Mostly Fresh Men

New Makatea “Labour Army”

From Our Own Correspondent MANGAIA, Cook Islands.

THE profitable Makatea (Society Is.) phosphate field, which has been ■worked by Cook Islands native labour for several years now, has again received its Quota of islanders from Mangaia and other parts of the Cooks, anxious to earn the good wages—three times the pay obtainable for “navvying” work in this Group—available there, plus the added attraction of easily-purchased US-made goods of high quality, which the Cook Islands have not seen since 1938.

Our “veterans,” with two, or three, Makatea contracts worked-out, have, to their displeasure, mostly been stood down for younger men, making their first trip to the El Dorado in the Societies. The consternation of the experienced men, when informed by the ganger of the change of programme, was great.

Returned workers find their home island very dull, after the entertainments of Makatea, and complain that Cook Islands’ Liquor Statutes are irksomely restrictive (the free sale of wines and spirits is permitted in the French Islands).

Huts and houses remain gay with im ported glassware, lampware, clothes and bed-gear, and the rays of hundreds of flashlights illumine the dark nights; the workers who brought these back with them still enjoy the status of heros returned from an overseas campaign, until their supplanters return, in 12 months, with a bigger and better array of goods.

Savagely-criticised at first, the Makatea scheme has brought civilisation, in this form, plus a certain prosperity, to our island. On the debit side, discontent with local conditions, (and, it is to be feared, the introduction of VD, prevalent in the Societies) are evidence that contact with the outside world has also its dangers.

In time, the great Outside World must come “over the reef;” its delaying for 50

years is remarkable, and the retention by Mangaia of political independence equal to Tonga’s, is one of the unadvertised wonders of this end of the Pacific.