CHEAPEST PLACE TO LIVE.

Taranaki Daily News, 29 December 1921, Page 5

CHEAPEST PLACE TO LIVE.

1 NOVELIST AND CANNIBAL NEIGHBORS. Sydney, Noy. 22. Miss Beatrice Grimshaw, "a well-known authoress, who owns an islet off £he Papuan coast, and has been living there since her arrival from England eight years ago, describes New Guinea as the larder of the world. “It is not alone a land flowing with milk and honey, but it can supply every other food needful to civilisation,” she told an interviewer the other day. “I am sure it is the cheapest place in the world to live. I know of one family a planter and his wife and several children, whose weekly expenses run to £l. and that is spent on a few odd groceries. But they have a daily menu of turkey, chicken, ham, pork, fruit, vegetables, eggs, and custards, and the whole is raised on the plantation.” Mentioning Port Moresby, the capital of Papua, Miss Grimshaw confined herself to one sweeping phrase—“ The sink of the Pacific.”

“I asked a very well-travelled man recently,” she added,, “if he knew a worse place, and he had to think, and then remembered another tropical town, which, however, shall be nameless.” , Miss Grimshaw is at present in Sydney on her way to England on a business visit. She says she finds a ready market for her i&land fiction, and, under contract to a well-known publishing firm, turns out two books of adventure life and love every year. She will return to Papua next year. Asked if she missed social intercourse and the clatter of the tea cups, Miss GrimshaWsJaughed and said, “I live amid the tropical jungle because I want to. Naturally T meet many people, and dispense a simple hospitality, but to be in society —in and of the throng—that has no charms for me. I much prefer my neighbors the cannibals. They are singularly honest as to intention and in outlook, and ‘far from the mad’ning crowd’ engenders a wholesome fear of an over-cultivated modern civilisation. I think I am quite safe in echoing a song which has reached even our latitudes ■ ‘This is the life,’ even though I have no trams nor trains, and have to negotiate most of my journeyings to the nearest white settlement Samarai —in mV whaleboat with a fuzzy-headed crew of men who are still cannibals.”