Soon They'll Be Digging
p. 31 · Read in the full issue
Up Tahiti !
From Our Own Correspondent
Papeete, Nov. 24.
TPHERE are people who say that no * country can be truly civilised until it has adopted golf. By that standard our islands notwithstanding motors, jazz, bridge-parties, beach-costumes, rad ios, and aeroplanes—is still lurking in the twilight of barbarism!
This disability is now about to be re moved. A golf club is in the making and a site has been selected on a plateau in the Papeari Taravao district. This plat eau commands a most beautiful view overlooking the almost land-locked bay between greater Tahiti and Taiarapu, the peninsular. From most angles this body of water appears more like a mountain girt lake in Equatorial Africa than an arm of the sea in a South Pacific Island.
Just how to endow this site with the heathery Scottish atmosphere traditional to golf will be a problem. There are indeed mature and mellow Scotsmen, and mature and mellow Scotch, in Tahiti, but the plateau is high up, rather inacces sible, and the going is hard on old bones.
Golf without the burr-r-r of Saint Andrews and the peaty aura of Glenlivet i.? as devoid of character as a game of hockey, and how can the exasperation of topped shots and missed putts be lifted from the soul so satisfyingly as by the rich, sonorous periods of Gaelic pro fanity?
It will be necessary, therefore, to con
struct a roadway of sufficiently easy grade to convey comfortably the elderly sons of Scotland (and the other neces sary ingredients) to the plateau; or*a stout-legged, strong-backed gillie from Skye will have to be imported as in structor and caretaker, if the royal and venerable game is to be instituted in due and ancient form.
Monsieur Georges Lagarde has been created a Chevalier de la Legion d’Hon neur by the Government of France in recognition of his 40 years of distin guished service in French Oceania. For many years, M. Lagarde was Adminis trator of the Marquesas Group, later serving in the same capacity in the Lee ward Islands. He has also had long ser vice with the Papeete Customs Depart ment as Chief of Customs.