Book Reviews

Lively Letters From

Pre-War New Guinea

Not since the well-connected Miss C. F. Gordon Gumming lame-dropped her way through two volumes of letters to “Dearest 4elT and friends in At Home in Fiji in 1881, has a book appeared juite like Mamie Bassett’s just-published Letters from New Guinea 921, but we owe Miss Bassett our thanks, as historians do to Miss jordon Gumming, for publishing the trivia of a journey. A large anvas is built up of small strokes of the brush.

Miss Gordon Gumming wrote lost of her letters under the sponsor hip of Sir Arthur Gordon, first jovernor of Fiji, and the lady herself as been described by a con ;mporary, Alfred Maudslay, as wonderfully good tempered, no tact, ery pushing when she wants any hing done, who can write very uently and describe the things she dually sees very clearly”.

Whether or not that description Iso fits Mamie Bassett, or Mamie /lasson as she was in 1921 when he spent three months in New juinea under the sponsorship of jeneral Wisdom, first civil Admini trator of that Australian mandated srritory, we have no contemporary eports to tell us.

Mamie’s letters, written to her larents in Melbourne, would indicate n intelligent young girl, very well ble to write clearly, enjoying the Mentions lavished on rare female isitors to New Guinea just after Vorld War I, and with enough trace lements of bitchiness and snobbish icss to make her interesting.

Never alone

With her friend Kitty Kininmonth, tfarnie Bassett visited most of what vas available to be visited in New Guinea of that day, when patrol >fficers themselves knew nothing but he rim of the islands they had icquired from the Germans.

She dined, she rode, she played ennis and cards, she danced to the gramophone, and she took passage o the outstations when she could mnt up a ship headed in the in ended direction. She and Kitty were lever alone, and in her long letters lome, Mamie writes down the names

of all those she meets, and passes judgment on them with a frankness that even today, nearly 50 years later, will shake the limbs of some family trees.

Names like Lucas, Hore, Grose, Evans, Allen, Jewell, Levi e n , McAdam, Nelygan, Pennefather, Schultz, Townsend, Wanliss, Walstab and many more appear in this quaint, slim volume that recaptures the atmosphere of a New Guinea that is no more.

“To the many Australians interested in today’s New Guinea,” says Mamie Bassett in a postcript, “the complexity of its current development and its social and political problems make the territory of nearly half a century ago, looked back on, seem strangely simple, even unreal.

But those who were there in 1921, even briefly, even if they were only fascinated youthful visitors with light hearts, could see that problems had then already begun.”

There was, for instance, the District Officer at Talasea, Colonel Nelygan, “whose talk is rapid and caustic, and so emphatic that you feel you must allow 10 per cent, for his super-abundance of vitality; he is cynical in a cheery unbitter kind of way, very cynical on the subject of the Australian administration of the territory at the same time as being red-hot keen on every detail of his job. . . .

“He complains,” writes Mamie home to Mother, “that he has 92 returns to send in, that he is snowed under with paper; that the Govern ment sends him a yacht with a

benzine engine and supplies him with kerosene to run it, orders him not to put beacons on the reef and to remove those he has put there, as that job belongs to the King’s Harbour Master’s Department, and that when he wrote to say that two men in his District, Australians put there by the Expropriation Board, ought in the interests of the country be removed, he was told that a District Officer must not interfere in such matters, and he is left saddled with two awful specimens in the Witu Group who insult everyone

else and are a shocking example to the natives.

“All this he tells you with a forcefulness and good humour that is without any personal rancour; and we feel that if only General Wisdom could meet and hear him, half the mutual misunderstanding would go.

“Meanwhile, the Administrator is overworking daily, and so are his staff, burdened by all the additional work of the changeover from military to civil administration, and so far, except for the old PMO, have had no time whatever to get away from Rabaul and see the country for them selves.

“There is no doubt about it, the Expropriation Board is importing some truly unspeakable men to take over the plantations; we have seen some of them. We can’t expect to get very many experienced people, but at least they could find men of good character and decent habits.

Many of the plantations are going down rapidly, and there is an enormous difference between their value in 1914 and their present one. . . .”

W. H. Lucas, boss of the Expro Board and former Island manager for Burns Philp, gets a worse biographical note at the hands of Mamie than many of the planters he employs.

Mamie admits that she and Kitty “say things to each other about Lucas that are positively libellous”, and adds: “He dined at Government House the night we left in the Melusia, and I have never met a more revolting man. To look at he is like a Raemaekers cartoon of a Hun, and to listen to him gives you the shudders. His personal and his business reputation are both said to be bad and there isn’t a soul who doesn’t hate him; and here he is, the biggest man in the Territory next to the Administrator. He really is a terrifying person, and I had to sit next to him at dinner and he called me dear lady and grinned at me like a hyena. I can’t imagine a more complete opposite to Judge Murray”.

Mamie’s pushing ways get her to Madang, to New Ireland (right up the road by horse and car), to the New Britain outstations, to Bougainville and the Mortlocks and Tasmans, and nowhere does she fail to prattle intelligently to her note paper. She has wisely left her letters in the original, adding footnotes where corrections or explanations are needed.—Sl.

(Letters From New Guinea. The

Hawthorn Press, Melbourne. $5.50.)