Tourist: Stay

Away From My Door!

Tahiti Correspondent's Warnings Taken to Heart

Letter to the Editor I NEVER wanted to go to Tahiti, any how, But after a steady diet of your Papeete correspondent’s views on Europeans in general, and tourists in par ticular, I should be ashamed to show my face there.

If the Government of French Oceania has appointed your correspondent Chief of the Anti-Tourism Bureau, then it has chosen well; I am convinced that no one else would want to go there either—where there are juke-boxes, or Hollywood blondes, or just no Polynesian welcome at all.

Don’t mistake me: I hold no brief for tourists. I do not know the semi-perma nent variety that apparently foist them selves upon long-suffering Papeete: I did know the hot, perspiring kind that decanted themselves from cruise-ships ( and for a brief day or so infested a par ticular Pacific port, and then went their way. And I certainly liked them not.

But there are tourists and tourists.

Once in so often you come across quite a decent kind of bloke, who might, with a little encouragement, turn into a regular Pacific citizen. No long-term resident of Oceania, who is worth his salt to-day, can look back on his beginnings there without a blush or two. They all had to learn something.

I gather that your correspondent is an American. How then came he to the

blessed South Seas? Was he not a tourist who lingered over-long?

In the half-dozen Pacific Island Terri tories which I know personally, no such acute state of affairs as he depicts, exists. If Tahiti is besieged by immoral, predatory, swing-age, moronic migrants, then it must be because they found the atmosphere propitious, the Tahitians willing and the Government encourag ing.

The solution lies in the hands of the Tahitians and their Government.

I’d like to suggest that we have fewer tirades about tourists, the notorious ’2O decade (which is past history, anyhow), Hollywood clowns, blondes, etc., and more of the good stuff about Tahiti which he can write in his less acidulated moods.

I am, etc.,

Martin Mackinlay.

Sydney, NSW.

February 16, 1946.

The Rev. J. H. S. Smith, formerly of Armidale, NSW, has been accepted by the Bishop of New Guinea for missionary service in Papua.

Freeman Keyte, a pupil of the Boys’

Grammar School, Suva, has been awarded the Fiji Scholarship for 1946. The Scholarship is for £l2O and is designed to assist students from the Colony who wish to attend a University overseas.

Dr and Mrs. Charles Leleu and their two children arrived in Suva by flying boat on February 4. Dr. Leleu has been appointed medical ofiicer with the CSR Co.