COSMOPOLIS IN MINIATURE.

Taihape Daily Times, 1 September 1919, Page 7

COSMOPOLIS IN MINIATURE.

DAEWIN, A POET OF MISSING SOULS. MEDLEY OF THE WOELD’S MISFITS. A globe-trooting correspondent of New York Herald writes thus of Port ' Darwin: —• ' Australia is a country where men struggle for commercial profits, wrestle with the land for its, wealth, and with the sea for its treasures. It has its silken civilisation in the cities and its primitive roughness “out back.” But it is far away from these where lies the land of Sargasso, the Port of Missing Souls. Port Darwin, as it is geographically known, the capital of the Never-Never, and Australia’s eastern portal, is a place where man’s philosophy stands neutralised. It is a place where east meets west, and the scu.s of the restless finds a temporary san* tvary. Coming in from the sea by right one passes close by the flickering lights of the pearling fleet and spasmodic song floats o'er the tropic waters in the tongue of the Japanese or some dialect of Southern Europe, accompanied by the musi-cal-like tinkle of some stringed instrument. The main street presents an appearance almost as cosmopolitan as Port Said. Each side is lined by a string of low corrugated shanties, with a few narrow intersecting passages here and there leading to a congested area behind. Here may be distinguished Greek cafes, Chinese stores, a Eussian garage, and a mcdly of shops of ineomprehensive trade. At the end of the street a corrugated enclosure is seen, where moving pictures of a decade ago are screened for the benefit of a tolerant public. This place is run by a European and a Chinese Malay. During the wet season a stampede

usually takes place half way through the performance owing to a thunderstorm breaking up the audience, A little further along stands the T 9,. minus Hotel, one of the three State “controlled” hotels. On a Saturday evening this place in invariably the] scene of a struggling mass, some three or four deep, around the count‘ ers elamsouring for -liquor, with bars men bathed in perspiration endeavouring to assuage their wants_ V MEN WHO LIVE WITH THE ‘ ' B—LAC~KSL We look around the faces and the “missing souls” are here. There is .11man just in after four‘or five years in the Never-Never, whose associates forl the most part have Ben aboriginals—possibly the lowest type of the black race~and his horses and dogs, Here is the skipper of a pearling lugger “in” with his treasure trove, divers, stockmen, an Old ’Varsity man who proved the “black sheep” and who in consequence, is spending -a life’s conge; Greeks byfho score, all sinking what individuality they might once have possessed at the shrine of Bacchus, the great levelle: of men and‘ obliterator of undesirable memories. One has ot the dscreet at this time. ‘ We emerge into the street again andi slip through an ill-lighted Chinese] shop where parchment-like faces peer! through a gloom pungent with a peculiar arolna——it might be opium. . Thence through a mazc\of passages, where furtive eyes are ever on the [watch for the police, and having “passed the Rubicon,” we enter -a room lwhere the game of fan-tan ‘is in progress. Two tables are being used anrl laround these swarm gamblers of all [types —— Chinese, Malays. seamen, clerks, station hands and storckeepers. The air is hot and vitiated with smoke from lamps and tobacco, but this is unnoticed. ‘All eyes are on the counters as the Chinese banker, with Oriental gravity, lifts the cup that covers them. Solemnly he scoops .away with his strip of bamboo until ‘the required residue is reached. Then the bank draws and pays. Out from here we pass a‘cr‘oss the street again and through a sh-op where a few mangoes appear to be for sale in the grimy window, A to the pak-a-poo “joint.” Here are the same darkened passages and numerous exits. The crowd here is smaller, as tickets are {marked and the numbers left for an ‘hour or so before being drawn_ ’ Police raids on these places are free quent, but the game is established in some new and more inaccessible spot a few nights later. And so the night wears on in this place, where men. whose souls have-become petrified on ‘lfic.:g rough course——part o’ the fiois {Sam of the white races, some victims of the wanderlust, others of the drink lust—-will tread their restless way until the tie between body‘ and soul shall at last be severed.