* Footnotes

Growing Old

Isn't What It

Used To Be

T'HE small Papuan girl who, with two brothers A and a grandmother, appeared on my doorstep one morning recently to wish me a happy birth day, proffered a plate of cakes and a birthday card featuring two red roses, a key and the words “Happy 21st Birthday”.

If only it were true! Actually it was my 73rd, and my 48th in Papua.

Among Papuans birthdays are rarely remem bered, except in the case of small children. Of late years a party for baby’s first birthday is a common feature of urban family life. Before the advent of infant and maternal welfare clinics it was quite an achievement for a Papuan baby to survive the rigours of its first year of life, even with the help of the little wood charm attached to a string tied round his or her neck. Thus the modem first birthday party may well be an adaptation of an older ceremony which celebrated the child’s safe

passage through the initial perils of babyhood, rather than a bor rowing from the white folk.

Not only are birthdays little celebrated, but birth dates are little remembered. Literate parents often write down their children’s birth dates in an exercise book or on the fly leaf of their vern acular Bible. The latter is the more likely to survive, and the Bible Society might do worse than to take a leaf out of the practice of Victorian England and bind a few

spare leaves into the Bibles they publish for us ® .* n a P ua New Guinea to provide for the writing in of a record of family births, marriages and deaths.

For many years, as a minister of religion, I used to make a practice of writing the birth date as well as the date of baptism on the certificates I gave to the parents who presented their babies for baptism and who, at that early date, could generally still remember the date on which their children were born.

Generally, but not always.

I once visited, on a Monday, a Papuan home m which there was a new-born babe. The happy but placid mother had to call her husband to help establish on which day of the previous week the

With Percy Chatterton

in Port Moresby

latest addition to her already numerous brood had arrived!

Unfortunately those small pieces of card— the baptism certificates—proved themselves to be eminently losable, and rarely survived for produc tion at a time when they would have been of use.

It is only within the last few years that Paguineans have begun to realise that, in a world of forms, birth dates matter. Tertiary education, medical benefits, life assurance and other blessings of the

Western way of life bring with them more and more forms to be filled in. Many of them have a space for “date of birth”, and some even demand the production of a birth certificate.

Some years ago an ordinance was enacted which had as one of its objects the provision of readily accessible facilities for the registration of births throughout Papua New Guinea. Unfortu nately the part of the ordinance which made this provision has

never been brought into force.

Quite often young Paguineans are faced with the need for establishing their birth date, and, if they happen to have been bom in one or other of the areas in which I have spent my working life, they not infrequently end up on my doorstep with the plaintive plea, “Can you tell me when I was born?” Here is a situation which could have been foreseen and should have been provided for in the immediate post war years, but instead it has been dropped into the “too hard” tray and left there.

This problem is one which mainly affects those on the threshold of their working lives.

There is another which has crept up on us, and which was perhaps less predictable, which is cur-