PUZZLES TO COME

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 2, Issue 523, 5 May 1933, Page 6

PUZZLES TO COME

AUSTRALIAN CENSUS "MEN FROM ALL « THE SEVEN SEAS." FROM CHINA TO PERU. Darwin, Saturday. When the Australian census is taken on June 29, a remarkable collection of names and characters never seen or thought of by the people of the cities will he brought together, Carried by truck, car, paek-horse, huckhoard, camel, mule, donkey, and hlack hoy, the pink and hlue forms will hring skeleton outlines of lives in the strangest places. They will come from the great sandhill wastes in the centre of the continent; from the trepang and pearling camps on the rim of the Timor and Arafura seas, and crocodile and fever rivers in the Gulf. They will come from "over the ranges" in the Kimberley, where white men have not seen their kind for three years; and from the rivers and jungles of the Far North. Bishops, beachcombers, buffalo shooters, baronets incognito, prisoners, pensioners, poddy dodgers, opal gougers, sandal-wood-getters, drovers, well-sinkers, ringers, boundary riders, horsetailers, station cooks and lepers . . . white men wearing nothing but flour hags, who live and look like blacks, and exist on cocoanut and goanna tail; a handful of white women fighting the splendid battle of pioneers, rearing children in the wilderness with' ineffable bravery — all these wil.1 be "mentioned in despatches." A Chinese Puzzle. Religions will range from the followers of Mahomet, Confucius, Mrs. iEddy, to Bush Methodists who cannot remember the Lord's Prayer. iOld prospectors of Ultimate Hills, who came from the Yukon in the 'nineties, will emerge in individuality, if .not in person, from their rock warrens in the Kimberleys, where they live with kangaroos. There will be men of station homesteads, out-camps, tents, tin shacks and bough shades; men of lighthouses and the luggers; and men whose only address is a swag. From the polyglot towns of North Thursday Island, Darwin and Broome, many weird names will be gathered; names beginning XS, ZS, QS; dipthongs that trace their derivation to every country from Norway to New Zealand, with a few Venezuelans and Zulus thrown in. One walled Chinese compound alone in Darwin can furnish names of 57 child inhabitants, all magnolia blossoms of the one genealogical ,tree whose patriarch, an aged Celestial now visiting Ohina, came to help build the North Australian railway 50 years ago. From a Japanese village in Broome will be tahulated Yumyums- and Suzukis, who came to Australia before the passing of the Aliens Restrictions Act; Creoles, Koepangers, and men of Borneo. Strange Racial Blends. Some of the most incongruous hlends on earth will he diselosed in the half-caste quarter in Darwin. The comhined nationality of one family alone would haffle Solomon. Broome claims a half-caste family of some 50 members, all descendants of a silk hat manufacturer from London, who spent his youth in the "Blaek Ivory" trade in the early days of north-west pearling and his old age lying in the sands of Cape Leveque while lubras from a neaxby camp sent him fish, crabs and turtle eggs. But the hest riddles for the census men will he the 'statistics regarding the hlacks. The policemen on patrol are in for a had quarter on an hour with every one of them. "Little bit father"; "Picaninny belong my boy"; "Mudders and nudder mudders"; "Auntie hy skin"; "Brudder only harp"; and "Cudgin helonga me not proply, fellas" are some of the relationships that they will have to disentangle before the pink form will be eomplete. There are widows who have been .passed on to three of their original husband's younger brothers in turn, i lubras whose sons through a succession of wrong marriages are now their trihal fathers, and aflianced wives of xwo years old. Over all this the long arm of the Census will stretch.