Henri Sautot, Farmer,

Returns to N. Caledonia

M. HENRI SAUTOT, New Caledonia’s popular war-time Governor, who was deported from Noumea in 1942, following his clash with Rear-Admiral d’Argenlieu, arrived unexpectedly in Syd ney late in October aboard a British ship.

M. Sautot, who was accompanied by

Madame Sautot (a former resident of New Caledonia), and who appeared very well, stated that he was returning to New Caledonia to become “a gentleman farmer.”

The story of how Governor Sautot was shipped away to Auckland by d’Argenlieu was told in the October “PIM.” M. Sautot went thence to London, where General de Gaulle appointed him Governor of a French African Colony. He held Govern orships in Africa until his retirement.

Henri Sautot was French Resident Commissioner in the New Hebrides when France collapsed in 1940. He made his tory because he was the first French Colonial Governor to declare for de Gaulle and Fighting France (in July, 1940) and because he went alone to New Caledonia and rallied the colonists there to de Gaulle (September, 1940).

The Vicar Apostolic of Rabaul district of the Roman Catholic Mission, the Right Rev. Leo Scharmach, DD, MSC, recently applied for naturalisation in Australia.

Bishop Scharmach is of Polish nationality and was resident 21 years in Rabaul, New Guinea. The last four years were spent as a prisoner of the Japanese.

Johanthan Fomia, a Tongan Methodist missionary in Papua, died there after a short illness in September. He had been 10 years in Papua.

M. Henri Sautot