Isolation

Plea For Continued

What Air Service Would Mean to Manihiki

From Our Own Correspondent

Rarotonga, March'22.

SPECULATIVELY mooted last month in a New Zealand newspaper was a sug gestion that the near future might see the establishment of a commercial air-base on the island of Manihiki, Cook Is. The sug gestion was made in connection with ten tative proposals for a British-controlled service between N.Z. and Vancouver to compete with the American-owned Pan- Pacific air Clippers.

Just what such a base would ultimately mean to the 700 inhabitants of this coral excrescence is hard to estimate. Primarily it would stand for the coming of Civilisa tion with a capital C —the erection of a wireless station, hangars, workshops and quarters for a handful of Europeans.

Trans-Pacific passengers would come and go. Materially the islanders would prob ably derive some small benefit from all this. Mentally they would gain nothing.

The even tenor of their lives would be lost almost overnight—and forever, swept away by an avalanche of new ideas, con ceptions and values.

First probably to go would be the now powerful influence exerted by the various Missions. Contact with a modern sophis ticated world would kill it immediately.

Simultaneously the old native life of the island would undergo a rapid transforma

tion; simple pleasures would lose .flavour, old customs their meaning. A new money sense would develop but not be able to keep pace with earnings, so that happiness which is based not on what one has but on what one desires, would soon become a pale elusive ghost.

The world forges ahead. Competition swings us ever to fresh heights of endeav our, of invention. Profits rather than, ethics dictate men’s actions. To protest against the onward march is reactionary— unpatriotic. It is therefore too much to expect that the lonely atolls of the South Seas will be left as they now are, the last hiding-places of human happiness, peopled by kindly simple folk who have only re mained thus through their blessed state of isolation.

No man has the right to take away from another that which he cannot restore and for the sake of a day or two saved on an ocean crossing the imposition of our own fretful worries and selves upon these scat tered minorities, the price is too high.

But just the same it will doubtless come about in the not too-far distant future.

Mr, W. A. Freeman and Mr. C. A. Banks have been re-appointed President and Managing Director respectively of Placer Development Limited, for a term of five years.

Mr. F. O. Greenwood, of Messrs. Green wood and Laws Limited, of Rabaul, New Guinea, arrived in Australia on business by the Neptuna on March 27. He was accompanied by Mrs. Greenwood, and will remain in Sydney for two months. During his absence, Mr. E. W. Lins is in charge of the firm at Rabaul.