Indonesia'

New Guinea 'Could Join Indonesia'

By a Staff Writer

The people of Papua-New

Guinea, after independence,

are more likely to attach them selves in due course to their Indonesian neighbours than anyone else, in the view of Australian author and writer on New Guinea, Osmar White.

IN Parliament of a Thousand Tribes, a book just published in Australia, White says there is a remote chance that after indepen dence the people will become the beneficiaries of some international agency created to assist backward peoples, but a political and cultural link with Indonesia is far more likely.

Although no ethnic link exists be tween the two peoples, and they are temperamentally dissimilar, the dis similarity between New Guineans and Indonesians is “immeasurably less than it is between New Guineans and Australians”, he says.

"Apprentice Indonesians"

White adds, “Expressed in crude terms the truth is that New Guineans would find it much easier to become ‘apprentice Indonesians’ than ‘appren tice Australians’.

“The Indonesian Republic is multi lingual, multi-racial and multi cultural but it is an effective political entity although it embraces so many inconsistencies and inequalities. It has already survived appalling vicissitudes and it will probably con tinue to survive.

“It is, I believe, natural and perhaps inevitable, for the people of New Guinea to gravitate towards Indonesia when political severance from Australia has been effected.

White says New Guineans would find Asian models far easier to imitate than Australian.

New Guinea will not inherit an informed, responsible and experienced central legislature nor a permanent administration efficient by European standards. In time and with luck New Guinea will evolve them, but the changes will be from the bottom up rather than from the top down.

White is against a hastily indepen

dent New Guinea and says that without authoritative guidance from some source for perhaps 50 years the territories will revert to savage disunity. The process of reversion cannot be gauged by examining the history of African decolonisation, for the “Congolese are sophisticates com pared with the Tolais”.

White, an experienced commenta tor who has produced many excellent newspaper reports on New Guinea over the years, says he is aware that his predictions will appear dis appointing, alarming or even offensive to many Australians who have been personally involved “in the New Guinea experiment”.

They may seem to imply the failure of a project in which there have been humanitarian respon sibility and generosity, and on which large sums of money, “and much heroic effort”, have been expended.

But he says the realities cannot be baulked.

Realities

“Much also will depend upon the ability of the Australian electorate to accept the realities of the situation in New Guinea without emotional overtones,” White writes, “and to acknowledge the fact that New Guineans are not children adopted out of charity, from whom loyalty and obedience may justly be demanded by generous foster parents.

“The probability that New Guineans will be forced to seek closer ties with Asia than those which could be fabricated to bind them to Australia during more than half a century of master-servant, teacher pupil association must also be recognised, without resentment or recrimination, if anything of that highly volatile asset, goodwill be tween dissimilar peoples, is to be preserved.”

Parliament of a Thousand Tribes is virtually a potted history of the Territory’s development—a simplified Gavin Souter, with stress on political developments rather than on ex ploration.

It is not a comprehensive work, for it covers too much ground too quickly for the author to be able to explain the finer points of policy.

Osmar White’s views on the future of the Territory are of interest be cause he is a qualified observer with out being emotionally committed.

But it is too early yet for anybody to say that his predictions are more to the point than those of a hundred other observers who think they know where the big Territory is headed.

(Parliament Of A Thousand

TRIBES. Heinemann Ltd. 45/-.)