Yesterday

When PIM was published in February, 1944, Australia and New Zealand had just signed an agreement which provided for joint action on all matters arising out of war or post-war conditions affecting their common interests. Such matters in cluded defence, trade, air transport, migration, etc. The two countries also agreed to work in harmony with a South Pacific Regional Council, which was to be established.

OTHER items in the issue of PIM of 20 years ago were: Australian troops had overcome strong Japanese resistance in the rugged country above the Waria River on the New Guinea main land and had made gains in the Ramu Valley. * * ♦ After heavy attacks by US aircraft carriers and warships, American forces began invading the Marshall Islands on February 1, 1944. * * * With the departure of American troops, Western Samoa’s boom prosperity was on the wane.

Reporting this, PlM’s Apia correspondent said; “There is less war work, less laundry and less purchasing of curios; and the prospects are that, owing to the Pacific war moving to remoter regions, things will become worse —or rather, return to normal in the near future”. * * * According to a Sydney report, the Colonial Sugar Refining Company was thinking of with drawing from Fiji because war conditions and “the bad behaviour” of a large section of Fiji’s Indian sugar-growers had severely dislocated the sugar in dustry there. * * * After four eventful years as the Melanesian Mission’s medical officer at the central hospital Fauabu, BSIP, Dr. J. D. Thomson had resigned to take a private practice in Christchurch, NZ. * * * An announcement in Tahiti that Miss Alice Levy had given Queen Pomare s Bible to a committee to

sell for the benefit of the Fighting French War Fund caused such a fuss that the priceless volume was withdrawn from sale. The Bible, the first copy of the book to be printed in Tahitian, was presented to Queen Victoria by its translator, the Rev. Henry Nott, in the 1830’s.

Queen Victoria, in turn, presented it to Tahiti’s Queen Pomare.

Later, no one knows how, the Bible passed out of the hands of the Pomare family and, eventually, into the hands of Miss Levy. ♦ * * Two boys and two girls, the children of British residents in Fiji, were drowned on a picnic in Nukualofa. The children were members of a party of 30 boys and girls who were returning to Fiji from New Zealand for the Christmas holildays. The children were: Pamela Corbett, 11; Patricia Brown, 13; Peter Gittins, 11; and David Small, 9. * ♦ * The Allies dropped 722 tons of bombs on Japanese posts in the New Guinea area on two days in

February, destroying 67 planes

and between 50 and 100 large barges. * * * Solomon Islanders could literally smell out the Japanese, not only in their bivouac areas, but coming along a trail, according to an American officer at a “South Pacific base”. “Without native hdp, we would not get far”, the officer claimed. “They can spot with certainty a trail and say if it is Japs who have used it, and how long— two hours, or two days —before”.