IN HAPPY PAPUA.

Taranaki Daily News, 11 July 1922, Page 3

IN HAPPY PAPUA.

AUSTRALIA MAKES AMENDS. NOVELIST’S HIGH PRAISE. tt . ' London. June 27. “If ever a nation did penance for a crime, the Commonwealth is doing it now in Papua, for her 1 sins of the nineteenth century. No one has forgotten how the colored people of Australia and Tasmania were ‘dispersed,’ Australia least of all. Now I as an Englishwoman am compelled to acknowledge that Papua under Australian rule has prospered to an extent undreamt of in Crown colony days. Since 1906 Australia has nobly shown her ability to carry the burden of her only colony.” Such is Miss Beatrice Grimshaw’s summing-up in an address on Papua at the Royal Colonial Institute to-day. In a tribute to the Lieut.-Governor, Mr. J. H. P. Murray, Miss Grimshaw says that the Papuans, alone of all Pacific Islanders, have escaped the terrors of the “middle passage” from savagery to civilisation which has been fatal to so many. All the world knew the shameful history of Australia in respect of her natives, who could have been settled and who would have worked in the tropics if they had not been wantonly destroyed. Though the Maori had been saved, there was now “so much white blood mingled with the brown” that the survival carried less weight than would have been otherwise the case. Miss Grimshaw sees the beginning of a great trek toward the sunnier parts of the earth by the white race, and predicts that the days axe coming when the world’s battles will be fought for the possession of the sunny lands.