PAPUA CURIOSITIES.

Taranaki Central Press, Volume IV, Issue 384, 16 March 1937, Page 5

PAPUA CURIOSITIES.

Land of Contrasts. From Papua, land of strange contradictions, Lady Murray is at present on her second visit to New Zealand, states an exchange. A. quick-witted Irishwoman, she is the wife of the Lieutenant-Governor, Sir Hubert Murray. Her first husband, the late Mr. Arthur Vernon, was a step-brother of the late Mr. E. S. Vernon, of Christchurch.

Papuan oddities, according to Lady Murray, include electrically-lit native villages, an nnroaded interior crossed by a splendid air service, capable of transporting anything from a bag of gold to a cow;, natives in the coastal regions who have acquired a thin veneer of Westernisation, and in the interior savages, who, Lady Murray considers, would not be above doing a bit of head-hunting now and again to relieve the monotony of life. All the mysterious hinterland of Papua has now been explored, however, and will gradually be brought under control. Life al, Government House, Port Moresby, has its drawbacks. So one glimpses from Lady Murray’s conversation. Humid he.at, untrained and untrainable Papuan servants, things that creep and things that crawl. And after that, the heat again. Small Wonder that she has spent only two months there, since her last, trip to New Zealand about a year and a half

ago! On her short visit home she found that talk of oil had superseded that of gold. Gold has been found in Papua, but not in anything like the quantities that has been produced, and is being produced, by the mines in the adjoining mandated territory of New Guinea. Visions of finding oil are now filling the imaginations of business men.

On her present trip to New Zealand Lady Murray is planning to see something of the country.