Drunkenness at Suva

Dances Causes Police Ban

INCREASING drunkenness and disorderly behaviour have pro duced a police ban on any form of dancing at three Suva halls.

The ban includes the taralala, a once-innocuous Fijian social diversion which, since the war period, has become steadily more sophisticated and, according to various Mission quarters, steadily less innocuous.

The idea behind the prohibition is to give those in charge of the halls a greater sense of respon sibility when dances are resumed, and to encourage dance-organisers to refuse admission to drunken men and to prevent the drinking of liquor in the halls and the immediate vicinity.

Another aspect of Fiji’s liquor problem cropped up at the Suva Magistrate’s Court when counsel, defending a European charged with supplying a Fijian with 12 bottles of rum. pointed out that a very potent liquor called “Raisin Jack” is not uncommonly concocted. It was added that for an Easter party the Fijian and his village friends had wanted “something decent to drink.”

“Raisin Jack” is claimed by some authorities have been introduced by Americans during the wartime “occupation.” The lawyer quoted, who said that boot polish was sometimes an ingredient, claimed that “one glass would knock a European flat on his back.”

In the case in question, the European was fined £5O and the Fiiian recipient of the rum £l5.

In recent weeks reports of increased drunkenness, sometimes involving serious crime, have come from Fiji, Tonga, Samoa and New Caledonia.

Meanwhile, New Caledonia hopes to collect 800,000 francs a year from a new tax of 5 per cent, on imported alcohol. (Beer, wines and medicinal alcohol are not affected).

The proceeds will subsidise the price of seed potatoes, of which NC produces annually 600 tons and imports 150 tons.