Solomons

Drums From The

Brought To The Help Of Important New Fiji Industry

WHEN, after apparently endless war time and post-war difficulties in volving machinery and materials had been surmounted, the big crushing mill at Walu Bay, Suva, was completed by Messrs. W. R. Carpenter (Fiji) Ltd., and coconut-oil and meal began to flow out in increasing quantities, the furrows cleared from the brow of Mr. W. Grainger Johnson and his fellow directors.

It had been a mighty struggle; but the completion in 1948 of the big enterprise gave a certain guarantee of stability to at least one section of the copra industry.

Fiji generally rejoiced with them. In any country, the establishment of a secondary industry, based like this on a primary industry, is a notable occasion.

Their troubles were not oyer, how ever. They had the machinery and the copra, the oil and the transport and the market. But oil needed containers; and the post-war world was desperately short of oil containers of every description. The major oil companies have been fighting each other for 40-gallon drums—the kind of commodity that the workers of the world, preoccupied with their Socialistic world-wide spree, simply decline to pro duce in quantity.

The furrows returned to the forehead of “Tui” Johnson. The “containers bottleneck’' kept him awake at night. No use producing coconut oil at Walu Bay if there was nothing to put it in. The story of how containers were located, and tracked down, and secured in the face of bitter opposition, so that the wheels could keep turning at Walu Bay, would fill a book.

Some echoes of the struggle were heard when, a couple of weeks ago, the LST Rawhiti came into Suva port from the Solomons, literally staggering under thousands and thousands of empty oil drums, which had been salvaged by Carpenter interests in and around the islands of Melanesia. Someone said there were 17,000 drums—but it did not seem that the “Landing Ship Tank” could ac commodate that many.

The LST Rawhiti is New Zealand owned, and is a kind of Jack-of-all-trades in Pacific Islands transport. Her last job was the carriage of a large number of cattle from Auckland to the Solomon Islands plantations. She just opened her bows in Auckland, and the cattle were driven in; and she did the same thing on the Islands beaches, and the cattle walked out onto the plantations.

The drums, unloaded in Suva, have been added to the other drums that have been scraped off wartime islands and forgotten, overgrown air-strips. The container situation is much better, and Carpenters’

Suva director is again smiling and put ting on weight.