MELVILLE ISLAND

Evening Star, Issue 23094, 21 October 1938, Page 6

MELVILLE ISLAND

NO HOME FDR JEWS AUSTRALIAN SUGGESTION When Air Xavier Herbert condemns as “ridiculous” a scheme for the settlement of Jewish exiles at Mel villa Island, all those with a knowledge of North Australia—and, incidentally, Melville Island—will be inclined to agree with him, writes Ernestine Hill vm t^K ' Sydney ‘ Morning Herald.’ Where Australian pioneers of the best type look back on a half-century of industrial inanition, could the stranger from Palestine succeed ? With no secondary industries established, fewer than 6,000 white men, women, and children, in 523,000 square miles, and a long record of spectacular failure in closer settlement, it ia scarcely feasible that North Australia, or an isolated patch of it, would appeal. In the outback the Jewish people are conspicuous by their absence. Moreover, those “boundless resources” of the far north territory demand an understanding that we ourselves have not yet achieved. But when Mr Herbert denies thesuitability pf Melville Island for any type of settler, and writes it down as “almost a desert,” his pessimism is, surely not justified. The most eloquent argument in its favour is that it already supports a population of 2,000 the sturdiest and the most prolific aboriginal race left in Australia. THEY MANAGE TO EXIST. With no science of civilisation, no thought of to-morrow, and no arts of agriculture beyond the uprooting of yams and the gathering of fruits, they have managed to exist on the bounties of its earth since time began. Not only in physique and intelligence, but in elementary artistry { they are strides in advance of their swiftly-diminishing brothers on the mainland. Sixty miles from Darwin across Van Diemen’s Gulf, and so close to the Coburg Peninsula that it share? its fauna and flora and all physical characteristics, the island, naturally, has s healthier climate. Like the mainland, it is a jungle in the wet season, parched scrub and bare sand in the dry Two thousand square miles, all told, it is comparatively well watered with small streams, torrential or non-existent, according to the rainfall, and one considerable little river, the Bremer. These could be made of permanent benefit by simple irrigation systems. Melville, again like the rest of the far north Territory, will grow to profusion rice, millet, blue maize, coffee, indigo, vanilla, cotton, and other tropical produce that the world will not buy at our price while the East competes. Cost of production in White Australia is against them. There are several big forests of cypress pine—one of the few white antresisting building timbers that the north provides for its own protection —the Timor Sea teeming with sea wealth, and fine harbours for a fishing fleet, as we know from the trespassing there of the Japanese luggers.' A BUFFALO HUNTER. Buffaloes thrive so well that there is every encouragement for the breeding of cattle. 1 When Joel Cooper,, the settler referred to. went there in the ’eighties the 15 buffaloes that Bremer had left there when the old military settlement. J§27j Jh*4-' befcenie Cooper’s'interest was confined wholly and solely to the buffaloes, One, of the first hunters in the Territory, he remained there until ha had rather ruthlessly, shot them out. The aim of Bishop Gsell’s mission on Bathurst Island—only a stone’s throw across the Apsley Strait, and a native reserve—has been to Christianise, not to colonise. Practically single-handed for 27 years Bishop Gsell made no attempt to usurp the natives’ countryThe mission concerns itself mainly with the children of the scarcely-civilised tribes and those who of their own will gather about it. The Melville Islanders and the Bathurst, for the islands are as- one at low tide, are the most interesting and the most vigorous I have met. Contact with the Malay voyagers and s* nit degree of interbreeding have made them enterprising and energetic beyond their race. They introduced the bark canoe to the north, and now it is’ found in Carpentaria and as far west as Yampi Sound. Their spears are_ elaborately barbed and painted, their _pandanus leaf baskets skilfully plaited and decked with many a strange device ia ochre. They make necklaces of birds** feathers, and they weave their hairbelts and corrobofee ornaments of banyan fibre and kangaroo fur on an ingenious loom that consists of n crossed stick and the big toe. WARRIORS TO HOUSEBOYS. Theirs is he only native tribe ia Australia that keeps memory of the dead in monumental grave posts in an allotted graveyard, and also in the ‘‘ pukamini ** dance, a coxroboree drama of the life of the dead that is unique among the primitve tribes of the continent. The saga of the Mala-ola is yet _to be written, with much of outstanding ethnological interest. In the old, days that name was feared on the coast, and the men with the palm leaf engraved in their breast earned all before them in war; but now for their superior strength and intelligence they are welcomed in Darwin as house servants and yard boys. There is an aerodrome at Cape Fourcroy, on Bathurst Island, and civilisation is gradually intruding. That would be, for the 2,000, the beginning of the end. The fact that the island has not been cultivated and colonised means nothing in a country where you can still travel a straight 200 miles without meeting a living soul. But as conditions are in the Territory at present it is better tb"t Melville should remain a black man’s paradise than become a white man’s of which the north coast of 'Australia already has more than its share.