fiji talanoa

Vakatawa Talks Of This And That

An occasional rumble and earth jolts and trembles still emind Suva people of the earthquake of July, 1953, when a jreat submarine landslide off the main reef swept away 60 niles of trans-Pacific cable, sent a series of confused and lestructive waves across the harbour, and shook land and mildings in the city for 15 violent seconds.

lAT 1953 earthquake happened at about mid-day and most people rode out the afternoon e successfully, mainly on a wave excitement of experiences and ly of the damage, dat night, however, brought a 3s of after-shocks that destroyed ) and created fears and anxieties ; built up into severe nervous in. le next few days bred as nice ■op of rumours as I have ever vn, and it was one of my jobs, Government PRO, to try to iteract these by broadcasts and s releases giving the truth as . as possible. it the power of suggestion is t and rumour is a mighty force. soon required a determined ■t of will to disbelieve. There a feeling, as each new story ped up, that it might be true, le rumours that had to be most rously discounted were those d on the belief that the earth :e was volcanic in origin. There : so many people who had seen n and smoke rising from newly ed cracks in the ground, tere was a peculiar substance, d at Lami, that was supposed ave been forced to the surface subterranean levels. (Geologists looked at it soon decided that ad not come from under the nd, but above it, and that it a case for biological, and not )gical, examination), r days I had been writing, and ig, and declaring in every form ild think of, that there was no mce whatever that the earth e had any volcanic origin. :en I learned how strong a hold ‘perhaps” attitude can have on nind. e lunch-time crowds on Satur stopped along the Suva fore -3 to watch peculiar puffs of :e rising at intervals from the :tion of Navua —close to the ; where, the experts had estab d, the epicentre of the earth e was. eculation was strong. Was the :e coming from the sea, or from land beyond the nearer hills?

Was there any significance in the spacing of the puffs? The staff of the ZJV broadcasting station pro duced a stop watch and charted the periodicity of the eruption.

There was no doubt in most minds that this was somehow connected with the earthquake.

It was obviously a case for eye witness information and it looked like a Saturday afternoon car trip along the coast. Fortunately, how ever, before starting out I rang the Beachcomber Hotel at Deuba.

David Philp, then managing the hotel, answered the phone. Yes, he had seen the puffs of smoke. Yes, they were close to Navua. He had just come back from there.

But what was the fuss about?

Surely there was nothing unusual about rice farmers burning off neaps of trash after harvesting?

They Are Busy

Ghosts in Levuka

The peope of Levuka are not lying down under the economic blow received from the change in the town’s main role of trans-shipment port for Fiji’s copra industry.

The little ships which traded be tween Levuka and plantations at eastern island ports now go straight to Suva, where all Fiji’s copra is milled by Island Industries Ltd.

The overseas vessels which took away copra from Suva and Levuka now load coconut oil at Suva alone. All this has meant severe cuts in Levuka’s normal trade and in the amount of waterfront work avail able and there have been plenty of people ready to talk of a “ghost town’’.

But the ghosts that haunt Levuka are hospitable and friendly spirits, who mingle with the ghosts of men who lived life to the full and who, by initiative and vision and imagin ation built some of the Pacific’s most notable commercial houses.

As the first shock of loss of the copra trade has passed away, the friends of Levuka have begun to lally round and the spirit of enter-

a recent article in a Wellington (NZ) newspaper saying that young leper patients at Makogai Fiji, were trying to raise money to build a small launch and buy an outboard engine, brought a quick and generous response from New Zealanders.

Enough money was donated to enable the patients to build themselves this neat little craft-the "Group Scout"-which they will use tor fishing trips and

general excursions around Makogai island.

Three members of the Royal New Zealand Air Force stationed at Laucala Bay, Suve, who flew the engine across to Makogai in a Sunderland flying-boat, are examining it with two patients and the Makogai Medical Superintendent (Dr. D. W. Beckett).

The RNZAF men are Sgt. T. Methven (kneeling left), M. Eng. A. F. W.

Mason (kneeling Tight) and W./O. S. G. Fagan ((standing next to boat). Dr.

Beckett is dressed in white, standing.

photo: RNZAF.

j within the town has begun tmw itself. )liday and sports expeditions i other centres in the Colony : been organised and regular rammes of entertainment, based the Royal Hotel, with Eddie ey in charge, are helping to I up the tourist industry, r services between Suva and ika, hitherto shelved because of lack of flat land for a landing , are likely to become regular that Air Viti Ltd. have im ?d a Cessna amphibian, which use the harbour waters for iting and take-off. the whaling survey carried out ecent years by Carpenters i to the establishment of a ing station on Ovalau that will Levuka, and another project emerged from the town itself, is to exploit the waters around au and elsewhere in Fiji, mak -icvuka a base for catching and ing fish, especially tuna, e canning operation would be ided to fruit and vegetables, h would be grown on Ovalau the islands of Lomaiviti. e Levuka planners are not per d by the failure of earlier pine : canning ventures in Fiji. say they can profit by past ikes and they think they can narkets in Japan, where they ooking for their fishermen.

Fishermen to

v How perience elsewhere certainly seem to point to Japanese ods being the only ones likely to ccessful in getting tuna out of i Pacific waters and into cans mmercial quantity.

H ar°ld Gatty’s post-war South Sea Marine Products company spent a great deal of time and money on training Fijian fishermen in the art of tuna catching as practised with marked success along the American coasts.

The results were disappointingly meagre, although surveys have shown that tuna are in Fiji waters in quantity.

The Japanese brought in to catch fish in Eastern Samoan and New Caledtpnian waters demonstrated how it should be done by going deeply below the surface with lines baited with small fish brought speci ally from Japan.

Levuka citizens who have formed themselves into the nucleus of the Levuka Canning Company, with Mr.

A. G. McCown at their head, hope to attract similarly successful fish ing groups to Fiji.

One of the inducements proposed is to allow Japanese investors an option on each season’s pack.

So It’s Back to the Wog-Wagon Viti Levu travellers, both local and from overseas, were sorry when Whites Express coaches stopped running at the end of March. The coaches had set new standards of bus travel in Fiji.

They were imported by the Pacific Transport Company, and Whites Travel Service attended to the passenger arrangements. The comfortable seats were a change from the spartan straight-backed devices normally found in Fiji buses.

The coaches each carried a hostess and ran to meticulously exact time tables by adopting the express prin ciple of a limited number of stop ping places also a great change from normal procedure.

This, of course, limited the number of potential passengers to those wanting to make use of these stop ping places, and this naturally had an effect on revenue. (Over)

visitors in Sydney recently—Miss Peggie [?] and Mr. lan Eyre. They attended a [?]nction at the Polynesian Association. —Tele-Photos.

.bove all, however, it is a heart aking business to try to run a nee with high-grade equipment the winding, hilly Vitu Levu ds, with their long stretches of icle-punishing surface. ; could be an interesting economic rcise to balance the overall cost a large-scale road reconstruc i and sealing programme against present cost of unceasing road ding and maintenance, plus the : to individual car, bus and lorry lers of repairs to the damage e by potholes, corrugations, loose ;al and nail studded bridges.

Land and of Cession he pubication of Dr. J. D. ge’s book, Britain In Fiji, 1858- ) (reviewed by RWR in Feb ry PIM) draws timely attention the fact that it is not only in Deed of Cession, the document □ugh which sovereignty over Fiji sed to the British Crown, that :ain’s undertakings to the Fijian pie are stated. here has been a tendency to lose it of this in Fiji in recent years, nly because of the emphasis laid so long on the Deed of Cession the late Mr. A. A. Ragg and his tical associates. f the many debates I have med to in the Legislative Council most interesting, because of the ings (expressed or held beneath surface) it stirred, was the one Vlr. Ragg’s motion calling on the r ernment of Fiji to reaffirm the iciples of the Deed of Cession, r. Ragg’s purpose was plain. He ited an assurance for the Fijian pie that ownership of their land

Id be permanently guaranteed,

that Fijian interests would re n permanently paramount in , despite the growing, non-Fijian lecially Indian) population, □wards the end of the long

day’s debate, Mr. A. D. Patel turned a logical legal eye on to the terms of the Deed of Cession, on which Mr. Ragg had anchored his claims.

Mr. Patel read clause after clause and pointed out that none contained any pledge that all Fijian lands would remain perpetually in Fijian ownership.

He was perfectly correct, but it would be wrong to assume from this that the idea of such a pledge can therefore be lightly dismissed.

Land rights had had an import ant place among the topics dis cussed with the Fijian chiefs before cession.

Sir Arthur Gordon, who became governor after cession, held un equivocal ideas on the subject, as Dr. Legge makes clear. He was de termined that Fijian rights and culture should prevail, and he drove home the idea that both depend on continued land ownership.

No one who lays any claim to knowledge of Fijian attitudes and feelings will dispute the fact that, although it may not be so stated, explicity in the Deed of Cession, the Fijian people in general believe that Britain has guaranteed to them the continued ownership of the lands of their forefathers.

This belief is an essential, and a dominant, element in the loyalty and trust which found clear ex pression in the speech which accom panied the presentation of Cakobau’s club to Queen Victoria after the Deed of Cession had been signed.

“With this emblem of the past he sends his love to Her Majesty, say ing he fully confides in her and in her children, who, succeeding her, shall become Kings of Fiji, to exer cise a watchful control over the welfare of his children and people.”

A distinguished colonial admin istrator, Lord Milverton, described the agreement of Fijian landowners to hand over control of their land to the Native Land Trust Board as

[?]e big buses of Whites Travel Service set new standards of travel on Viti Levu, Fiji. But [?]ey stopped running at the end of March—to the regret of people like Vakatawa, who comments below.

of the greatest acts of trust in history of colonial rule. iere have been few open pro- Is that Fijian land ownership Id be tampered with, but to hful eyes there have been ?h signs of odd Whitehall moves cent years? to justify the warn :omment that if there is any ipt to bring about radical ge without the willing and full ?nt of the Fijian people, the ure of the trust of which Lord jrton spoke will be equalled by the unworthiness of its yal.

[?]d at the Holy Trinity Cathedral, Suva, [?]arch —Miss Eileen Thomas, formerly of [?]utoka, to Mr. Leo Smith, of Savusavu.

Photo: Caine's.