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around to see them and their ship.

Large crowds thronged the wharf, hundreds of local people were able to look round the ship, dancing groups performed with gusto, and the authorities chose the occasion to open the new wharf formally.

llahali*

respectable . . .

One of Papua New Guinea's best-

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Island, has apparently entered a new era of respectability. Hahalis presi- S iOTernmSt n coundf d last e month Iw government council last month that anyone referring to the society as a cargo cult would be taken to court and sued for damages.

Another Hahalis leader, Francis Hagai, said that society members had been “hurt” when a news story referred to them as cargo “wp don’t practice 1 a § cuffluid it’s not right for anyone to sav we do ” he said Tniticm n v t i a u i Cultism on Buka Island has a long War n’ d if ing before W ° rld War 11. It seemed to fade away after

about 1935 but flared up again during the war when the Japanese forces invaded Bougainville. In 1943 several cargo cult leaders were beheaded by the Japanese who held the mistaken belief that the cult was an anti- Japanese uprising

Xhpn • • , .

96 ere i WaS the vlol T .u W h F° ICe , 0n ? S o n ? y beach on the east coast of Buka Island. John Teosin and Francis Hagai—then young men—led the time h h r „ •, adherents have noi exactly' been

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to do their own thing. But there could be changes on thf way.

A ‘ 3 m . ee,ing of . th % Buka local government council, Teosm and Hagai said thev wanted the council and Hahalis to co-operate and he friends The onvpmmpnt ™ aofficer at Sohano, Dr Tom Sawa, himself a Buka, raised a quizzical eyebrow at this statement. q c * , . , D J Sawa told the two men he was closm § an aid P "J the Hahalis area . because of * he fa,lure of the people to support it. He said he had received “no co-operation at all” from the Hahalis people in the two years he’d worked in the Buka area.

• a l*

vpponilllUy lor

* , . , Maybe its up to one of the new nations of the Pacific who aren’t ham strung by Western traditions to put Dr Willard E. Edwards out of his miser >' and give his -Perpetual Calendar” a go. F p. c , , ’ . . , Dr Edwards and his calendar havA

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«p«f pragress Vwas

ijc m , rom *he L 3g °' fT 0n publicising his ideas for calendar Te form. it* ?is perpelual calendar has been officially endorsed by the legislatures the Massachusetts and Mr VaU^ an Ecur 7 emcal C ° unci ;

membe? The 1

members or the US House of Repre sentatives bring it before the US Congress as a private members bill regularly, but without success.

Dr Edwards despairs of getting any thing settled in his lifetime but mavbe he shouldn’t give up yet. It took about 1.000 vear s of agitation to give

Catholic Europe its present Gregorian calendar in 1582, by which time the old style Julian calendar had got the date and the seasons about 10 days out of kilter. (It took England almost another 200 years to go Gregorian.) It takes the earth 365.2422 days to make a complete journey around the sun and although even the early experts could cope with the 365 days they were fouled up by the .2422 expressed in days, hours and split seconds. Even the Gregorian calendar, complete with an extra day in every

fourth year, is not completely accurate and will have gained one day in 3,323 years.

Dr Edwards does not aim to fiddle with these seconds; his proposed calendar simply plans to get most of the irregularities out of the present system and substitute a calendar that is good indefinitely—that is, per petual.

He would divide the year into four quarters—January, February, March/ April, May, June/July, August, September/October, November, De cember —each quarter having 91 days, the first two months in each quarter 30 days, and the last month, 31 days.

The month at the beginning of the

quarter would always start on a Monday; the second month in the quarter, on a Wednesday, and the third month in the quarter, Friday. (The first day in January would always be a Monday.) To bring the year up to the re quired 365 days, there would be a day without a date called New Years Day (NYD) which would come be tween December 31 and January 1 and would be a world-wide holiday.

Similarly, to take care of the present February 29, every Leap Year, there would be a no-date day called Leap Year Day sandwiched between June and July.

Easter would always be on the same dates, so would one’s birthday and other anniversaries. Public holi days would always be on convenient Fridays or Mondays. In recent years the US Congress has passed laws to enable some public holidays to be celebrated on the nearest Monday.

In most British Commonwealth countries the concept of the long holiday week-end has long since be come a tradition.

Murder in the

New Hebrides

If “Japanese duck” appears on a menu in the New Hebrides, it’s an odds-on chance that the nearest the bird got to be a duck was as a cormorant. And it’s frequent appear ance on the menu is a threat to the existence of the species in the con dominium.

Naturalist Mr Bregulla, who is adviser to the Vila Cultural Centre, fears for the existence of many of the New Hebrides species of birds on two counts, delegates to a South Pacific Conference on National Parks in Sydney were told.

Breeding places are being destroyed by land development and the hunters are trying hard to ensure that the need for breeding places will die with the birds. A colony of cormorants, which made Duck Lake on Efate their home for generations, has been wiped out entirely. They were prized as “Japanese duck”.

The albatross, the world’s largest sea fowl, is proctected by law in the New Hebrides as it is elsewhere. It was extremely rare there. Now, it’s even rarer. Two, which lived in the north of Efate, were recently beaten to death with sticks. That was an easy job for the murderers. The albatross were tame and allowed people to approach them.

“It just shows how much remains to be done too educate the public of the New Hebrides”, said Mr. Bregulla.

Aii eaeli-way bet

in the race race?

When is a man not a man? When he’s classified as a part or a particle, says Fiji Senator Felix Emberson, who is again campaigning for a more acceptable name for the 9,500 Fiji Islanders with some European ancestry. He was planning to intro duce a motion in the Senate to try to remove the label “part-European”, which he describes as an outrage and a stigma on members of that com munity.

“Until we can have this parlia mentary certificate of respectability, we will continue to be the social and political doormat of this multiracial society,” said Senator Emberson, who is president of the Part-European Association. “The part-European is i whole human being—you are look ng at one now—and he is not a part 3r a particle.”

In one respect part-Europeans had he edge on other communities, iverred Senator Emberson, since one lay all the world’s population would >e radically inter-mixed. “In the neantime we have to try to evolve lowly upon our own and wait for ;ou to join us,” he told his fellow >enators.

The term multiracial isn’t popular yith Fiji’s Education Department, k'hich has asked schools not to use [ m their names, since this is con idered to be an undue emphasis on ace. A department official has said hat if a school’s committee is indeed multiracial, as the department sug ests, it is unnecessary to play up ns aspect by including the term in ic name. The department has sug ested also that schools should avoid ny name with a racial connotation r the name of a living person.

Politically-speaking though, it’s im ossible to avoid the term multiracial 1 hip, and as Deputy Prime Minister atu Sir Edward Cakobau, pointed ut at a recent Alliance Party Con ention, Fiji has no future if its dif jrent races can not pull together.

Each racial group in Fiji has its wn views and values, its own culture nd religion, its own strengths and eaknesses,” Ratu Sir Edward said, there is ample scope for disagree icnt. That is why a tolerance of each her s views and ways is essential, olerance is born of understanding.

“My plea is—be patient, be under anding, be compassionate. The dure requires peace and harmony . as every family knows, it is some mg which doesn’t just happen. It quires effort.”