Editor’S Mailbag

Bottle-Feeding

1 was interested to read your report in the July issue, (p 13) titled Bottle feeding ban in PNG. The main hospital in the Highlands at Goroka has banned all bottle-feeding and is throwing out its own supply of feeding-bottles. This is the first step in a campaign to stop the dangerous trend towards bottle-feeding dangerous because of the problem of sterilising the bottles, apart from feeding a balanced formula and being able to afford it.

In Australia there is a trend back to breast-feeding, but our hospitals have not followed Goroka’s example and changed to cup and spoon feeding for babies who cannot drink human milk.

British researchers have produced conclusive evidence of the unethical marketing methods used by manufac turers in Africa, Asia and South America which they have published in a booklet called The Baby Killer.

There is also a film on the same sub ject produced in Kenya. The booklet and film highlight the dangers and costs of bottle-feeding where mothers are unaware of, or are unable to meet, the hygiene and mixing instructions written on the label.

There is still time to remove the idea that bottle-feeding represents progress, and stop the dangerous acceptance of bottled milk as a good substitute for breast milk which it isn’t.

This practice has already killed many children and family incomes and there is not much time left before the practice will be irreversible.

Anne J. Bunning

Parkside, S. Australia

Festival Of Arts

I was interested to read in the May issue (p. 19) your account of the se cond South Pacific Festival of Arts held at Rotorua in March this year.

There is just one point which I would like to take up with you, and that is the comment at the end of the article in which you say, “Its first aim was to provide a tourist attraction and that’s not the islanders’ idea.”

As chairman of the organising com

mittee, I would like to make it ab solutely clear that tourism was not the first aim of the festival so far as the organising committee was concerned, nor to my knowledge was it the idea of anybody else associated with the festival. Had it been so, the cost of the festival (which turned out to be con siderably less than the $650,000 originally budgeted) might well have been very greatly reduced.

I think I am too well-known in Pacific circles for people there to believe that I would be interested in the commercial exploitation of their cultures. Polynesian culture has been a life-long interest to me and I would be the last to become involved in its commercial exploitation. As a retired person I could be put to no pressures by the government or anyone else over a matter like this, nor in fact was any such pressure even hinted at. The whole aim of everybody concerned was to provide a venue for the festival and to ensure that the first festival at Suva was not also to be the last. I am sorry that PIM thought otherwise.

We greatly enjoyed our visitors and the effort put into the festival will have been totally worthwhile if they also enjoyed being with us.

Nz J. M. Mcewen

Heretaunga, NZ.

Development

What's An Atoll?

Misled as I apparently was by social scientists who were not so scien tifically correct in their geographic terms, perhaps I have caused hurt to “A Much-Pained Reader” of Canberra (PIM, Aug., p 25) over my June article on Rennell and Bellona.

But, then again, perhaps the hurt is self-inflicted.

“Much-Pained” may be correct in correcting me and Samuel Elbert and Torben Monberg who lived on the “atolls” for months in the 1950 s (it was their words I borrowed in those two brief descriptions of the “atolls”), yet . . .

Evidence of the shape of both Rennell and Bellona with their con cave centres, their entirely limestone base of which the outer rings, now cliffs, were undoubtedly reefs, shows

they are raised atolls. When does a reef stop being a reef and become an island?

Ontong Java, the largest atoll in the Pacific by the Oxford definition, is nevertheless occupied and has agriculture in parts. Part of Rennell’s one-time lagoon remains as a very large, land-locked lake. How does that fit?

So much, I hope, for the pedantry of “Much-Pained”. I’d rather someone had troubled to argue over the fate of the Rennellese and Bellonese, who may or may not suffer neo-colonialism by their own Solomon Islands Government. We shall have to wait and see if mining occurs, and how it is done.

Denis Fisk.

Lae, PNG.

Beekeeper's Offer

Through PIM editor’s recent radio broadcast, I learned of the need for technical assistance for primary in dustry on many of the Pacific Islands.

Over the years, I have heard reports of the favourable honey-producing potential on some of these islands.

Honey bees collect nectar from the blossoms of plants and elaborate this with honey. In the process, cross pollination, essential for reproduction in many plant species, is ac complished.

I am a commercial beekeeper and honey producer in Australia, and have been involved in the development, in troduction and implementation of a number of beekeeping techniques and equipment items. I would be prepared o offer my practical knowledge to in Island government agency or enterprise interested in developing the leekeeping potential locally.

I am interested in, and an admirer )f, Island culture, as well as an avid tudent of isolated, locally adapted trains of honey bees. Therefore, inancial remuneration is not of )rimary concern.

If any of your readers are in erested, they can contact me at the ddress below.

K. J. Ollev

297 Ipswich Road, )xley, Queensland 4075 Australia.

Biting The Hand . . .

In her rambling and grossly laccurate article (PIM, July, p 25),

Letters

“ -7,7 *• * aat li was the (now despised) M ‘ ssionar J es ,- , who fu "y educated her Sd Ktacher W “ h J ° bS “ S “““

“political jet-set” at the University of the South Pacific in Suva, where the main topic seems to be anti-white propaganda but at the same time en joying the white taxpayers’ money to do so . . .

We can only advise Miss Mera to turn back four pages in the same PIM and read Mr R. Cherry’s letter which sums it up quite clearly.

Miss Mera seems to fit the descrip tion of “The mouth biting the feeding hand” ... 5

Ex Patriate (White),

Luganville, Santo. • Name and address supplied.