who entered the service with him and is now District Commis sioner, Morobe, is due for retirement about the same time. However, Mr.

Niall will probably retire in January, 1964, to stand for election in the new House of Assembly.

Ivan Champion, a Territorian-true, born in Papua, and now Chief Native Lands Commissioner, will retire at

the beginning of 1964. He is one of the last of a dying race of explorers.

Between the wars there was little of Papua that he did not walk over.

On retirement, he is going South to live, but will be doing something peculiarly Ivanish—he is going back to sea as skipper of the old Laura bada.

Laurabada was for years the Papuan Government vessel and Ivan Champion was, for periods, her master. She was bought about nine years ago by private interests, has been completely reconditioned and will soon enter coastal and inter island trading.

Mr. H. H. Reeve, now Assistant

400TH ISSUE: Readers with a mathematical turn of mind may be interested to know that this is the 400th issue of RIM. The first issue appeared in August, 1930.

Administrator (Finance), formerly P-NG Treasurer, is also believed to (be retiring next year; Mr. J. R.

Foldi, District Commissioner, New Britain, reaches retirement in 1964, but will probably stay on for an extra 12 months; and Mr. D. E. Maclnnes, Director of Lands, Surveys and Mines, “goes finish” to Sydney at the end of this year.