Where Is Islands Utopia?

From Our Own Correspondent

Papeete, June 20.

A RADIO commentator remarked, not long ago, that this war has torn to dismal raindrops the enticing bubble of South Sea island Utopia.

But has it done so? Not, we fear, so long as crack-pot writers wield their pens, so long as tourist bureaux drool of “beckoning isles,” so long as believing souls cherish the myth of a corner in this shrunken world overlooked by the standardisation of an Age of Gadgets.

By nearly every mail, especially from USA, we get letters from people who apparently believe all the rubbish writ ten about the Islands.

In a charmingly written and authori tative essay—published in the latest Bul letin de La Societe des Etudes Ocean iennes—entitled “Le Mirage et I’exotisme Tahitiens dans la Litterature,” we learn

that the genesis of absurd, crack-pot writers of South Sea fairy-tales is not tq be laid in the notorious 1920 decade —as many of us supposed—but as long ago as the Period of Discovery. These gentry, who masqueraded as “philoso phers” and who had seized upon the few paragraphs about Tahiti in his “Voyage autour du Monde,” to spin an airy, glit tering fabric of “La Nouvelle-Cythere,” aroused th 6 ire of that doughty navigator, Bougainville, and he wrote angrily of their misrepresentations.

Bougainville protested in vain. The “philosophers” spun and weaved a tapestry of Utopia, and the myth of Nouvelle-Cythere has been perpetuated until this day.

At the present time, nearly every European in the Islands is eagerly trying to find transportation to somewhere else.

The steamship agent tells us that the waiting-list in his office is, practically, a census of the white population of the Colony.