Air Transport Will Open New Era in the Pacific
pp. 5-6 · Read in the full issue
Islands
EVERY person with eyes and ears knows how the use of the aero plane has grown and developed since September 3, 1939. Little imagination is needed to show us what aerial transport is going to do when peace returns to the Pacific Territories.
Overwhelming air-power is blasting the Japs out of the Islands; the bombers and the fighters will go, but the innumerable airfields will remain, at the service of civil aviation.
“But,” someone will say, “there are not enough people to use or to pay for aerial transport on the scale suggested.” That is true. But if transport facilities are provided in habitable country, the people soon follow. We may remember the case of the Canadian Trans-Continental Railway, and of United States rail ways. The railway owners got con trol of large, good but uninhabited country, built their lines out into the heart of it, and then offered cheap lands and transport—and settlers flocked in. That will happen in the Pacific Islands.
AERIAL transport already was be ing used in the Pacific, before 1939. Pan American Airways ran a service across the North Pacific (San Francisco to Hongkong, via Midway, Wake, Guam and Philippine Islands) and across the South Pacific to Auck land (via Canton, Fiji, and New Caledonia Islands). Carpenter and Company ran a subsidised service from Sydney to Rabaul. The Japanese ran a subsidised service from Japan south to the Carolines, and on into
Portuguese Timor. There were in conspicuous inter-island services in the Philippines and in Hawaii. And there was the famous and efficient transport service of the New Guinea goldfields, pioneered in 1928 by Guinea Airways.
The only one of these Pacific services which really was successful, on a non-subsidised basis, was the New Guinea goldfields organisation.
That was because the goldfield was so rich it could carry the burden. In all other cases, the services were handicapped or crippled by the high cost of planes, the cost of the ground organisation needed to guarantee safety, and the comparatively small pay-load possible on long flights.
The war has altered all that. When peace returns, we shall have tens of thousands of airmen and technicians; mass-produced planes; airfields every where complete and waiting; planes designed to carry payable loads; schedules which will take people and goods right across the Pacific in 70 hours’ flying.
We shall have, in the Pacific, a magnificent aerial transport organi sation, with everything complete— except inter-island passengers and goods in - sufficient numbers and quantities to justify such services!
What does that mean? If private enterprise and commercial develop ment are not entirely wiped out by the Pink and the Red Governments which are to establish a New Order for Democracy, it means that power ful interests, connected with aerial transportation, both American and
British, are going to bend all their energies towards encouraging and helping new European settlement in the Pacific Territories.
THE prospect is almost breath taking. Air-power, in over whelming measure, is winning the war for the United Nations. Such air-power, having been invoked, is not going to disappear after the war, like a wraith. Air-power, in the shape of air transport, is going to dominate the re-arranged and re established world which will follow the peace.
Air transport is going to alter the nature and tempo of life in the Pacific Islands. Most of us will deplore it—but we may as well accept the fact and reconcile ourselves to it.
Will air transport interests, trying to encourage new settlement and indus tries in the Islands, find people ready to respond?
Undoubtedly, they will. Not only will there be tens of thousands of soldiers eager to renew their wartime acquaintance with the Islands: there will be other influences forcing people away from the European countries now immersed in war. Those coun tries are going to experience a difficult period—a period of continued high taxation, of vicious interference with social, industrial and economic affairs by Governments of the type of the Australian Labour Government —well-intentioned, but incredibly ill informed and stupid—incapable of national planning, yet driven on to seek a “new order” by the narrow visioned and class-conscious industrial masses. Thousands of men will try to leave such countries as United States, Canada, New Zealand, Aus
tralia, to seek places where taxation may be lower and living conditions less harassing, and where, in tropic quiet and beauty, they may escape the clamour and turmoil of ceaseless economic argument.
A LL this will happen; and, while it happens, it will create many new problems. The basis of life any , where is production from the soil. The new settlers of the Islands must be primary producers—secondary indus tries may come later. Primary pro ducers, if they are to survive, especially in the tropics, must have three things—some practical know ledge of Islands life and of planting, an adequate supply of labour, and dependable markets.
That is the simple ABC of settle ment in the tropical islands—yet how often it is neglected. Anyone who plans new settlements in the Pacific Islands must first of all provide for those three problems—and there is a headache in each of them.
If European settlement in the Islands is to be encouraged, does it not mean that the plan (now receiv ing much attention) of developing the Islands races as peasant-farmers, to be independent, in their own countries, cannot be fully developed?
Or is it possible to hold back Euro pean settlement? Or, if a native peasantry and new European settle ments are to grow together, where is the labour supply to come from? Is Asiatic indentured labour to be seriously considered, after the examples seen in Fiji, Hawaii, Tahiti, New Guinea?
How can there be a guaranteed market for tropical products unless there is widespread agreement and organisation among the principal countries of the world, so as to take care of the consumer end? New tropical settlers dare not undertake the expensive enterprise, involving years of time, of growing coconuts, coffee, rubber, and a dozen other things, unless they can be sure that they are going to get something more than a bread-line price for their pro ducts. The Pacific copra-producers, with harsh memories of the 1929-1939 period, can testify to that.
AUSTRALIANS will be eager appli cants for Islands lands—that may be taken as certain. But will the Australian Government permit such a thing?
Australia’s main problem, for many decades, will be population. If the European race cannot assemble an other thirty or forty million people in Australia within the next fifty years, Australia will be lost to the European race. The same factor, air transport, appears to make that a certainty.
There are now only a few hours’ fly ing time between the north-west Australian coast, and one thousand million people crowded into south-east Asia.
So Australians, probably, will not be allowed to come—although there are empty lands, offering a pleasant home for European people, on the high lands of New Guinea, in many of the Solomon Islands, in all the southern
islands of the New Hebrides, in the vast archipelago of Fiji, in the empty Marquesas groups, and in many other places. There are empty lands, too, in the attractive non-malarial terri tories of Samoa and Tonga; but the Samoans and Tongans, capable of self-government and rapid develop ment, probably will want all of their countries for themselves.