Various Problems Of Living

In The New Hebrides

Some Impressions

By Judy Tudor

BURNS PHILP land about 500 tons of cargo in the New Hebrides each two-monthly trip of Malaita —everything from copra sacks to potatoes, of which last there is a perennial shortage— but no Australian beer. The beer consumed locally comes from Glasgow or Sweden or Alsace (which is about the nearest approach to ;he Australian type) and can cost mything up to 6/6 per bottle—de fending upon where you buy it. ;And a bottle of Australian fizzy irink, that probably costs 9d in Jydney can, according to where you >uy it, cost over 3/-).

But the traffic is all one way, Australian goods come into the lebrides but, now that the scrap rade hereabouts is a thing of the •ast, mighty little goes out. All opra goes to France, on French hips. Current freight rates from ydney to Santo are £l5 per ton, n increase of about 600 per cent, n pre-war rates, and much of this an be attributed to local condi ons.

If the stars are right in their furses, the entire Australian cargo >r Vila or Santo can be discharged ias little as 12 hours. If not, it in take as long as four days—as

it has on this occasion. As few as a dozen natives at a time nibble at the job, and rain, Sundays and holidays intervene. No work is done after midnight—which is understandable—there is not suf ficient labour to work one shift, let alone two.

Cost of native stevedores can be anything up to £1 per day per man, although general run of native wages in the Hebrides is still £lO per month, and rations, etc. It is said in Vila that, by mutual agree ment, wages will be reduced to £8 per month—but so far as can be ascertained no one has yet had the temerity to cast the first stone.

Shortage of labour, since the hurri cane of Christmas, 1951, and the eruptions on Ambrym, is not as acute as hitherto; but as yet it has not become so easy that either natives or Tonkinese are happy about hiring themselves out for less than they have come to accept as their due.

Depending on location and other factors, it probably costs, with wages, rations, etc., between £l5 and £2O per month to keep a native labourer or a servant. Most of the British housewives of Vila, there fore, get over the difficulty by doing

without house-servants. They do their own housework, cooking and iaundry—the record in the spect having apparently been reached recently by the wife of a high British official who is said to have laundered 18 sheets at one session. mHE household help problem in I Vila is not lessened by the fact that there are very few local natives on Efate; or by the fact that the French official is paid on a much more lavish scale than his British counterpart, and is therefore in a position to compete for what labour there is.

With these factors of high wages, costly transport and allied difficulties, it is not surprising that the cost of living has almost gone through the ceiling. Butter is over 9/- per pound; local eggs, of the bantam type, 1/- each. Petrol is just on 7/- per gallon.

In Santo and other outposts, pre sumably, the position is better; but in Vila there is no local native market—in fact, few natives to pro vide such a market. There are Tonkinese market gardens some distance from the town, but no at tempt is made to bring the stuff in to Vila for sale to local house wives. If local housewives have not the transport to go out to the gardens for lettuce, beans, tomatoes and other oddments, then they must have recourse to the can, or

imported high-priced fruit and vegetables.

Pawpaws grow well in most Vila backyards (and, of course, there area the usual flowering shrubs) but otherwise there is not much attempt at gardening—lack of labour being responsible, plus the deficiencies of local soil.

But in spite of shortages, and high prices, hospitality is lavish and food is good, for here the stodgy British have benefited considerably by French culinary art. Crusty French bread made from Australian flour in a way that no Australian baker ever knew how; omelettes, large and inviting in spite of one

shilling-a-pop eggs and with strange and interesting bits and pieces in volved in their make-up: and much ordinary red wine broken down with lashings of iced-water.

Wines champagne and the sweeter varieties and liqueurs—are, comparatively, about the cheapest thing in the Hebrides.

Economically, the Hebrides are still suffering from the hurricane which wrecked some of the best plantations 15 months ago and the copra slump of about the same vintage—this following long years of post-war economic indigestion, when copra and scrap boomed.

At present local copra is bring ing £65 and £7O Aus. per ton; but how long this will last is anyone’s guess—local planters, of course, be ing without the guarantees enjoyed by planters in the British Pacific possessions. When and if copra does again have to compete on a buyers’ market, it is a safe bet that the low-grade Hebrides product is go ing to be hard to sell. Apart from copra there is nothing; and—unlike most other South Pacific countries —seemingly not even plans for an alternative industry. Coffee and cocoa plantations there once were, but these have become overgrown and unproductive.

By all the rules, the economic freeze in the Hebrides should come any time fram now, although there are as yet few outward signs of it.

The few thousand Tonkinese, now 'ree French citizens, are still hiring ;hemselves out as skilled artisans or naking a precarious living by sell ng each other peanuts or slices of watermelon, or hard-boiled eggs [this medley of edibles is on sale tom stalls outside the local picture show during sessions) or building nore shops or making a dishonest iving from their incredible taxi :abs. The “taxis” are jeeps, some f wartime vintage, some new, which >ounce and flounce along the wide oads the Yanks left, like a cross >etween a crab and a Luna Park )odgem car. There seems no set ate of charges and a ride of a nile or two can cost anything from our to 10 shillings, depending upon rhim or what the driver decides is he degree of stupidity of the lassenger.

Maybe, when the slump comes, hese Tonks will be happy to go ack to the plantations to cut copra, tut not yet. New Hebrides seems, conomically, to have got itself mund-up and although one feels aat there is not much there now r in the future to prop up the recarious economy for the present ; just seems to keep on going.

Since 1947-48, the output of timber ■om Papua-New Guinea sawmills as doubled. During the last half f 1952, the total cut was 10,985,000 iper feet.