Fishing Industry

Facts From Thurs

Day Island

Curing Sardines in Torres Straits

From Our Thursday Is. Cor’pondent EVERY year the Commonwealth im ports over a million pounds’ worth of edible fish from abroad!

This is enough to make the average citizen of Australia sit up and think, when he knows that his own waters and those around the Pacific Islands contain an almost inexhaustible sup ply. Can no remedy be found for this tremendous gift to other nation’s pro ducers?

This important matter was the sub ject of an informative address by Mr.

H. Lang at a recent meeting of the Thursday Island branch of the Royal Geographical Society of Australasia.

The lecturer has been engaged in vari ous fishing pursuits on a large scale in Australia and New Zealand.

Local interest in the speaker’s re marks was enhanced by the fact that Mr. Moorhouse is working on the sub ject of sardine curing at Murray Is.

Mr. Lang gave an account of the sar dine fisheries in France, where the business has been reduced to a fine art, and where the nets alone cost as much as £400 a piece. It is impossible to imagine the happy-go-lucky Murray Is landers developing the necessary pa tience to make a success of their vast supplies or sardines, and when the lec turer mentioned the large capital and the strict attention to detail required, he left a rather pessimistic feeling with regard to fish-canning in the North.

However, it was consoling to hear that every acre of sea-water contains potential wealth to the extent of £3O.

There seems plenty of room for expan sion in that direction.

There are 136 miles of good roads in Western Samoa —14 of them tar-dress ed. No new roads of importance have been built within the last five years.

Most of Samoa’s traffic is water-borne, as the majority of towns and produc tion centres are on or near the shores of the islands.