After our short tour was finished, we were to push into the wild interior. We had decided to give mass treatments where we could; otherwise we must leave medicine and instructions with planters and missionaries along the way. It was talk, talk, talk these first few days, and I was like a wild horse, rarin’ to go. I got plenty of going before my seven months were up.
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There was a touch of madness in this little hot-spot of semi-civilization where Queenslanders had come to build up another Australia. The superintendent of the hospital, Dr. Mathews—(“Dr. Mathews, one t in the name, please”) halted operations to quote a Biblical passage proving, to him, that the world would end in 1925. He had worked it out mathematically; exactly 144,000 souls would be spared from fire by a race-conscious Creator. These would be mostly Papuans, who would rise and inherit the earth from England. He hated England. His prophecy of destruction, he told me, had come to him when a boy of fifteen, in the midst of a football scrimmage.
Port Moresby, during the war scare of 1914, earnestly believed that German New Guinea might at any minute cross the border to burn and loot. At the Papuan Club they could laugh it off after the third whisky-soda. They told about native sentries posted around town, instructed to shoot at sight. One gray dawn a sentry spied an excessively smelly scavenger’s wagon rolling up, and took it for the enemy. The password was “Vailala.” The guard leveled his rifle nervously and said, “You no talkim Vailala me shoot.” The baffled Motu driver replied, “Me no sabe Vailala. This no shoot-cart. This shit-cart,”—and rolled away into the mist.
The Motu is a tamed and pleasant savage who only murders when it is conscientiously necessary. In the Port he is quite a city fellow, wearing his great bush of hair with style, but not aggressively. His kind brown eyes hold no reproach for the white folks who set him to minor household drudgeries. He is inclined to be timid; but in Papua you mustn’t put too much faith in kind brown eyes. Even the butcherous Koiaris and the cannibal Goaribaris can look at you with winning gentleness when you visit their villages.
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Viewed from all angles,—geographical, political, medical,—our situation was not easy.
Here were three thousand miles of coast, with mountains massed so near that roads by the sea were impossible; the nineteen-mile road that ran from Port Moresby to Sapphire Creek was the only one that wasn’t a goat path or a postman’s trail. The Governor’s yacht was out of my reach, and we hired or borrowed the canoes that took us up rivers; therefore, for transportation we were largely at the mercy of recruiters and planters.
We were only there on sufferance, for the Australian Government which ran the Territory chose to snub local authority. The depression of 1920 had set the planters yammering for subsidies to help a Territory which, for the tropics, is strangely unfertile. Governor Murray was at his wits’ end to carry on his pinch-penny policy with the aid of ships’ engineers and stewards whom he had made into roughly able magistrates and district officers.
The whole medical service was pared down to an excellent Chief Medical Officer with nothing to work with, a Judgment Day prophet in charge of the local hospital, and one physician for each of three far-flung districts. These five, with a couple of nurses and two European dispensers, were supposed to service the 90,000-odd square miles. The officer at Samarai was efficiently modern; the other three were elderly hacks. This was typical of the general medical situation over the South Pacific.