Island Suggested

Synthetic South Sea Island Suggested What Is Wrong With Real Thing?

THE Royal Hayman Hotel has been opened by the Australian Treasurer, Mr. Padden, and has been described by newspapermen as the best tourist hotel south of Hawaii. It has recently been built on Hayman Island, in the Whitsunday Passage, Great Barrier Reef, by Ansett Transport Industries Pty., Ltd. Access is by sea-plane and tariff is a minimum £2l per week. Australians have liked to read about it while they are having, in the southern States, a cold and wet winter, but not many of them expect to sample its delights. It was built with the hope of attracting dollar tourists, anyway (presumably, that is why Mr. Padden was asked to open it) but Aussies were shocked in June when a visiting American travel agent (Ansett’s US agent) suggested that the place should be turned into a synthetic South Sea island with imported Polynesian singers.

Australians thought the whole idea silly, even for dollars. They took the view that a holiday on the Barrier Reef, at the Royal Hayman, should be enough without the imported hula maidens. If the Americans want that, why come fur ther south than Hawaii where such things are already organised?

THE enterprise of Mr. Reg. Ansett, who started on a shoe string, would bear study by Fiji and other South Pacific territories who are always talking about a tourist industry—and doing very little to bring it about. Where the old-estab lished travel firms in Australia have be come almost moribund since the war, An sett has gone ahead despite rising costs and wages and all the obstacles to getting anything done in this post-war world,

and has achieved something. Presum ably the difficulties have been as great for Mr. Ansett as for anyone else.

Fiji, for example, has great attractions to offer the tourist but although millions pf words have been spilled on the sub ject, neither public nor private enterprise there has yet done the one thing that would make it possible—that is, provided the accommodation.

Maybe Fiji does want a tourist in dustry, but it obviously does not want it

enough.