LITTLE-KNOWN PAPUA

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume LXII, Issue 18879, 3 December 1935, Page 6

LITTLE-KNOWN PAPUA

UP-COUNTRY FOR LABOR FASCINATING BUSH PEOPLE FRINGE OF DANGER ZONE GISBORNITE'S EXPERIENCE To the thousands of Now Zealanders who have not in many years moved beyond a radius of a few miles from thenhomes, there is romance inherent in the lives of their former acquaintances and friends who have sought other environments. There are New Zealanders scattered throughout the length and breadth of the world, accomplishing tasks which by daily routine may have become familiar to them, but which remain a source of abiding interest to those for whom the quiet sedentary life has been decreed by circumstance. Among the contingent of adventurers abroad, Gisborne is strongly represented by a number of men who have made for themselves niches in other lands. Some have directed enterprises of world interest; others, denied the greater opportunities, nevertheless have taken such as came their way, and have known the thrills and hardships of life on the world's last frontiers. No super-men they, but individuals who do their own work, often for meagre enough rewards, and perhaps at times envying ;those whose company they knew in less adventurous days. Yet they are getting from life much that is denied to the average home-staying member of the community. SOLID ACHIEVEMENT

A great many residents of this district will remember well the personality of Mr. Graham B. Mirfield, at one time assistant engineer to the Gisborne Harbor Board, and later in the employ of a Svdney business concern with extensive'interests .in the tropic seas, and particularly in the mandated territory of New Guiaiia. Mr. Mirfield has known solid achievement since taking up his appointment in Rabaul —tragedy too, as the result of an aviation accident in which his wife lost her life, and he was so badly injured that his recovery was despaired of. For months he suffered the effects of a spinal injury which, despite a gradual improvement, threatened to leave him a physical wreck. To-day he is himself again, so thoroughly himself that he writes in happy vein of a journey into the interior of the mandated territory, undertaken with the object of testing the completeness of his recovery.

HILL COUNTRY VILLAGES A record of bis up-country journey, in search of native labor for the plantations of his employers, has been furnished by Mr. Mirfield to his father, Mr. I. Mirfield, of Gisborne, in the form of a journal detailing the major events of every day—humorous and otherwise. In this'journal he describes the extraordinary character of the country through which the journey was made, and many sidelights are thrown upon the types of natives encountered, their habits of life, and the procedure by which they are enlisted for work on the plantations. It should be explained that native recruiting is now supervised closely by the Administration of the territory, and that penetration into the. back areas of unsettled country is undertaken at a certain risk of untoward happenings. -•• It is not Jong since a party of- prospectors was ambushed by natives in a hill village of tfie Nakanaia district, into which Mr Mirfield recently journeyed with an experienced labor, recruiter. The village where"the ambush took place, with the loss of thrcj 5 white men, and where retribution was visited upon the tribesmen of the killers, was in fact one of those visited by his party; and in his journal Mr Mirfield refers" interestingly to the impressions left by the punitive expedition, which made the lives of white men safe for a time at least in that particular area. The journal has been made available to the Herald for the selection of material likely to interest readers of this paper, and though not written with any thought of publication, has been found to afford a most interesting record of an unfamiliar terrain and of a people little known to the world at large. The document is too lengthy to deal with in one issue, and for convenience will be published in sections, the first of which will appear shortly.