THE FLY MENACE

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 7, Issue 56, 14 March 1944, Page 4

THE FLY MENACE

tory. Let us. all hope arid pray that we in this beautiful little town will be able to put our house —or backyard—in order before an epidemic more serious than summer sickness reaches us. I! know the citizens are ready to co-operate if only the City Fathers will do their part. Yours etc.. C. F. THOMAS, President, Whakatane Chamber of Commerce.

Sir,-—Please allow me to express my thanks lor the remarks in your leader of Friday last relative to the Fly Menacc. I, too, had the privilege of listening to the main part of the lecture delivered last Wednesday evening by Major Hutchinson and can say in that connection that it is a great pity this lecture was not more widely advertised and the people encouraged to hear such an eloquent and enlightening address so well arranged and illustrated. Le3t me say here that T: stand that short. notice given was not the fault of the local; E.P.Sj. Officers. If every citizen had taken the trouble to attend the Major's lecture I feel sure, they would all have appreciated to the full why the Chamber of Commerce, as a body, lias, so persistently hammered at the City Fathers in an attempt to drive home to them the necessity of having a decent and systematic destruction of that which creates the main breeding ground for our dangerous little playthings—the domestic and blow tlies. I say 'playthings' intentionally as we are only too prone to treat them as such. He has a ijob of work to do, no doubt, but that job of work is not the self appointed task of running a shuttle service from the garbage hole to your jam or butter dish, or worse still, to baby's faqjo and hands while that child's life,, surely more precious than money is exposed to unknown dangers. Yes Mr Editor, .you are correct when you say that the City Fathers have used the alleged shortage of cans and lorries as an excuse to shelve this matter. Over the last 12 to IS months they have demonstrated better than any Government Department T know, a perfect ex-> ample of. official shuffling. They say they cannot get cans. That may be true to-day but it was: nofc so when we lirst shook them up sufficiently to get them to shew some interest. Last year they specifie,d a 19-13 model truck. I suppose they now want a 1944 model. Can If suggest to you, Sir, that had they taken« the opportunity of tendering for a suitable truck under their own name at the recent large Army sale they may have been as successful as those other Councils who secured good trucks at very reasonable prices. Or 'I may suggest that they tell the people why they did not accept the tender of the present sanitary contractor—perhaps I: missed the point there. I should also like to remind -you Mr Editor of the 'backlash' you received from a provincial paper—no riot in the Bay of Plenty:—when you wrote a very forceful and sane leader in support of our request for a new Post Oirice. Here arc some extracts from that paper and I doubt whether it's circulation is any more than your own. "Residents of AVliakatanc have many other things to worry about for such is the fate of small towns which have not already established what might be called the 'civilised amenities' before the war cut in. For many years — — — lias had a weekly rubbish collection and while its sewerage system, also long established, has occasionally given rise to spirited discussion at Bor-i ough Council meetings, it has one. Whakatane has neither. There is surely room for local elfort on tlxq part of that town in getting these fundamentals attended to as residents have already done." "In conclusion, however, we hop© that as Whakatane further emerges from the 'sleepy hollow' atmosphere of the Rip Van Winkle fable, and continues to progress towards the" bustling township of the future, it will attain all these amenities,, including a new Post Office which—■ and towns of its size now possess," , Every right thinking person must resent that;, not the fayt that that provincial paper 'rubbed it in' as it, did, but because we have left our-* selves open to such a broadside., which, unfortunately is warranted-^ I would not like to appear tofo pessimistic, but I must say that we can hardly expect history not to repeat itself in some form or other as it has done at, or towards the end of, nearly every war in recorded his-