Editor’S Mailbag

Angry Hebridean

I am responding to the two points made by “Expatriate (white)” (PIM, October, p. 23).

I. I remember the missionaries.

The first resident missionary on Aoba lies at Lolowai. My grandfather’s brother was responsible for his being there. My grandfather’s brother was a victim of the “expatriate” slave trade which took him to Queensland. My father became a clergyman. In his work he tried hard to preach and practise self-reliance. He died. I then grew up to be educated by mis sionaries. Later I worked with the very same missionaries, who taught me Christianity and democracy. I de mand that those Christian doctrines and democratic principles be applied, and their worth proven in the New Hebrides. 2. The Administration came to New Hebrides without an invitation.

The Administration ignores our ex istence and our rights on our native soil.

If taxpayers’ money is giving me a university education there should be much more taxpayers’ money to provide university education for every New Hebridean child. Providing only enough for a mere handful of New Hebrideans is too small a token to compensate for the injustices com mitted on us and our country.

I had read R. Cherry’s article (PIM, July) “Biting the feeding hand”. The food I am forced to eat sickens me. It is this very same relationship “expatriates” impose on us that we don’t want. Paternalism is the worst form of colonialism.

We are being denied the right to be “political”, let alone to “jet-set” as you claim. If you say that USP en courages white racism then explain to us New Hebrideans why we, our ancestors, our future generations, have been ignored in the writing of the New Hebrides Protocol; explain the stupidities in the Representative Assembly elections; explain the judgments passed in the current Rarua murder case; and a whole lot more within the New Hebrides political situation.

“Expatriate (white)”, I am New Hebridean black. I talk of my people and my country. Our experiences, our feelings, our thoughts, our hopes, you have never attempted to find out, much less understand.

True to form, you attack from un der cover, “Expatriate (white)”.

Grace Mera

University of the South Pacific, Suva, Fiji.

New Hebrides

I have read with keen interest this year all your articles and letters about the New Hebrides. I am particularly interested in the debate on ‘lndependence’, involving churchmen, laymen, Grace Mera, expatriates and others.

As I spent four years teaching in the New Hebrides (during which time I had a close working relationship with those parties in the present debate, including teaching at the same school as Grace for a year), and there developed a strong love for the native New Hebridean people, I have felt moved to join the debate.

Three cheers for Grace Mera and other Melanesian New Hebrideans who are now saying the things that have been kept padlocked in their minds by their European rulers from the lime the two races began to share the New Hebrides nearly one and one half centuries ago.

No cheers at all for the Ex-patriate (white), who, with shallow arguments and strong words (PI M, Oct.) implies that he would dearly love Grace and her fellow spokesman for the Melane sian New Hebridean community to close their eyes and hold their tongues: his kind reinforce and prolong the tragic enfeeblement of the Melanesian spirit that his predecessors have so cleverly master minded.

Most people, inside and outside the New Hebrides, will applaud the ef forts of the Melanesians who are now, for the first time in their history, put ting in print what they feel about themselves and other races of people; and what their countrymen like and dislike; and at last they are beginning

to figure prominently in debate about the future of their beautiful islands.

Let them say much to combat the arrogant and pernicious rubbish that is being prescribed in high places of the archipelago today; let their tongues expose those whose sole pur pose for being in the New Hebrides is, as Quiros unashamedly said 370 years ago, to “discover, pacify, and possess”.

R. G. Field

Warreena St, Walgett, NSW

A Call For Equity

Do the independent island states of the South Pacific need people to tell

them what to do? Your cor respondents who have been writing recently seem to think so.

None seems to want to leave the in dividual islander to follow his own in stincts, to build up what he wants to.

That is as often as not to leave his own island for a while, to work somewhere else where the pay is good enough to allow him to save up, to realise some of his dreams at home.

Many Polynesians can do this in New Zealand. For Melanesians life is more difficult. New Hebrideans can go pretty easily to New Caledonia, but very few Melanesians can ever realise the dream of working a short time in Australia. Either passports or

visas or both are difficult to get. So, for the last 70 years or so, you’ve pret ty well had to stow away or jump ship, if you’ve wanted to come to Australia to work from the New Hebrides or Solomon Islands, and from what is now Papua New Guinea, unless you’ve been on a government organised training course or something of the kind.

But you’ve seen Australians coming easily into your islands to make money for themselves.

Shouldn’t we all now, governments, individuals and journals like PIM, be pressing the Australian Government to allow at least as many Melanesians to get work permits as it has citizens working in their islands? They will be “unskilled” very often, but will learn many skills of use to them at home.

Then maybe we’ll see the islands transformed, like Turkey has been by those of its citizens who’ve worked in Germany in the last 15 or 20 years.

Now the Melanesian migrant worker usually ends up being deported, because the way he is forced to arrive is “illegal”. This upsets his employer, who has found him a good worker, and his older workmates, who fought in his islands to stop the Japanese controlling them, and who now find themselves ashamed of the mean treatment he gets from their own side.

John Allan,

Spring Hill, Qld.

Judges' Wigs

After Sir Alan Mann introduced wigs for judges of the Supreme Court of Papua New Guinea (PIM, Oct, p2O) one judge was a conspicuous dis senter.

The late Mr Justice Ollerenshaw, alone of the judges, did not wear a wig- „

Philip Davenport

Paddington, NSW

• Would Lonnie Shafer, of Woodworth, inquiring about her father’s grave on Hull Island in the Phoenix Group, please send her full address.

Reverse Traffic

Fourteen members of a church youth group in Auckland will go to the Island of ’Eua in Tonga in January to transform an old school building into a joinery factory.

The young people, with their parish priest, the Rev Father Paul Farmer, are from the Church of the Good Shepherd, Balmoral.

They will live and work with members of a local youth group.