Lae - 10. In the evening we were the guests of honor at a barbecue given by John and Mary Womersley at Henty's cocoa plantation about 6 miles out of town on the Markham Road. Thirty or more guests there, mostly government personnel and planters (cocoa and peanuts) and their wives. The whole thing very well done on Henty's spacious oval lawn, were a long canvas-covered shelter was rigged as insurance against rain. A boy in white rami cooked hamburgers ('tucker belong America') and sausages ('tucker belong Australia') on an open fire at a proper distance from the comfortable rattan porch, chairs arranged on the lawn. The planters I talked with all seemed very capable, active men with reasonable confidence in the future and their ability to make a success of their ventures. Ted Henty is a descendant of the first settler in the State of Victoria, in Australia. I'm told that a few years ago, while an officer of the Department of Agriculture in New Guinea (Animal Husbandry), he inherited the last of the family's fortune, and put it into cocoa planting. To help things along until about May, he harvests his first crop, he has been employed as Agricultural Botanist attached to the Forests Department in Lae. Good Friday, March 27. A day at paper work for me. Van worked in the bulk shed and tonight has out a dozen rat traps (from the Department of Public Health) and a mist net set for bats in the Botanic Gardens. During the day John Gunn dropped in with well-pickled specimens of a yellow-eyed lizard and two young bandicoots. The lizard has several rows of prominent processes on the back. The bandicoots are bristly and probably Echymipera. Gunn brought his wife and young daughter Sylvia in the evening. Mrs. G. as keen on zoology as her husband. In the morning he will be going to the "bung" which is held in town for native produce Saturdays between about 5:30 and 7:30 in the morning. Natives often bring in snakes, etc. to sell to him. Womersley, who is building up a small collection of live animals in the Botanic Gardens, is sour on Gunn for paying much too much to the natives for what they bring in. L2/10/- for instance for a tree climbing kangaroo. That is 7 or 8 dollars. Have written the Museum about insurance for John Collins; Cogswell & Harrisons in London about the mistake they made with our ammunition. Tests by Van with one of our new aux barrels today gave good results with the 2 inch x .410 shells and we will be able to use them for small bats. I neglected to record in Australia that in Brisbane Van met Dr. Margaret Mackirras and Dr. Dorothea Sanders of the Queensland Institute of Medical Research and offered to collect blood smears for the former (all groups of mammals) and viscera of marsupials for the latter. Dr. Mackirras is well known for her work on the blood parasites of mammals. Saturday, March 28. It is said that most of Lae's ample rainfall of about 180 inches falls at night. Last night we had a considerable amount. And Van, who wrote letters to a late hour, left all the doors of the house open when he went to bed. Result, about 2:30 AM I was awakened by mosquito bites. Scores of them, gorged with blood, were resting on the walls of my bedroom, but there were no anopheles among them. I'm told that for years the town and its environs have been fogged with chemicals as a malaria control measure. Have heard several remarks on the mosquito pest now evident in the town.