YOU CAN'T BE GAY IN LAE

Rotorua Morning Post, Issue 5312, 27 January 1947, Page 7

YOU CAN'T BE GAY IN LAE

SISALKRAFT TOWN CIVILIAN POPULATION LIVING IN EX-ARMY HUTS. Four times a week now the airliners from Australia arrive in Lae, New Guinea. They pump life-blood interest and hope into the moribund township; supply a quick escape to the south when necessary; and, above all, prove to Territorians that somewhere there remains a public ntility that is efficient, predictable, and at their service, writes Judy Tudor in the Sydney Morning Herald1. Unless you had been told, you would be pardoned for not recognising the hotel at Lae as such. Formerly it was the barracks of the A.W.A.S.^ who Were stationed in the area and consists of about 50 asorted-sized buildings of palmleaf thateh and tarred paper, scattered over a four-acre elearing. The A.W.A.S. have gone, but their barracks linger-on, converted to the use of civilians who are using Lae as the jumping-off place for the remains of their plantations and mines further afield. In memory of the establishment which existed in pre-blitz Lae, the hotel goes officially by the name of the Hotel Cecil; informally it is referred to simply as "the pub." Three of the buildings are in use as a bar, a dining-room and a recreation hut. Others, which bear a striking resemblance to Fly River long-houses, have been made into sleeping quarters simply by dividing them into small rooms with sisalkraft (tarred paper) partitions.

Through the Rain to Breakfast. There might he some merit in scattering the hotel over acres if it were not for Lae's climate, which is gene- ■ rally vile. As it is, taking breakfast each morning usually consists of trudging along sodden paths and through wet grass from sleeping quarters to dining room, muffled up in a raincoat or huddled under an umbrella. The lives of the two women who run Lae's pub are given up entirely to poxe, unadulterated co.ping. Today, it is the sudden and unheralded influx of guests. To-morrow, the town water supply is abruptly cut off and remains so for a week. The day after that, the laundry 'boys indicate that they wish to leave for home in a body. Always there is raw native labour to contend with, and cooking, and the shortage of supplies. Ships from Anstralia have been arriving gbout once every two months. Sometimes they bring food and sometimes they do not. There are long intervals, therefore, when the hotel must supply hundreds of meals per week entirely from cans. It is rumoured that the proprietresses make money; but I fear they have no fun. They are apparently sustained in their task by the hope that some day when the Town Planners permit it, and sufficient material is forthcoming from Australia, they will be able to build a recognisable hotel to sefve not only the local residents, but tourists from overseas. Their guests are sustained by the fact that there is nothing better anvwhere else. During- the Japanese occupation, Lae was bombed out of existence. After the reoccupation of the township by Australian and American forces, a new Lae came into 'being. Vast stores, workshops, hospitals and camps were scattered over an area perhaps six miles square, and linked by good roads along which, day or night, every tkind of motor vehicie from bulldozers to jeeps rumbled and roared. Into this once lively Army area now have come aibout '200 people, and most of those are transients. They rattle about lilke dried peas in an overlarge pod. Lae, as the Army built it, and with transport as it is to-day, is far too scattered for them. Homes from Army Huts. When they come to Lae, permanent residents, forbidden to build permanent homes, prospect around in the huge triangle between the Milford Haven wharf, near the mouth of the Markham, the pub, and the na'tive hospital at Malahang, pick out some mouldering and abandoned Army building which they feel has some possibilities, interview the District Officer and the local ibranch of the Commonwealth Disposals Commission, and usually gain permission to take it over temporarily. Then witli sisalkraft and thatch and paint, black iron and oddments scrounged from old Army dumps, there emerges a roof and a floor and a few rooms in which to live. It is pioneering plus in the Territory today. A man builds his house (and probably most of the furniture) with his own hands. If he does not, then he and his family are without shelter. The few Chinese tradesmen who flourished in the Territory before the blitz, and survived during it, now are busy re-establishing themselves. So lives Lae — undler sisalkraft and on canned M. and Y., thumbing a ride along the now pot-holey roads from Administration jeeps, nativeowned lerries, and the few privately owned, sawn-down airbulances and signal-cars. Even the great Australian pastime of drinking beer was denied Lae citizenry when I left th^re recently. There had been no beer boat for over two months, and those who felt the need of bottled uplift imbibed gin, Australian in origin, and of diverse and fprmerly unheard-of brands. But on the whole, Lae residents are cheerful — heaven laiows why — !because the gold mines which were the sole reason for Lae's being befqye the war, no longer fomction. The air journey to New Guinea is spread over two days, but the southbound trip takes only the hours between dawn and 10 p.m. This sameday service between Lae and Sydney is a magic-carpet accomplishment that has the eff ect of moving the body but leaving the mind 2500 miles behind

up north. When I journey south, I stayed the previous night at Lae's pub — a hot, steamy night, with the promise (duly released) of rain before morning'. Lights Off at Midnight. The electric light is turned off promptly at midnight in the. township and Mine Hostess 'had armed me with, a very weak torch, as well as an alarm clock, against the pre-dawn rise. Characteristically, I had spent most of the time between midnight (when the establishment had quietened down suffilciently to sleep) and 4.30 a.m. peering at the clock by torchlight for fear that (a) the alarm would not go off, or (b) I would not hear it if it did. By five I had already managed to assemble my clothes, dress and run a comb through my .hair by torchlight (my face had to remain very much as it was until well aiboVe the Owen Stanleys) and was standing in the roadw^y waiting for the airways jeep.' By 5.30 we were assembled on the drome, the silver airliner waruning up with a whirr of propellers. The dawn was just breaking", with a leaden sea before us and Lae township, sprawling and grim in the half-light, behind._ Clouds and the vapours of the night still tangled in a mountain masses above. Half a dozen Europeans and a similar number of Papuans were to make the ifirst leg of the journey — the Papuans providing us with some relief from early-rising blues. To speed- their approach to our way of things natives of Papua and New Guinea ai'e encouraged to wear Euro■pean clothes where formerly, as ah anti-T.B. precaution, they were kept to the simple lava-lava. Native in Gaudy Outfits. Chu* fuzzy-wuzzy travellers were g'Ot up regardless in anything from singlets and shorts of dazzling hue to a sketchy R.A.'N, outfit, but each had put on as an extraordinary termination of long spindly legs the largest, yellowest, newest army bo)ots ever worn by man. Brown-brother is not used to foot wear of any variety, his feet are unashamedly splay, and the expression on the lads' faces as they hobbled and clomped along was agonising, but this, they patently believed, was an occasion. Wear 'em they would, if it crippled them for ever. Thus in boots and air travel, paid for by the taxpayer, is Australia discharging her debt to the brown angels of the Kokoda trail. Our plane took off over the stillgrey sea, then gaining height, swung inland again and over the Owen Stanleys partly hidden from us by layer upon layer of white cottonwool clouds'. Down and across the Sogeri tablelands we went to Moresby, now in sunshine, blue sea, and hluer sea off the shoreline. ■ Here we lost our booted Papuans and took on rubber rafts for the set hop. Then up and off again, straight out over blue water headed south for Cairns, over 550 milse away. Our plane climbed and with it our appetites in that thin, cold air. Scrambled eggs for breakfast and chilled tomato juice, fruit, fresh hread and butter and coffee. And helow us 10,000 feet helow— the Coral Sea, flat, heaten silver in the morning sunshine. Ahead, civilisation. Civilisation; just the exchange of New Guinea jungle for the jiungles of Sydney these days. Bu.t 'at- that stage of the journey, good food inside you, a nip in the air— somehow good. i