Servicemen Seek a Refuge in the Islands

By Our Mangaia Correspondent

mHIS writer has recently received many X letters from Servicemen, of all arms, and many localities. The theme of all Is —Post-war Insecurity in Civilisa tion They want to come to the Pacific, and settle on any island where living is inexpensive, weather mild, and Europeans few. Settle, forget the war, and enjoy life. Polynesia looks a paradise, to them, in Europe.

Well, with all its faults, it is! The “civilised” life these good fellows face on demobilisation is as near a refinement of hell as I can imagine. They all fear un employment, and the consequent exhaus tion of the money—quite big sums—that they have saved during the war. They fear homelessness—and anyone can see that the housing problem will be ten times more acute than it was in the de pression. Most dare not marry. Those who are married dread the coming of children; a matter of £4O a birth.

Why go on? The soldiers are very worried, because civilisation is not civi lised enough to allow a man any secure future, and the commonest happinesses are priced too high.

With this, I can sympathise. But whom to blame, and how to remedy, is not in my power to advise. Properly run, civi lisation could be far, far happier to live In than the Islands; where life is at best an occasionally-won battle with nature—as every Territorian knows only too well. rOSE of us who have married Poly nesian women/ and live as Euro peans without deserting the clan and tribe, have it best, I think. (Presum

ably this is in my correspondents’ minds.) When our children are born, we can call in an old Maori midwife who will do (and with skill) for a few yards of pareu, what a city doctor wants big money for doing.

There is a certain permanence, and a definite security, in island life that make the difficulties and the isolation prefer able to the city way of living—a way friat these worried soldiers and airmen fear will, as soon as hostilities end, make them into suburban serfs or forgotten men. They know what they’re facing, better than I. And they yearn for “a place in the sun.”

But the day of the adventurer is over.

I fear that my friends’chance of exchang ing cemented canyons for palm groves is vety remote indeed.

The Cook Islands Administration, for instance, discourages European penetra tion of the Group. Working-class settlers, to all intents and purposes, it prohibits! The entrant must be a Gov ernment employee, a well-fixed rentier, or a recruit to the staffs of local big business. An unknown Englishman even in possession of money, is hardly likely to find any effusive welcome here. rnHEN, again, the pernicious rubbish X USA song-writers still put out about romantic unions between white men and Island girls is another misleading influence. Only our prosti tutes take up with strangers. A Lon doner need not go further than Leices ter Square for “romance” of this kind.

Marriages between Europeans and native girls, can and do take place; but the arrangement has to be upon exactly the

same terms as a wedding between two white persons.

No “papa’a” husband is thought to be a heaven-sent “catch” for the Cook Islands girl. He stands, or falls, upon his personality and character, not his race.

The myth of “white superiority” was long ago slain by boozy tourists and hula-dancing white women. (The public performance of the “hula” by a Euro pean woman disgusts natives, though they may appear to applaud.) So, all I can say to my inquirers is; Try to improve civilisation, and you may not need to leave it!