Unlucky Luke

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 331, 17 April 1928, Page 1

Unlucky Luke

Nobody Wants Him “TOURING” PACIFIC NO FUNDS, PROSPECTS OR CARES Nobody wants Anthony Luke, and yet, in a mild way, he is making history. For the last 12 or 14 months he has been touring round the Pacific Island on mail boats—mostly at the expense of other people. 'V7" e STERDAY he arrived from Samoa by the Tofua, a forlornlooking figure, without funds and without any definite plans about anything. The authorities in Auckland will not allow him to land, as he has no passport, and it looks as though he wi , be sent back to Samoa, from where he came. This is what has been happening to Luke for the last 12 months. Nobody wants him, so they keep sending him from place to place, evidently with the idea of eventually getting rid of him.

“Anyhow, I didn’t want to come here, and I didn’t want to go to Sydney,” said Luke yesterday, as he scraped the deck of the Tofua with a dirty and very worn tennis shoe. He confused that he had no money, though he had paid for part of his prolonged “tour.” Certainly he looked as though he belonged to the ranks of the destitute. His clothes were grubby; his braces were held together with pieces of string. The only prosperous part of him was a particularly bushy aud rather antagonistic moustache. It was impossible to get any definite statement from him, except that once he had a passport, but that he misplaced it. “I think it must be somewhere about this ship,” he remarked, looking sideways with a pair of mild and rather helpless grey eyes. However, the passport must have disappeared long before he was put on the Tofua by the Samoan police, who paid his fare to New Zealand. Luke professed that he came from Hamilton, in the Eastern States of Canada. He says that he wants to go back there, but evidently the Canadian authorities will have none of him. The "tourist” says that he left Vancouver over a year ago and went to Honolulu. Apparently there was some misunderstanding there, so he journeyed south on the Ventura. At Suva he was-eyed with suspicion and was sent to Samoa. From Samoa he was sent to Sydney. Sydney turned either a deaf ear or a blind eye on Luke and sent him back to Samoa, where the authorities packed him up and sent him to Auckland. “I wouldn’t stay here, anyhow,” Luke remarked yesterday as he watched the rajn blotting out the harbour.

And then he became quite cheery; the prospect of another trip did not damp his ardour. “Life’s all right if you don’t kick up hell,” he remarked blandly. Perhaps Luke is destined to live a life on the ocean wave. Nobody wants him, he has nowhere to go, and so the only thing which remains for him to do is to be carried round the Pacific in a kind of endless chain.