No Reprieve For Cession

Obelisk

From Our Own Correspondent

Suva, Sep. 10.

rE Deed of Cession Memorial, a great obelisk erected by the Fijians in 1889 to commemorate the signing of the Deed of Cession (1874) and the Golden Jubilee of Queen Victoria (1887) has been standing in isolation above Suva since the Old Government Buildings were demolished last year. Shortly, but in the face of bitter opposition from a number of Europeans and Fijians, the memorial will also be demolished.

The former Government Buildings site will become the new cathedral of the diocese of Polynesia. A foundation stone was laid in 1940, but no one seems to know precisely when the cathedral will materialise.

The official reply to the protests on the demolition of the obelisk is that last December, when a resolution was put be fore the Council of Chiefs, that body agreed that the inscribed marble tablets pn the memorial should be incorporated in a new, smaller memorial which could be erected in front of the Supreme Court block of the new Government Buildings.

But in 1944 the Council of Chiefs had agreed with equal serenity that the tablets should be put into a memorial chapel (which has not materialised either) at the Queen Victoria School At times a suspicion gets abroad that the Council of Chiefs is even less difficult than the House of Lords.

In the meantime the new memorial is under way, and the people who had ideas (too late) of the old memorial retained in the centre of a Deed of Cession Park can contemplate a waste area until it is built over.

The inescapable question is: What would have happened if it had been an Indian memorial?

Doctor John T. Buchholz, well known US professor of botany from Illinois and hay n arri , ved in New Caledonia i?io h % wlll ake a special study of the islands coniferous trees. The island wide variety, and the professor expects to stay four months on the job.

Mr. J. D. Rankine, CMG, Colonial Sec ®arbados - has been appointed §i> 10 riihprf 0 T? ry ’ . Ken £ a ’ in succession to Renme ’ who was recently ap ?? l AT te^Governor and Comander in Chief af Northern Rhodesia. Mr. Rankine was born in Suva in June, 1907. His father nr?° b ecame Sir Richard Rankine’ was then in the Fiji Civil Service.

The New Monument.