Up Front

with the Publisher

JUDY Tudor, former New Guinea gold-miner and planter, turned journalist, author and publisher (she was both editor and publisher of PIM for many years) pretends these days that she is retired. But as pre tence is about the only thing she doesn’t do well, nobody will be sur prised to see her name in its usual place on the title page of the new edition of the Papua New Guinea Handbook when PIM brings it out at the end of this month.

She has compiled every edition since the first in 1954, and if my luck holds out and she doesn’t take off on an extended tour of Africa or Alaska—for travel and writing are her two loves—she may agree to produce the next issue and even one or two after that. (Judy is 65, but the kind of person who will never be convinced she’s even got started in life).

The 7th edition of the Papua New Guinea Handbook came out in 1974, but from this issue, the Bth, the handbook is an annual publication.

Important changes in PNG policy are now happening with such regu larity that you can’t record all the information at any greater interval than 12 months and hope to keep it useful.

This fact has been made clearer to me in the last few months as I have listened to Judy’s heavy breath ing and sudden releases of breath while the concentrated job of re search and compilation has gone on.

The monologue goes something like this, “We got the list of Minis terial responsibilities finally right, and they changed them again today! . . . Who the heck really knows about these Court procedures; I have four different versions ... I know that Provincial Government was supposed to be finished, but it isn’t finished . . . The National Capital Province still hasn’t got a commis sioner . . . They’ve decided to close some overseas consular offices and it has taken us weeks to get the full details of the ones they’ve got . . .”

You can only stick with it. From my own observations, at least Judy still has a better overall picture than most PNG public servants about

what’s happening in PNG. Many of those are still struggling to keep up with their own problems arising from the changes. They have the added burden of getting policy car ried out by a public service under going its own severe internal pressures I can understand Chris Ashton’s fear, expressed in his long article in this issue, that PNG is in danger of splitting into parts, with some of the less-developed provinces returning to their traditional ways, and the influence of the central government not extending very far from Port Moresby.

Myself, I should imagine that it depends on just how separate the development is, because separate de velopment under general guidelines laid down by central government is not a bad thing.

For the last 20 years in PNG we’ve somehow been given the im pression that unless every part of the country continues to bound for ward every year, the place is going backwards. Good enough while the money was pouring in from Austra lia and every little township scrambled for its share of develop ment money, but those days are gone, for ever.

Fiji is more uniformly developed than PNG, but there are many parts of that dominion today that have not got out of a subsistence pattern, and nobody in government in Suva believes that the coutry is about to fall apart as a result. Life goes on in the Fiji provinces as it always did.

And the same may be said about Western Samoa, and Tonga, and many other scattered Island nations.

The pressures, and the influence of government, decrease in proportion to the distance you get from the capital. And nobody wrings his hands about it.

Stuart Inder