Una Voce: Little journal tells a big story
16 January 2008
Judy Cannon
The PNG Association of Australia has been keeping former PNG residents in touch since the late 1950s with its quarterly newsletter, Una Voce. From a small beginning, the publication developed into a journal of substance. For researchers, it is a classic example of how the regular collection of a serial publication can build into a historical resource.
Early issues of the newsletter were primarily concerned with practical matters, as expatriates met the challenge of an old life gone and a new one to settle into. Gradually, however, Una Voce included more reflective articles and reminiscences of funny and anxious moments, even if, one has to suspect, some are burnished for the telling and wrapped in a little nostalgia.
The June 2000 journal includes an item from Bob Cole, a former assistant district officer. In the 1940s a senior delegation led by the administrator arrived on a fact-finding mission in Bougainville. Cole wrote, ‘I was horrified to see these senior officers so ill equipped for bush work and was a little taken aback when the administrator moved in on my table, chair, bed-sleeve and tent-fly, which he used for the next three days.’
The Snakepit, a Port Moresby bar demolished in 1981, gets a mention in the March 1986 issue, when Des Large wistfully remembered a piano-playing medico who, while sipping ‘a sample of the good stuff’, was asked by a patron what to do about prickly heat. The medico replied: ‘Have you got two quid on you?’ When the patron had put two pounds on the bar, the medico turned to him and said: ‘Scratch the bloody stuff the same as I do!’
Read the entire article here and find out more about Una Voce by visiting the PNGAA website here.
Source: ‘The time of their PNG lives’ by Judy Cannon, NLA News, National Library of Australia, vol 12 no 5, February 2002
Very sad to hear of the demolition of the old Snakepit bar.
It was the real bloodhouse section of an eminent bloodhouse hotel - Moresby's notorious Bottom Pub. A famous story, perhaps true but who knows, had Errol Flynn and the famous kiap Jack Hides engaged in a monumental fist fight just outside the famed Snakepit. It was no doubt within the bar's confines that the original verbal dispute flared into something more serious.
Actual dates vary but some sources place the Flynn-Hides confrontation sometime in the early 1930s.
When a number of the 1962-63 crew arrived in the Central District, much of January 1963 was taken up with whetting the whistle on the verandah bar of the Bottom Pub. Strategically situated on the corner of Champion Parade and whatever the name of the street was which ran down the waterfront along to Steamies' main store, that verandah was a regular meeting point, particularly on Saturday mornings. Those dreamy Saturday mornings stretched into the afternoon .... more often than not, late afternoon.
Posted by: Richard E Jones | 16 January 2008 at 02:44 PM