If you believed one particular chain-letter doing the rounds in Camp 6, money did grow on trees as it was aptly named "MONEY TREE".
"MONEY TREE" was in all the camps on Bougainville but not confined to the island. Together with another scam, "AUSTRALIAN BONANZA", both said to originate from Sydney, they infested all of Papua New Guinea. The local post office refused to issue postal orders made out to "MONEY TREE" and, after enough exposure in the local press, both schemes were banned, or at least suppressed.
Post-Courier articles from April 1972
These chain-letters promised a flood of Australian dollars to anyone who bought one of them, sent off a dollar to the name at the top of the included list of addresses, added one's own to the bottom, and then "sold" the chain letter to anyone daft enough to believe in it.
(I had previously written about this "lottery" here.)
Does anyone still have a copy of one of these chain-letters? If so, please email me at riverbendnelligen@mail.com as I would like to contact the promoters to claim my money.
