Doing Well
p. 34 · Read in the full issue
Japs Are Still
Bogey-Men, But—
Santo Fishery is Doing Well
\ SYDNEY business man, just back from a routine trip to the New Hebrides, hooted with de rision when shown a clipping from a Melbourne newspaper which had 300 Japanese women going to Santo next year to work in a local fish cannery.
This is the piece, from the columnist in the Melbourne Age: Travellers back from the New Hebrides tell disquieting stories about the return of the Japanese.
The island of Espiritu Santo, some 1,000 miles north-east of Australia, is being trans formed into a Japanese fishing base.
A large canning factory, where 300 Japanese women are expected to be working next year, a modern wharf, and other buildings are rising there.
This news should interest Australians gener ally, and particularly Australian fish canners, because Japanese competition was blamed for the recent closing of a big Tasmanian cannery.
This peacetime Japanese invasion of the New Hebrides is ironic.
Espiritu Santo was America's chief base for the Pacific war drive which recaptured the Solomon Islands.
It is an Anglo-French condominium, but be cause of its nearness to Australia, white in habitants sought Canberra's support in oppos ing the return of the Japanese.
If Canberra has protested, its protest has apparently gone unheeded.
The cannery is the fishing enter prise established at Paleikula by D. J. Gubbay and Co. with Ameri can and Japanese backing and Jap anese fishing know-how.
First fish was delivered to the company’s freezer at the end of October and about eight to a dozen Japanese fishing boats are working there under contract —after the style of the Van Camp set-up that has been flourishing in Pago Pago, American Samoa for several years.
So far as is known there is no immediate prospect of canning fish at the Santo plant. Canning needs labour—and labour is something the Hebrides has not got. Probably a few hundred Japanese women would solve that difficulty or a few hundred Javanese or Chinese or Tonkinese.
NH has a Tonkinese population of over 2,000 already—about twice that of the French and British com bined. These have been very suspect within the Condominium, just as the same racial group is non persona grata with the white residents of New Caledonia.
Santo fish will be frozen there and will be shipped in that form to the United States. There is no sugges tion that it should be sold in Aus tralia although as Australia sells a lot of food and manufactured goods in the Hebrides and buys nothing, it could help to balance trade.
It is understood that if fish
canning develops from the present enterprise, it will be in the hands ol a French firm, Compagnie Parisienne Sunbel.
The Gutfbay enterprise has the blessing of the British and French Governments in the Hebrides. NK is at present a one-industry economy—copra, and poor copra at that.
Even if the fishing company hai to import all its labour—on short-* term contracts under quite rigid safeguards—and a lot of its profit go to overseas shareholders, presum-, ably the Government expects to get a rake-off somehow, as Government always do.
Local Hebrideans and Tonkinel are supposed to be trained to worl In the freezer.
No native Hebridean, no Tonkinese or British planter (some of whon did object to the use of Japanese fishermen) has ever had ttu slightest desire to exploit the fisl resources of the area. Wanderin| Japanese tuna ships will get tin fish anyway; so if the profits there' from are diverted for the enricM ment of the Condominium, it might be a very good thing. t More than 1,000 natives out the South Pacific have nov passed St. John first-aid examine tions, following a training schemi inaugurated in 1953.