Tropical Hotel

New Management For Gph

SUVA, Sept. 27.

THE South Pacific’s leading hotel, the Grand Pacific, in Suva, Fiji, will be under new management from Octo ber 1.

Mr. Charles Brown, who has been managing the hotel since 1938, will leave shortly for New Zealand on three months’ leave; his place will be taken by Mr. and Mrs. C. W. Anderson, who arrived here on the September “Matua" from New Zealand. Mr. Anderson has been on Union Company ships for many years, and knows the Pacific right through from San Francisco to Sydney, To a person whose ideas of tropical hotels are founded on those in existence in the Mandated Territory of New Guinea in the pre-war period, the GPH is some thing right out of this world. It is a far call from the dangling, galvamsed iron shower-bucket, the box-like rooms and the unsewered discomfort for which Territorians uncomplaining paid 15/- or 16/- per day.

The GPH was built in 1914; therefore, there are many hotels in Australia to day which are more modern; but there are no hotels in Australia at the present moment to compare with it for service and food. The food in this country is beyond Hie wildest dreams of the long suffering Australians; the particular bureaucrat who invented the 5/- meal maximum in Australia, administered the couo de grace to whatever pretensions Australia might have had for good food.

There is only one thing about this place that could get in the hair of the individual with a Melanesian complex.

That is, the strange urge of the Indian servants to be vocal at 6.15 in the morn ing These seem to pick that time, over th<*. making of morning tea, to get their political views off their chests It takes a whole lot of willpower on the part of this Territorian to cling to her bed, ana not dash out on to the landing in full fighting trim to bellow: “What name something? Go on—rouse! ’

But, apparently, the Indians of Fiji

don’t go for that'kind of treatment.

J.T.