Both the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) & the administration network run by the Department of Information and Extension Services (DIES) produce first-rate programs for the education & entertainment of the local population. But that population is so incredibly diverse that strange messages often reach strange ears.

Radio in New Guinea opens with a Moral Rearmament chorus and for the rest of the day the airwaves are a Finnegans Wake: native sacred songs made public; Voice of America on Tricia Nixon's fashions; country music; Peking Radio on anti-Stalin revisionists; Christian fundamentalism; local news; stock exchange reports; an interview with a 76-year-old choreographer on the status of Australian ballet; frequent racing reports, etc., etc.

Radio's chance juxtapositions lead to interesting interpretations: I heard a Fundamentalist's sermon on Lucifer, Prince of Light, fallen from Grace but still titular head of the City on Earth, followed by a news broadcast on smog, riots, power failures, crime, hunger - the City as Purgatory.

At Barapidgin, a remote village on the Wagameri, I picked up a broadcast direct from Apollo 11. The interpreter, a Christian convert, listened intently & then said, "Getting closer to God is good." Apparently Wernher von Braun shared his assumption that man was voyaging to other planets to search for God, for in this same broadcast he said, "Through a closer look at the Creation, we ought to gain a better understanding of the Creator."

In the Mt. Hagen theater, cowboy & horror films are immensely popular. No audience of New Jersey wrestling fans can equal this Highland audience for sheer frenzy: screaming, on their feet, most standing on seats.

In one remote area I saw a tattooed, skewered-nosed, feathered, painted, armed audience, including one local beauty nursing a piglet, watch their first movie: one film was an interview with the British Foreign Secretary on the 1957 German Arms Treaty. Another dealt with the use of closed-circuit TV for traffic control in Sidney. I have no idea what these villagers thought of a film on elderly Australian ladies flying kites.

But in a deeper sense, it didn't matter. What mattered was that these media were changing the environment itself.