Peter England

A Tribute By Judy

Tudor

So now they’ve buried

Peter England

It is an awful commentary on the rat-race to which most of us contribute that old friends can be ill, die and lie in their graves for weeks—all unnoticed.

Peter England, of Angoram, Sepik River, New Guinea, died in Decem ber, in Sydney I believe although the details are vague. But only today, February 6, have I learned about it.

It seems that a small piece of the Sepik sun has gone out with this news.

I first met Peter through a piece he wrote for PIM in early 1954. It began: “Today we buried Mclnerney . . .” and it was fairly typical of Peter that the man of whom he wrote had then been dead almost a year.

As Peter himself would no doubt have said—there is no point in hurry ing these things.

His tribute to Dr. John Mclnerney, New Guinea’s “flying-doctor”, who had crashed his plane off Vanimo in early 1953, was an unusual, and in many ways beautiful, piece of writing, especially from someone who, as far as I knew, was a saw miller or a crocodile-shooter on the Sepik River.

NG fantasies

From this point on we had a very sporadic correspondence— usually exhortations on my part for him to write more, answered by wisecracks from Peter who refused to take me seriously. At very long intervals, PIM received something from him perhaps a fantasy founded on the New Guinea native myths that seemed to fascinate him, or something closer to the earth like The Very Long Arm of the Savings Bank, which we published in PIM first in 1955.

A year or so ago, when we were collecting pieces for a book of PIM stories ( PlM’s Pacific) this gem went in and in the introduction we wrote: “. . . Peter is trader, crocodile shooter, pub-keeper and, we almost said, poet. He is one of those stranger-than-fiction characters who should have died out about the time

of Sanders of the River and probably could exist these days only in a place like Angoram, Sepik District, New Guinea.

“He might have been the chronicler that New Guinea is wait ing for—had he put his mind to it.

But writing is one of the pleasures he reserves for when he is in the mood for it; then he will produce something—grave, gay or ridiculous —that is the very essence of outport New Guinea life. There are many calls for his attention. Once he described to us how he liked to go crocodile-shooting—with an easy chair arranged strategically in his boat, a box of books at one hand and a box of beer at the other, so he could dip into either as the whim took him.”

Whenever I pick up this book I always read Peter’s story of the sav ings bank again. Perhaps to most Territorians of 1968, this light hearted nonsense is not even typical of New Guinea today; but, to me, the laughs are just as fresh as when he first wrote the story.

Born in Wales

Peter England was born at Llanishan, Wales, in 1904 and arrived in Australia at 18. Before he found his way to New Guinea in 1937 he worked at timber cutting, gold mining, droving and horse-breaking; at one time ran a country store and at another a country newspaper. In New Guinea he became a planta tion manager and after the war a saw-miller, trader, crocodile-hunter; he also built a pub at Angoram.

During the war he served with ANGAU and was attached to the US air-sea rescue service. He served as a scout and guide throughout, was wounded in action and mentioned in dispatches for leading patrols behind Japanese lines.

It was during one of these patrols in the Ramu Valley that he first met Mclnerney who was technically the MO but at the time had borrowed a Bren gun and had started out on a patrol and a war of his own.

These two, far-out characters formed a friendship that lasted until that morning in March, 1953, when Mclnerney put his plane into a steep 180-degree turn, too close to the sea off Vanimo.

Although I met Peter only twice in the flesh—once on a plane travel ling to New Guinea and once here in Sydney—to me he was always part of the New Guinea mystique, a Territorian tru. For his wife Meg, their daughters Shan and Susan, for me and for his friends, New Guinea is just so much less for his passing.