The Sydney Morning Herald from Sydney, New South Wales, Australia • Page 19

19 The Sydney Morning Herald, Saturday, Oct. 8, 1966 19 WEEKEND MAGAZINE AND BOOK REVIEWS YOUNG MAN BEGINS A POLITICAL EXPERIMENT Hi -ft I 1 In far New Guinea, a 23-year-old Arts graduate from Goulburn, Anthony Voutas, has been elected to represent a backward area peopled mainly by indigenous subsistence farmers. In this article DAVID WHITE sketches Voutas' background and evolution into a politician and tells of his hopes and problems. Thumbs down on Frenglish Port Moresby. ment and the possible forms of association the Territory could have with Australia.

"Because of my background, I am inclined to be radical by Territory standards," he says. But his electors are not radical men; like rural people in many countries, they are basically conservative and resistant to change. So that while he favours virtually immediate self-government (his definition of self-government, in keeping with his normal caution and precision with words, is highly qualified), his electors do not. Thus he finds himself faced with the classic problem of an M.P. in a democratic institution: Should he simply represent and report his people's views or should he be more of a repository of trust? Given that his people do not understand the issues involved in self-government and independence, should he simply state their conservative views or should he try to persuade them to change their attitude? Mr Voutas has even greater doubts when he thinks of his future.

He intends to stand for re-election in 1968, but hopes that an indigenous candidate who would make a "functional" member will have emerged by the 1972 general elections. If such a man has emerged, he will stand down. That is about as far as he thinks he will go in Territory politics at present. After that, the choices will not be easy. He could settle at Muniau villagers want me to die there." he says), he might seek an academic career (he intends writing a thesis on his election), or he might try for a United Nations job which would fit in with his "internationalist" concepts.

He can, of course, have one comforting thought: he will still be only 29 when the 1972 elections are held. The Mumeng Local Government Council, which is in the centre of the Buang country, endorsed him. He went to other large public meetings and won further unofficial endorsement. No one else from this area stood against him although three men had considered doing so. Having achieved this, he then set about winning the votes of people in the Kapiau and Men-yamya areas.

In the five months of his campaign, accompanied by several Muniau men, he visited all but seven of the 250 villages in the electorate an average of about three villages a day. He carried no food bought or was given what he needed on the way. His platform was simple: he concentrated on parochial issues such as roads and schools. Before he visited a village he would send some of his Muniau companions ahead with tape-recorded speeches (recorded in all of the 19 local languages). This provided something of a fanfare for him and ensured that people gathered to await his arrival.

Since his election, Mr Voutas has been carefully feeling his way. He doubts that, at his age, he can have much influence on national politics, at least for a while. But, at the same time, he feels that it is necessary for his people to be represented in the House by an articulate and literate person. "I believe that the House needs what I term functional' members." he says. By this he means members who are articulate enough to make effective representations on behatf of their electors both inside and outside the House and who are literate enough to be able to deal with legislation, particularly in the vital committee stages.

His greatest dilemma will arise when the House discusses such big issues as self-govern ministration, which had refused to accept his resignation, gave him leave of absence. Although his contact with the Territory was sketchy during the three years he spent at university, he had not forgotten his friends at Muniau, He had become involved with these people. When he returned to the Territory after gaining his degree late last year, he visited the village before taking up another Administration post away from the area. Then in February. Mr Bill Bloomfield, the 53-ycar-old former miner who had represented Kaindi since 1964.

died. Mr Voutas had intended to stand fey the seat at the next general ele tions in 1968 but decided that he would contest the by-election. He resigned from the Administration and went back to Muniau village where the 200 villagers "adopted" him. "It wasn't a ceremonial adoption," Mr Voutas says. "But I was accepted into the village and a clan." As he planned his election campaign, Mr Voutas lived in the house for single men, worked in the gardens and engaged in other village activities.

He says his fellow villagers are not primitive people: they have given up their traditional dress and wear European clothes. Some of the village houses have galvanised iron roofs. The campaign Mr Voutas conducted must be the most scientific that the Territory has seen. His first move was to persuade the Buang people, who live in about one-third of the electorate, that they should pre-select a candidate. He pointed out that, if they had more than one candidate, someone from another part of the electorate might win through a drift in preferences.

(Mr Bloomfield had won on preferences after trailing on the primary count in 1964.) Naturally, he asked them to pre-select him. THE TIDE seems to be Tuning out on the Americans here in France no matter what they do, and it is causing a great deal of real, American-style anxiety. It's a terrible thing for them, because nobody feels himself more lovable, nor loves so hard, as a Yank. It's the older members of the U.S. colony in Paris, naturally enough, who are feeling the change most.

They remember the twenties. That was the time! The American Occupation was led by Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, and Gertrude Stein, and every Anglo-Saxon was a demi-god. And then there were the marvellous years just after World War II. How welcome they all felt, sunny smiles clenching fat cigars. What splendid figures they cut on the Champs-Elysees! But look at the Yanks here today.

They don't know which way to turn. One minute they're nervously observing a rally outside the United States Embassy protesting the American involvement in Vietnam, the next they're rubbing away at the U.S. GO HOME signs, which appear chalked-up as mysteriously and persistently as ETERNITY used to in Sydney. Washington, with its usual youthful vigour, is working around the clock to find ways to turn the tide. Very modern American libraries, cultural centres and youth clubs are dotting the country, with special facilities designed to win the French.

But most important of all, almost one and a half million of the best-equipped tourists the world has ever seen poured into France this season alone. Let them come, seems to be of the hydroplane. The name hovercraft, as equally attractive and pronounceable in French as in English, was invented along with the new machine, and the word served here well, until recently. Then, quite unexpectedly, official memos skimmed on to editors' desks all over the country. From that moment on, the hovercraft which left Dover six times a day were aeroglis-seurs when they docked at Calais.

The very latest decree amounts to this: when the use of a word or phrase unanointed by the Academie Francaise is absolutely unavoidable, the suspicious foreigner must be kept surrounded by inverted commas at all times. Naturally enough. Paris is far more Americanised than the rest of the country. A frequent sorry sight on the main boulevards are the poor, bewildered French out-of-towners up for a weekend in the capital. They'd probably find a more Continental atmosphere is certain parts of Sydney! Ninety per cent of the theatres are showing films with titles they can't make head or tail of.

By lunchtime, the average country cousins don't know whether they're coming or going. Madame is nervy and the children are crying; so, beaten and bewildered, unlucky Pierre starts looking around for an ordinary, little French restaurant. He looks and squints and everywhere he sees strange neon words blinking on and off: SNACK BAR, QUICK LUNCHES. SELF SERVICE. HOT LUNCHEON, DRUGSTORE, etc.

What can it all mean, he asks himself, what can it all mean? Eventually, an old, nostalgic gendarme will come to the rescue, pointing the way into an old-fashioned back street. There Pierre and family will sigh, smile, and feel more at home. Chances are, though, the menu even down there will be partly in English. Mais out, it will be a long, hard struggle, but the militants are completely confident about the outcome. They pride themselves on their superior patience, persistence, and traditional French logic.

By MARK F. MURPHY the official French response. Let them run up and down as much as they like, spending as many dollars here as they wish, for, we are determined, no mailer-how long it takes, France will be French again! With not much more than this stoic battle-cry to go on, the little French aren't doing too badly. Despite the stupendous wealth and strength of the Americans, France has recently succeeded in assuring the departure of all U.S. forces from her native soil.

But there's still a lot of work to be done. Two months ago, the Prime Minister, Georges Pompidou, made a speech deploring the way the French language, la belle languc, was slowly being turned into something he chose to call Frenglish. Now there has long been a hue and cry against this shocking state of affairs, but this was the first time that anyone as important as the Prime Minister had spoken out. Just what measures are going to be taken are fearful to contemplate, but already the nation's Press has been officially cautioned about the use of English words or phrases. Everybody has been put on his guard, though it's going to be hard.

Even for the French, to say nothing of the English-speaking community, the idea of having to go down to one's regular hot dog stand and asking for a chicn cliaud just doesn't seem to go over. Well, actually, it's much too late in the day to expect to see such a well-established expression as hot don disappear from the French language. The same must go for so many others: shopping, club, fan. snob, bowling, pullover, jockey, etc. But Although some people may feel that M.

Pompidou's historic discourse can only be regarded as a classic case of shutting the stable door when the steed is stolen, what can be done will be done. Take the hovercraft, as an instance, the British improvement Anthony Voutas in AT THE latest meeting of the Papua-New Guinea House of Assembly a bespectacled and rather intense 23-year-old Australian, Anthony Constantine Voutas, was sworn in as an elected member. He had come to Port Moresby to represent about 52,000 New Guineans who live in the mountains and valleys of the rugged, 4,347 iquare-mile electorate of Kaindi, in the Morobe District On the surface hs is an odd representative for the area. His electors, some of whom have had contact with Europeans since German times ('They killed the first bloke who oamo in," Mr Voutas says), still live mainly as subsistence farmers. There are a few indigenous entrepreneurs, a few gold miners around Wau and Buiolo the centres of mucn European mining activity before World War II and many of the subsistence farmers grow some coffee for cash.

But the overall picture remains that of a backward area with a people, divided into 19 language groups, moving slowly towards a more sophisticated way of life. In contrast. Mr Voutas is an Arts graduate from the Australian National University, Canberra, where he specialised in Indonesian and South-east Asian Studies. After a two-month visit to Indonesia a couple of years ago, he is fluent in Indonesian. This background mean3 that, although he has so far shown himself to be a skilful politician, he retains some academic detachment about his own work and the Territory generally.

And, while he is now deeply involved in the parochialism of Territory politics, he still classes himself as an "internationalist" in outlook. For all this, he was returned at the Kaindi by-election in August with an absolute majority of slightly more than 3,000 over his four New Guinean opponents the first European to be elected on the first count in an open electorate, in which candidates of all races may stand. How did this young man, who is given to constant and earnest self-examination, come to take part in this election and what was the key to his success? The chain of events which led him to Kaindi began in Goulburn, N.S.W., where he was born in January, 1943. He remembers having "a rough time" at school apparently because he was the son of a Greek migrant. His treatment as a member of a minority group first made him think of the problem of relations between people of different races and backgrounds a problem which probably worries him more than ever now that he is in the Territory.

He can also remember becoming interested in politics when aged about 14. When he left school he went to the Australian National University but failed in his first year. It was then that he decided In 1961 to come to the Territory as a cadet patrol officer. He admits now that he was not motivated by high ideals, although he had already begun to ponder the inequalities of wealth between under-developed countries, such as New Guinea, and the richer nations, such as Aus-tralia. "I think it was more a case of withdrawing from Australia then," he says.

Despite this, it did not take him long to become involved in the country and its problems and he recalls three events which had a big influence on him at that stage. Th first was his contact with pop By CRAIG SCENE McGregor posting to the Finschhafen sub-district of New Guinea, where he worked with indigenous cadet patrol officers. He recalls a number of conversations about Territory politics with them and he began to think about the possibility of seeking election somewhere in the future. The third and dominant evyit came when he was sent to a patrol post in the Kaindi electorate, where he worked among the Buang people for some months. Muniau, the village of his former cook, is in the area and he soon became very friendly with the people so much so that he took their side in an argument with the Administration over the building of an airstrip near Muniau.

When it became obvious that the Administration would" win the argument he resigned. He thought at first of settling in Muniau and asked the villagers if they would accept him. They agreed but he changed his mind and decided to return to Australia to complete his university studies. The Ad Desalination plant FAR-SIGHTED President John F. Kennedy once said there was no scientific breakthrough not even reaching the moon that could mean more to the world than a process to convert salt water into fresh at a competitive price.

Every day we are discovering how right he was, how important water is to the world, how short our supplies of it are becoming. What President Kennedy said is easily proven. Getting the job done providing a thirsty world with more water is immensely more difficult. The United States is spending millions of dollars on the task. Most of the countries of Europe, Israel, Russia and Japan are devoting more and more time and money on complicated experiments aimed at turning sea water into something drinkable.

Australia so far is only thinking about the problem. The thinking is serious for we are the world's driest continent but so far our financial resources are not up to the establishment of significant research schemes. But last month Australia played host in Canberra to the seventh regional conference on water resources development of the United Nations Commission-for Asia and the Far East. And last year Australia accepted the invitation of President Johnson to take' part in an all-nations conference especially called by the President to discover what can be done to use the world's oceans. At the ECAFE conference in Canberra it was pointed out that Asia is running out of water to the point where there Is insufficient moisture to grow crops.

Prewar Asia had been an exporter of cerealt. Today the area has to import millions of tone of cereal there isn't the at Point Loma, near San Diego, California, which each day converts a fresh drinking water. Desperate quest for fresh water WHEN BOB DYLAN was in Australia last year he carted around with him a bunch of acetates of his forthcoming two-disc LP set, listening to them again and again. I spent the best part of one night listening with him; and though it was too short a time to reach any conclusions, I got the impression that the discs represented another definite step by Dylan in the direction of pop. Now the discs have been released here in a glossy two-disc set called Blonde on Blonde (C.B.S., 2BP 220019, complete with "a full-colour, 12 26 inch photo of the folk singer" on the cover and nine fashionably grainy and half-lit photographs inside.

As for the music, it seems my first impressions weren't so wrong after all. Quite a few of the songs, including some which have already been released here as singles, are obviously aimed at the hit parade charts; for the first time Dylan seems to have deliberately "written down" to a mass audience. Stripped of its implications, "Rainy Day Women Nos. 12 and 35" is a banal piece of musical hokum; "I Want You" has little to distinguish it from half a hundred other pop tunes. I thought "Just Like A Woman" overly sentimental when 1 first heard it at Dylan's Stadium concert, and still do.

Dylan has always had a zany, comic side to him and his humorous numbers are better: "Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat" is a very funny transformation of the oid tunes "In The F.venin'," and "4th Time Around" is a spoof of the Beatles' "Norwegian Wood" Dylan even uses the same melody. But Dylan's further involvement in pop music goes deeper than this. It's clear that the band which accompanies him has he-come much more important to his music than before; some of the songs are virtually, built around a single musical phrase by the band, such as Charlie McCoy's seductive harmonica blowing on "Obviously '5 Believers'1 and that reiterated motif in "I Want You." The band has improved, too; "Pledging My Time" starts off with a bluesy beat which would not disgrace any Chicago rhythm-and-blues group. The result is to make Dylans work more intrinsically musical, less like a long recitative. Of course, Dylan's current pop orientation has its debit side.

Many of the songs are as ephemeral as any chart-rider; who will remember "Rainy Day Women" in a year's time? And yet at the heart of this latest release is still an incorruptible core of Dylan music. In his best songs he is still grappling with the introspective themes which recur throughout his music, still reworking and reshaping the old blues tradition (sometimes with astonishing success), still attempting to jam his songs with the rich and extrava-gent symbolist imagery which is more familiar in beat poetry than beat music. "Temporary Like Achilles." for instance, seems to me an entirely successful song, uniquely and unmistakeahly Dylanish, a gentle and moving love song which is contemporary and yet traditional at the same time. "Visions of Johanna" is a song of drug addiction in which Dylan's symbols are too private to be fully comprehensible, but it has the sort of holding power which "Like A Rolling Stone" displayed. The most difficult song of all, however, is "Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands," which takes up an entire side of one LP.

Who is she? A song such as this raises awkward questions about the success of Dylan's latterly symbolist approach: has it become too vague, too blurred and introspective, to have any chance of communicating at all? Certainly in songs such as this Dylan's music has lost some of its bite. It will probably be his earlier work, rather than these long essays in self analysis, upon which his reputation will be based. But that's a risk which Dylan consciously takes, and it's not much use demanding a throwback style. He's the creator, i million gallons of sea water into The solution is to take the salt out of sea water or out of the huge reserves of underground saline water particularly in Australia. It is not difficult to turn salt water into fresh.

As any school-hoy knows you simply heat salt water and condense the steam to make fresh water. Stone Age man used the sun to make his salt this way: he threw away the resulting fresh water. The big problem, however, is how to make this simple process economic. It would make quite a difference to the household power bill if we had to boil a billion gallons of salt water on the kitchen stove to get drinking water from steam. But progress is being made.

Desalination plants are working in several plants in the world producing good quality, if expensive, drinking water in areas where no natural water exists. You might ask, if desalination plants already exist and are in effective operation, what is the worry about future water supplies? The answer is cost. In 20 years of increasing effort engineers have brought the cost down from about $A5 per 1,000 gallons to around $At per 1,000. Rut that is still very expensive, and hopelessly uneconomic if the water is to be asett for agriculture. The Water Board supplies Sydney people with drinking water 28 cents per 1,000 gallons.

In the Murrumbldgee Irrigation Area, where farmers pay more for water than anyone else on the land, the cost is about $2 for every 300,000 gallons, or less than one cent per thousand. So far desalination of water is feasible only where fuel costs to carry out the process are very low, or where the cost of natural fresh water is abnormally high. The biggest hope of a breakthrough to low cost fresh water from the sea lies with the use of nuclear power. The first major nuclear plant to produce up to 165 million gallons of fresh water from salt every day will be built in Israel by 1971, largely with U.S. finance.

But giant planus producing the enormous quantities of water needed to irrigate large areas can cost up to $700 million, and the water they produce is still 13 or 14 limes the price Australia's irrigation farmers pay for their river water. Late last year British scientists and engineers claimed a breakthrough in their desalination work with plans for a plant to give 30 million gallons of fresh water from salt every day, using an advanced gas-cooled reactor to supply the power. This desalination plant will cost $16 to $20 million and the reactor another $80 million significantly cheaper than all other nuclear plants so far produced. The new British plant can yield 480 megawatts of electric power enough to supply one-quarter of Sydney's power requirements and produce fresh water as a by-product at around 40c to 50c per 1,000 gallons. The British designers of this new "cheap" plant are now reviewing design and engineering costs to produce an even less expensive plant and cheaper power and water.

Suddenly the world has realised that water, the commonest substance on earth, is also the most preciou. water to grow what the area needs. So the race is on between the world's increasing thirst and the efforts being made to quench it. It is a search being given as much importance if less publicity as the atomic race or the race to the moon. The search is being concentrated on the obvious turning salt water, in which the world abounds, into fresh water.

And such is the vital importance of the task that the United States and Russia have signed a pact to share all knowledge and experiments on desalination, including the use of nuclear energy. By 1980 the United States will have spent more than 100 billion dollars looking for the non-aaline solution. The seas cover 71 per cent of the surface of the earth and in them there are 60 million tons of water for each person on earth all of It undrinkable. Of the earth's 25 billion acres of land, only 2.5 billion acres are under cultivation. Less than 10 per cent of the world's potential food-growing lands are being used, and the reason is lack of water.

The people In more than one third of the world's land area seldom see a raindrop. Their countries are arid; their national budgets, therefore, low. They do not have the money to explore means of making fresh water artificially. By J. SHARP The countries that have the money, particularly the United States and Britain, have until recently had plenty of water and did not need to look for more.

Now this situation is changing bringing hope to a thirsty world. The United States has found in recent years that her high standard of living and tremendous industrialisation is using up more water than is available. In 1940 throughout the United States 109 billion gallons of water were available every day in excess of consumption. By 1950 that figure had fallen to 68 billion gallons of daily excess water. The Committee on Science and Astronautics of the U.S.

House of Representatives set up an inquiry into what could be done. It quickly found that the U.S. would be the first nation to be in serious water supply difficulties by 1970 or before. The committee recommended that a vigorous and extensive desalination program be started immediately to become a major industry as big as the mining or oil industries within 10 to 15 years. The race was on, and now other countries have followed America's lead.in pouring money end effort into the search for new water supplies.

I cook whom he employed while in Port Moresby soon after his arrival. He became friendly with this man, who came from the village of Muniau in the Kaindi electorate. His former cook is now classed as hit elder brother in tribal parlance. Thtlecond event was hie.