People

After 57 years, Leah Pratt has been reunited with her younger

daughter, writes George G.

Carter from Honiara. Leah, daughter of a French father and a Roviana, Western Solomons, mother, grew up in the home of the Reverend J. F.

Goldie and his wife, pioneer Methodist missionaries in the Solomons. In 1911, while still with Mr and Mrs Goldie, Leah met and married a young Ton gan missionary. Pastor Timothy Kauvaka. Martha, their first child was born the following year and in 1913 a second daughter was born. She was named Kuria (or, as the Tongans say it, Kulia).

After service in various parts of the Western Solomons, Mr Kauvaka decided he wanted to go home fgr a holiday. Leah could not go with him. It was one of those inexplicable

lapses into inhumanity, the

mission board in Australia having ruled that if a

Polynesian missionary married

a woman of the country in which he had been sent to serve, it would not pay for her to visit her husband’s country on leave. (Leah, today, says she wasn’t very keen on going any way.) So, Timothy Kauvaka left the Solomons in 1922,

taking Kulia with him. He never returned.

Kulia grew up in Tonga, speaking only Tongan and only vaguely aware of her Solomons background. Martha married Willie Paia, a clerk in govern ment service. The Paias called their first daughter Kuria after the missing sister. The years slipped by and it was not until 1972 that Kuria, daughter of Martha, with her English hus band, Tony Hughes, travelled to Tonga to look for her long lost aunt. The meeting was a memorable moment for all and it was not long before they

began talking about the possi

bility of Aunty Kulia ‘going home’ to see her mother. This year it has happened. Though language was at first a prob lem, the reunion was a tremen dous success with Leah hale,

hearty, happy and looking

much younger than her 86 years.

The first director of the newly established South Pacific Fisheries Agency, Dr William Razzell was soon on the move.

A Canadian with long experi ence of northern Pacific waters and what’s in them. Dr Razzell began his rounds of agency member countries with a visit to Honiara, planned home for the agency. Others on his list were Papua New Guinea, Aus tralia, Gilbert Islands, Tuvalu, New Caledonia, Niue, Fiji, Tonga, Western Samoa, Cook Islands and New Zealand.

The agency was a hot potato

at the last meeting of the South Pacific Forum on Niue in Sep tember last year and. after much wrangling, it was decided

to totally restrict membership

to Forum members only, excluding the United States which was very keen to be in on it but, at the time, said it was necessary to adhere to certain conditions imposed upon it by domestic US law. The US argu ment didn’t wash with influen tial members like PNG. Fiji and Solomon Islands and, for the time being, the US remains on the outer.

Two firsts and a sixtieth mark the career of Pat Carter, long time executive and founding shareholder of East-West Air lines. Pat Carter has headed north to Papua New Guinea on many occasions over the past 33 years since East-West got off the ground. But not so many times that he doesn’t want to remember. In March he told PIM he was on his fifty-ninth trip to PNG, the sixtieth being due to come up later that month on the occasion of Air

Niugini’s farewell reception for

its general manager, Bryan Grey. Those two firsts? Pat Carter fondly boasts that he is the holder of the first share issued in East-West Airlines in 1946 and that he sold the first ticket his company issued in 1947 to a man who promised to invest £25 in East-West. That man, says Pat Carter, was the late Arthur Wordie, licensee of a hotel at Tamworth, NSW, home of East-West.

Few tangle with a crocodile and live to tell the tale. Alan Blackley, a 27-year-old visitor to Papua New Guinea from Brisbane, did. He was swim ming over a reef near Manus in northern PNG when, according to the PNG Post- Courier, a crocodile grabbed his left arm. ‘But I was able to stand up on the reef and that was probably the only thing that saved me,’ Mr Blackley was reported as saying. It’s said a crocodile only opens its jaws when it wants to, no matter how much tugging and pulling might go on. T think the croco dile let go,’ said Mr Blackley who was taken ashore after his brush with death and rushed to

Lombrum Defence Force base near Lorengau for treatment.

His injuries turned out not to be serious.

Former police officer Norman George is the Cook Islands’ first consul-general to New Zealand. The Cooks office in Auckland has been elevated from trade commission status.

High Chief Sotoa Leota Tagaloasa has been appointed district governor of Maau’a in American Samoa. His term of office is four years.

The new director of the University of the South Pacific Centre in Tonga is Filimone Fifita who, until his appoint ment. was administrative as sistant in extension services of the USP in Suva. Mr Fifita was in the Tonga civil service be fore joining USP.

The elevation of Father Paul Mea to become the first Gil bertese bishop moved the Atoll Pioneer, the Gilberts’ national weekly, to comment: The Gil bert Islands is making history twice this year. She is attaining full independence from Britain in July and this weekend sees the first ordination to the epis copate of a Gilbertese priest.’

Father Paul’s promotion, to

succeed retiring French Bishop

Peter Guichet who had spent 17 years in the Gilberts, prompted the Gilbert Islands Protestant Church to com ment: The joy felt by the Cath

Solomons reunion ... from left, sisters Kulia and Martha and their mother, Leah. Photo: George G. Carter

Pat Carter ... 60 trips to Papua New Guinea

olic Church ... at the elevation of one of her sons to such high office ... is a joy in which we all share . . .’ Bishop Mea was bom on Beru Island in 1939 and schooled at St Patrick’s College, Tabiteuea, before studying at seminaries in Papua New Guinea and at the Ateneo University, Manila, in 1971.

Father Harry Tevi in February was consecrated the first New Hebridean bishop of the Anglican Church’s Diocese of the New Hebrides. Bad weather did not stop more than

1000 people flocking to

Lolowai, Aoba, for the conse cration. A tent, put up for the consecration was blown down but was re-erected before the 8 am service got under way.

Career New Zealand foreign service officer. Rod Gates, 40, continues his association with the Pacific next month when he takes over as NZ high com missioner to Tonga. Mr Gates

finished his job as deputy director of the South Pacific Bureau for Economic Co operation (SPEC) in Suva last month, a post he had held since 1977. Before that he was attached to the prime minis ter’s department in Western Samoa as an assistant sec retary.

Fiji’s Permanent Secretary for Labour Satyanand had a good look around Australia in February and March as a guest of the Australian Government.

In Queensland he inspected

sugar industry projects and

visited a copper refinery and the Institute of Marine Re

search at Townsville, in Can berra and Melbourne he had talks with government officials and trade unionists, and in Sydney he made a tour of sev eral small factories.

Ken Nicholson began his flying career in World War II when he joined the first Royal Air Force contingent from Fiji. Re cently he ended his career with Qantas by commanding a 7478 on a same-day return service to

Nadi from Sydney. Captain

Nicholson, born in Suva in 1921, left the RAF as a squad ron leader in 1946, joining Qantas in 1950.

Dr Hiroshi Nakajima of Japan has been appointed director of the World Health Organis ation’s Western Pacific office in Manila, succeeding Dr Fran cisco J. Dy of the Philippines Dr Karl Doering, 61, veteran West German diplomat now serving as ambassador to New

Rod Gates ... sticking with the Pacific

Permanent Secretary for Labour Satyanand ... a good look at Australia. AIS photograph

I Zealand, will serve concur rently as his country’s ambassa dor to Solomon Islands, writes George Atkin from Honiara.

Solomon Islands will be rep resented in West Germany by a roving ambassador who will remain based in Honiara.

Solomon Islands now has

diplomatic links with eight

countries: Australia, Britain, Canada, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Japan and the United States.

He hadn’t been in his job a \ fortnight as Cook Islands new

■ advocate-general before he

sensed a need to call in the edi tors of the two local news papers, Cook Islands News (government-run) and the Morning Star (pro-opposition Cook Islands Party) to give them a talking to on their re [ sponsibilities vis-a-vis the laws relating to contempt of court and other allied matters.

Michael Mitchell, 34, may have sensed, like other ob servers of the volatile Cooks scene, that there was a need to ‘cool it’ on the political front.

It would be sad if the refreshing ‘up and at ’em’ approach of both the News and Star were lost, but sometimes a reader is

left wondering just how they

get away with it. In fact, the Star was rapped over the knuckles a few months back for

imprudently commenting on

the role of Chief Justice (now Sir) Gaven Donne in last year’s change of government.

Mr Mitchell came to the Cooks from an Auckland prac tice. Before settling back in New Zealand he had worked in London and Uganda.

Fresh out of the University of the South Pacific, where she obtained her diploma of edu cation, Fijian Jeini Taoba has started work on Niue as home economics specialist at Niue High School. Ms Taoba got the job as a result of a request by the Niue Government to the South Pacific Commission.

Ron Hunt, formerly of Fiji, has been appointed manager of interline services for American Airlines in New York. He is a son of Mr and Mrs Harvey Hunt, who set up Hunts Travel Service in Fiji, and for which

he worked for several years be fore joining American Airlines in 1970 as Fiji manager. Mr Hunt went to school in Sydney and started his career in the travel industry with Ansett owned Airlines of NSW before joining Qantas for three years.

While the Pacific Forum Line luxuriates in the comfort of its latest financial injection with a lot of help from Australia and New Zealand and looks set to stay afloat until at least 1981 without further assistance, its commercial manager. Francis Hong-Tiy, is busying himself on a 12-month study spell in Australia with the Australian Government’s Australian National Line (ANL) in Mel bourne. Mr Hong-Tiy’s studies will cover all practical aspects of shipping including at least one voyage on an ANL vessel.

The new editor of Hailans Nius, one of three Papua New Guinea stable companions, the others being Lae Nius and A Hans Nius, is Benjamin Mar tin who moved with his wife and three children from Lae, where he was a Lae Nius sub editor, to the Highlands in

February.

Dora Elizabeth Burchell, author of New Guinea Nurse, Inaminka, Thursday Island Nurse and other books, has just finished writing the book which, she says, has ‘lots of meat’ about her long career as a nurse which she has never used in any of her previous

autobiographical writings. This

one she has titled Paths I Have Trod. But it seemed, in March when she called to see us, the pot pourri of her life, no matter how ‘meaty’ it might be, was proving more difficult to sell than the more specific accounts of her New Guinea, Thursday Island and Australian outback days. In the meantime, Ms Burchell is a fulltime arts student at Monash University, Victoria.

Deputy Prime Minister Benedict Kinika of Solomon

Islands and Deputy Secretary

of Foreign Affairs David Kera had a preview of the film of the Solomons independence cel

ebrations last July (Tropicali

ties) when they visited Sydney and Canberra in March. As well as having talks with Governor of the Reserve Bank Harold Knight and Acting Treasurer Eric Robinson and visiting Governor-General Sir Zelman Cowen, Mr Kinika was

able to squeeze in time for a look around Sydney Opera House.

Papua New Guinea’s first national pilot to convert to jet F2B Fellowship level is Aria Bouraga, 32, from Gabagaba in Central Province. Mr Bouraga, who has been flying for 10 years, joined Air Niugini when it started operations.

Bradford Morse, administrator of the United Nations

Development Programme

(UNDP), during a visit to Western Samoa, announced that a UNDP office would be established in Apia, respon sible for day-to-day activities in Western Samoa, the Cook Islands and Tokelau, under the overall control of the UNDP South Pacific Regional Office in Suva. UNDP resources available to Western Samoa in the period 1979-1981 total about SUS 7.2 million.

It was back to school for Western Samoa’s Director of Education Perefoti Tamati when he visited a primary school in Australia’s capi tal, Canberra, in March. Standing is Dr Mervyn Dunkley, director of the teacher education programme of the Macquarie University New South Wales

Solomon Islands Deputy Prime Minister Kinika and Australian PM’s Department officer Max Pechey at the Sydney Opera House ... independence film preview. AIS photograph.