JUNGLE TREK

Auckland Star, Volume LXXIII, Issue 133, 8 June 1942, Page 3

JUNGLE TREK

PRIEST THE HERO ESCAPE FROM NEW GUINEA (0.C.) SYDNEY, June 3. A New Guinea priest, Father Glover, is the hero of a story told by a party of 70 evacuees who trekked 530 miles to safety through the jungles of that country. Their worst disadvantage was the fact that the only footwear amongst the lot of them that would stand the strain of tramping over rugged mountains and wading through rivers and swamps were a few pairs of military 'bocts warn by soldiers who had escaped from Rabaul, and the sturdy brogues-of Miss Joytie Jones, matron of Madang Hospital, who was one of the party. At the end of each day's march, when the evacuees, footsore and weary, threw themselves down on the ground to rest, Matron Jones before she attended to herself went the rounds attending to blistered feet and watching carefully for signs of fever.

The leader of the party for more than half the trek was Mick Leahy, a well-known New Guinea explorer, who took them through some country which no white man had ever seen. Food was improvised with corn given to the party by natives which Matron Jones grated on parts of a kerosene tin and made into meal and pikelets. A small pig, also cooked in the kerosene tin, bush eggs and sugar cane made up most of the rest of the party's menu. After the party had reached safety Father Glover trekked the 530 miles back to the starting point to get an old plane in which to summon a rescue party. A mechanic had given the plane's engine only five days' life, but Father Glover, who had flown only a few times in his life, coaxed the machine along so well that he was almost in sight of the coast when the engine broke down and he made a forced landing. He finished his journey in a native canoe, and a month after he had left the evacuees a plane arrived at their camping place and took them to civilisation.