Real South Seas

Paradise

TER travelling many thou

sands of miles in the Pacific Australian journalist, Osmar be, has found a real tropical dise, in the British Solomon ids. Writing in the Adelaide ;rtiser he says: name is Anuda. Its nearest hour is Tikopia, 100 miles away— he world hasn’t heard of that either, tda is the top of an extinct volcano, Gathered cone thrust up from the deeps of the Pacific. Its soil is ! and the waters surrounding it with fish, turtles and dugongs. day 96 people live there. They are esians of superb physique. They are ed to be the descendants of a crew separated by storm from a if migrants sailing from Hawaii and i many hundreds of years ago. da’s contact with the troubled outside is practically non-existent, of the older men have made canoe to Tikopia and there learned a little •de-mer English, but those to whom ke when the American brigantine ie visited the island for the first recently, said they knew nothing the Second World War. far as I could make out, the last to visit the island anchored briefly re four or five years ago. It was fly a Government schooner from the ans. irently the Melanesian mission ship, srn Cross, has also visited the in years gone by, because there is church on the island where an aged r” sometimes holds services that iglican Church would have difliculty ognising.

Anudans are an excellently bed people. They use fish hooks from trochus and mussel shells, ultivate yams, sweet potatoes, taro bananas in plots tilled with a ive digging stick. r houses are solidly built of palm , with matting walls. .They are skilled mat weavers and make jus fish nets and lines from

pulverised hibiscus fibre. They are also expert at building: and sailing outrigger dugout canoes which they manoeuvre confidently through the heavy surf that pounds ceaselessly against the island’s white beaches.

Anuda is the nearest thing to the Pacific island paradise of fiction I have ever found in many years of South Seas travel. Its people have no enmities. They kill only for food. They reap no more and no less than they sow. .Their women have equality and dignity. They are kind

to their children. They do not fear tomorrow.

Captain Ron Partridge, of Man dated Airlines Ltd., Mr. and Mrs.

Frank Martin and Mr. and Mrs. C.

Farnham, all of Lae, NG, returned from overseas leave in February.

Mr. and Mrs. H. Nelson, and family, of Lae, New Guinea, are at present on eight months’ leave in Australia.