Up Fornt

with the editor

The crisis in leadership in Australia may prove to have been a crisis in the relationship between the generations. Events have moved too quickly for most of the old generation to absorb.”

SYDNEY writer Donald Horne {The Lucky Country ), says this in the text of Southern Exposure, a new, mainly pictorial look at Aus tralia he has produced with photo grapher David Beal, and which, in passing, I confidently recommend to anybody looking for an intelligent picture book (Collins, $5.50).

I extract this particular comment from it because it is relevant to the South Seas. At the moment there is no crisis of leadership in the Islands of the kind that Horne ap pears to see in Australia, but it is easy to underestimate, or to ignore altogether, the influence of youth on those changes now going on in the South Pacific.

It is youth more than anybody involved in the “tremendous revolu tion” which Dr. George Knight, principal of Suva’s Pacific Theological College, has recently talked of. As Dr. Knight puts it, the whole struc ture of Islands society is crumbling under the steamroller of Western in dustrialism.

Pop music now

Islands’ youth has absorbed the with-it world of today far more than its parents realise. There is a re flection of it to be seen in the pop music and dances that have captured South Seas youngsters in the last few years. Pop music envelops you from loudspeakers set up in the palm trees of Nauru; from transistors in the Solomons; from local bands in Fiji, New Caledonia, Tonga.

Not long ago I found myself up “The Road” on Buka, Bougainville, invited to the opening of a local women’s club, where we were courteously treated to afternoon tea

of sweet potato and arrowroot t cuits by the senior ladies. T was followed by a concert under 1 palms, which began with so] traditional dance items and whi shortly gave way to some hot guit playing and The Twist as the youi sters took complete charge.

The teenage idols at that enjoyal afternoon were clearly those me: bers of the Pacific Islands Regime the police, or the hospital nursi staffs who had most recently be to the metropolis of Rabaul a brought back the latest dance ste]

Youthful haunts

It can be no fluke that a curre issue of the P-NG School Paper f upper primary students, just arriv on my desk, tells the tale of he Papuan Yokomo, and his d Omokoy, took off on a space flig in their home-made rocket, ai finally splashed down in the sea, be rescued by The Beatles in th< yellow submarine. Naturally Yokon himself knew a Beatle song, o called “Help”, and thus he was bett able to draw attention to his pligl Youth meets together and cor pares notes in the Islands as anywhe else. There are, as anywhere eh favourite haunts where surprisin fascinating conversations go on.

Port Moresby correspondent in o last issue referred to the “Bohemh intellectuals” of the Kone Taver threatened with the possibility of tl lowly Pidgin speaker suddenly b coming their social equal.

“It would not be,” said the corre pondent, “the first time in histoi that a minority has decided a politic: issue on a minor tenet of a politic:

tform.” Nor a minority of the mg at that.

Tie Kone Tavern has, I believe, n changing its character since I ; in Port Moresby a few months —it is now being remodelled into 10 tel —but I have no doubt that er haunts are available where you take part in youthful discussions local politics, the place of America he world, girls, John Guise, Euro ns and football.

Ideas are there

slands youth has been born into ifferent world from their fathers’, ch is moving more quickly than r fathers’ world did. It is almost ; to say that, yet how many older pie in the Islands understand the h and significance of it I wonder?

New Guinea, for instance, how ly Europeans recognise that it is merely the so-called elite New neans, the high school and uni ;ity students, who are querying state of their world, but youth in sral? Take a look at the photo )h of the wage demonstrators in t Moresby we printed in July, note, if you can, the number of lies” you find there, jlands youth may not yet have know-how, but it has the ideas, crisis in leadership that will come he Islands may yet prove to be risis in the relationship between generations. Meanwhile, those > sell short the intelligence, acity and honesty of Islands’ youth making a sad mistake.

Stuart Inder