Greetings from Salamaua

Received this New Year card from my old mate, Post-Courier Lae bureau chief Patrick Levo, who visited Salamaua and fell in love with the place.

 

 

Moving farewell for Henry Kila

Henry Kila's coffin is carried out of church. All pictures by EKAR KEAPU of The National

Mr Kila's family

Deputy Prime Minister Sir Puka Temu

Last respects from Sir Puka

Bart Philemon bids farewell to a good mate

PNG Sports Federation general secretary Sir John Dawanincura

Representatives from the Papua New Guinea business community and sports fraternity turned out in numbers to show respect to PNG's first internationally-qualified insurer and sports personality Henry Raisi Kila, The National reports.

Late Mr Kila's distinguished services to sports and business in the country, particularly his efforts in strengthening business relations between Australia and PNG were highly acknowledged during the funeral service in Port Moresby's Sioni Kami Memorial Church at Gordon.

His close firend and deputy opposition leader Bart Philemon described Mr Kila as "larger than life in PNG; a pioneer come trailblazer; a truly bigman in PNG society yet a very humble down-to-earth person; firm believer of honesty, integrity; and indeed a unique Papua New Guinean".

Mr Kila succumbed to an acute heart attack brought on by clogged arteries and diabetic condition at about 2am on Monday at the Port Moresby Private Specialist Medical Centre.

He was 58.

He will be buried at his Arure village tomorrow after the trip home today to Delena and Yule Island in Kairuku, Central province.

Nine questions

A quiz for people who think they know everything! (maybe from a North American perspective?)
These are not trick questions.
They are straight questions with straight answers
1. Name  the one sport in which neither the spectators nor the participants
know the score or the leader until the contest ends.
2. What  famous North American landmark
is constantly  moving backward?
3. Of all  vegetables, only two can live to produce on their own for several growing  seasons.  All other vegetables must be replanted every year.  What are the only  two perennial vegetables?
4. What fruit  has its seeds on the outside?
5. In  many liquor stores, you can buy pear brandy,  with a real pear inside the bottle. The pear is whole and ripe, and the bottle is genuine; it hasn't been cut in any way. How did the pear get inside the bottle?
6. Only three  words in standard English begin with the letters 'dw' and they are all common words.  Name two of them.
7. There are 14 punctuation marks in English grammar.Can you name at least half of them?
8. Name the only vegetable or fruit that is never sold frozen, canned, processed, cooked, or in any other form
except fresh.
9. Name 6 or more things  that you can wear on your feet beginning with the letter 'S.'

Answers To  Quiz:

1.  The one sport in which neither the  spectators nor the participants know the  score or the leader until the contest  ends
Boxing

2. North American  landmark constantly moving backward  .
Niagara Falls
(The rim is  worn down about two and a half feet each year  because of the millions of gallons of water that  rush over it every minute.)
3. Only two  vegetables that can live to produce on their  own for several growing seasons  .
...Asparagus and rhubarb.
4.  The fruit with its seeds on the outside ..  .
Strawberry.
5. How did the  pear get inside the brandy bottle?
It grew  inside the bottle.
(The bottles are placed  over pear buds when they are small, and are  wired in place on the tree. The bottle is left  in place for the entire growing season. When the pears are ripe, they  are snipped off at the stems.)
6.  Three English words beginning with  dw
Dwarf, dwell and dwindle.
7.  Fourteen punctuation marks in English grammar  .
Period, comma, colon, semicolon, dash, hyphen, apostrophe, question mark,exclamation point, quotation marks, brackets, parenthesis, braces, and ellipses.
8. The only  vegetable or fruit never sold frozen, canned, processed, cooked, or in any other form but fresh
Lettuce.
9.  Six or more things you can wear on your feet beginning  with 'S'
Shoes, socks, sandals, sneakers, slippers, skis, skates, snowshoes,
stockings, stilts.

Hillary Clinton will visit Papua New Guinea

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton (pictured)  will visit Papua New Guinea, New Zealand and Australia from Jan 14 to 19, U.S. State Department said on Wednesday.

On Jan 12, in Honolulu, Hawaii, the secretary will deliver a policy speech focused on Asia-Pacific multilateral engagement and will be consulting with Pacific Command, said spokesman Ian Kelly in a statement.

From Hawaii, Clinton will travel to Papua New Guinea on Jan. 14where she will hold bilateral meetings and meet with local society leaders to discuss environmental protection and women's empowerment.

On Jan 15, Clinton will travel to New Zealand for meeting with Prime Minister John Key and other senior officials. She will also hold meetings with New Zealand citizens and U.S. and New Zealand veterans.

The secretary will travel to Australia on Jan17.

In Canberra, Clinton, U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and their Australian counterparts Stephen Smith and John Falkner will participate in the 25th Australia-U.S. Ministerial Consultations to discuss key global and regional security challenges.

 

Workshop addresses bio=control strategy for invasive pests and weeds

Participants at the Pacific Bio-control Strategy Workshop at Auckland, New Zealand, late last year

By ANNASTASIA KAWI of NARI

The biological control of invasive species in the Pacific was the agenda of a strategic workshop held in New Zealand recently.
Plant protection experts and quarantine specialists from the Pacific and international community were taken to task to address issues of adopting biological control or bio-control as a tool to fight invasive pests and weeds in agriculture, forestry and important ecosystems in the region.
The Regional Bio-control Strategy Development Workshop was held in Auckland last Nov 16-18.
Papua New Guinea was represented by Kaile Korowi, an entomologist with Ramu Agri-Industries; Tony Gunua, a senior plant pathologist with the National Agricultural Quarantine and Inspection Authority; and Annastasia Kawi, a National Agriculture Research Institute scientist.
Other participating countries were American Samoa, Cook Islands, Fiji, French Polynesia, Guam, New Caledonia, Niue, Northern Marianas, Palau, Samoa, Tonga and Vanuatu.
The main purpose of the workshop was to bring key players together to see whether bio-control of widespread invasive species could be undertaken in a more co-operative and collaborative way in the Pacific, and to develop a regional strategy that would allow this to happen.
Some of the issues addressed included:
· Reviewing of bio-control activities in the Pacific;
· Identifying capacity gaps and barriers in using bio-control to manage invasive weeds;
· Identifying opportunities and actions to increase bio-control work in the Pacific;
· Discussing criteria for selecting priority species for bio-control;
· Identifying actions and mechanisms to increase the understanding and acceptance of the use of bio-control as a management tool;
· Identifying potential funding sources for bio-control projects; and
· Creating a steering group to assist in the implementation of a regional strategic plan.
Participants were told that a significant number of successful projects on invasive species using bio-control already existed in the Pacific region with scope for more.
However, given the financial, legislative and logistical constraints faced by each Pacific Island Country and Territory (PIC&T), there was an urgent need is develop a strategy that could allow PIC&Ts to share expertise, experiences and resources.
Emphasis was also placed on each PIC&T to prioritise their invasive species, both plant and animal pests, for biological control.
With priority lists, countries with commonalities can work together to help minimise expenses of often-expensive invasive species management projects.
The workshop concluded that the PIC&Ts can share more information between agriculture, forestry and bio-diversity conservation groups to better address bio-control work, as well as look at strategies implemented in other regions in the use of bio-control agents to fight invasive plants and pests.
The workshop was funded by United States Department of State, Hawaii Invasive Species Council, Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund, New Zealand AID, Pacific Invasive Learning Network, Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme, Pacific Invasive Initiative based at Auckland University, Secretariat of the Pacific Community’s Land Resources Division, Landcare Research New Zealand and United States Forest Services in Hawaii.

Manus into coconut bio-fuel production

By ROSELYN ELLISON in Lorengau

 

Manus provincial Government (MPG) is slowly preparing itself to get into serious diesel fuel import substitution.

Of the K3 million National Agriculture Development Plan funding, K1.5 million is specifically set to get coconut bio-diesel production in a big way.

So far two of the major activities have taken place

One was the pre-feasibility tour of Buka Metal Fabricators’ coconut bio-diesel plant in Bougainville last August by MPG and provincial agriculture officers.

The other was the collection of 20,000 coconut seedlings from Aua Wuvulu and Nigoherm local level governments in the Western Islands of Manus last September.

The collection of nuts from the old German plantations was intended for the rehabilitation and replanting of 10 identified senile coconut plantations in the province.

This will cover a total land area of 300ha with the inclusion of a further 100ha.

 This extension will be from smallholders who will be given 70 seedlings each to plant to support the project.

However, other coconut growers within the province are also welcome to participate through the supply of coconuts to plant.

In August/September 2007, MPG engaged PNG Bio-fuel Engineering Ltd (PNGBEL) to conduct a baseline study of the coconut production capacity of the province

Coober Pedy's great leap backward

Life for many Aborigines is patently worse than it was 50 years ago, writes former Papua New Guinea crocodile hunter and politician John Pasquarelli

 

IN 1959 I arrived at the Eight Mile Field at Coober Pedy with two partners and, as luck would have it, our first shaft bottomed on saleable opal.

I was a 22-year-old dropout from the University of Melbourne law school and I met my first Aborigines in their own environment on the opal fields. In those days before mechanisation, Aboriginal women and their kids "noodled" on the mullock heaps of the working mines, which involved picking over the mined earth coming up from down below and collecting any opal chips and full opals, which were then stored in tobacco and cigarette tins. The law of finders keepers applied, but at the end of the day Aboriginal men would arrive and claim the collected opal, sell it to the people who ran the Shell service station and then go and buy metho; these were the days before Aborigines were allowed to buy the white man's grog.

I was made chillingly aware of the brutality that existed in the Aboriginal settlement when I noticed a young woman, obviously in distress, noodling on our mine. She had a filthy old singlet wrapped around her head and face and she was covered in flies. "Big trouble, boss," was the response from one of the women when I asked what was wrong.

The woman's drunken husband had assaulted her and forced her face into a campfire, burning out one of her eyes. I drove her into Coober Pedy in my 1936 Chrysler Model 66 sedan and she was taken to the Bush Nurses at Port Augusta. I never saw her again.

In 1960 I left Australia for Papua New Guinea and returned briefly to Coober Pedy in 1981, during a driving trip across Australia. Between 1959 and this year I have also visited Aboriginal settlements in the Western Desert, Papunya, Eumundi, Alice Springs, Tennant Creek, Katherine, Darwin, Kununurra, Mistake Creek and the notorious Palm Island. Outback Aboriginal camps remind one of Dante's Inferno. I have just returned from my third visit to Coober Pedy. Fifty years and billions of dollars on, the nightmare continues, worse than ever.

Coober Pedy is a stark microcosm of the problems that affect many Aboriginal communities. Many Aborigines run businesses, turn up at their jobs and look after their families. Signs proclaiming "Dry Area -- No Alcohol Allowed" and "Alcohol Consumption Banned" are posted everywhere.

But like some mad Monty Python script, drunken Aboriginal men and women are slumped on the footpath, crumpled VB cans beside them, within feet of these signs.

One afternoon in the main street of Coober Pedy, I watched a young Aborigine stagger out of a bottle shop clutching a plastic bag in each hand containing a bladder, or cask of wine.

In a catatonic state, he meandered back and forth as if trying to get his bearings before heading off to the settlement. Stones on the roofs of houses at the Aboriginal reserve are thrown there by drunks.

Dogs from the Aboriginal settlement roam the streets of Coober Pedy unleashed and the larger ones search the rubbish bins. One morning, a large, fierce-looking alsatian cross mongrel was standing on his hind legs rummaging through a garbage bin while 100m away an Aboriginal man was doing the same thing.

At the main hotel, de facto apartheid exists; blacks and town whites drink in separate bars by mutual arrangement. Unwary tourists soon realise their mistake. The police do their best but they have been turned into a de facto taxi service. They pick up drunken Aborigines in the main street and drop them back at the reserve, only to have them return an hour or so later.

The town's only ambulance is also co-opted to ferry drunks.

Coober Pedy sits astride one of Australia's busiest north-south tourist routes and local and foreign tourists pass through in great numbers seven days a week. Many will be appalled by what they see and will assume that the evil white man is responsible.

The question of how to deal with grog and drugs appears to be insoluble given our present laws and the influence of the civil libertarian movement. New draconian laws relating to the sale of alcohol could be passed. Years ago in PNG, problem white drunks had their photos distributed by police around the bottle shops and were refused service. This name and shame process proved effective, but imagine the response if such a remedy were mooted today to deal with Aboriginal drunks.

Far too many of the people that work in the Aboriginal industry, whether black or white, are totally unsuitable to be employed. They drink too much, smoke cigarettes and use drugs such as marijuana. Yet these people should be role models and mentors, setting an example and as such they must be drug-tested in the workplace. Unfortunately, many of these people are only too willing to promote the cult of victimhood, subconsciously or deliberately, and weeding them out must be a priority. Otherwise Aboriginal women and children will continue to suffer like that girl who had her eye burned out 50 years ago.

 

John Pasquarelli is an artist and political commentator.This article was first published in The Australian on August 19, 2009