New Caledonia

Lively Picture

OF

Extract from an article which that brilliant young Australian reporter, Osmar White, has just written for Melbourne Herald: NOUMEA. —This is a very rich island.

Indeed, it is so rich that the people running it have been, and still are. deathly afraid that the word will get round in the wrong quarters.

One of the most heavily mineralised areas in the world, it could supply all the industrial metals likely to be needed by Pacific countries in the next couple of hundred years—and then have made no inroads on its low-grade ore reserves.

From its own agricultural and pastoral resources, it could feed four or five times its present population of 20,000 whites and near-whites, 12,000 Asiatics and 30,000 natives. The mountains are bare scours of mineral oxide, but the river valleys are broad and fertile.

There are deposits of anthracite coal, stands of excellent timber ranging in variety from teak to kauri pine, reef waters teeming with fish, rivers that with conservation could keep the industry of Sydney or Melbourne rolling from one year’s end to the other.

Sitting pretty in this little oceanic paradise are half a dozen “first families.”: who between them own or control prac-' tically every important commercial en terprise in the archipelago.

In one way or another, almost every body else on the island—barring possibly new arrivals in the service of the French Colonial Office—is in debt to them or likely to end up that way if he doesn’t remain uncritical, co-operative and strictly non-competitive.

There have been a few reasonably efficient Australian monopolists at work in the South Seas since the turn of the century, but by comparison with their New Caledonian confreres, their position has been shaky and their methods have smacked of the Sunday School. . . .

In all the Western Pacific. New Cale donia is probably the only island with an economic potential big enough and im mediate enough to invite large-scale American or European investment.

Mr. Norman C. Nelson, chairman of directors of the well-known Islands trading firm of Nelson and Robertson Pty., Ltd., Sydney, who is on a business trip abroad, returned to England at the end of May after visiting Europe. He has been successful in arranging for the better supply and delivery of British and Continental goods for the South Pacific. Mr. and Mrs. Nelson expect to return to Australia in September.