Australia Sells to the Pacific

Australian Trade Mission to Visit Pacific Islands Markets

The expanding markets of the Pacific Islands are to be visited by an Australian Trade Mission which is due to leave Sydney on August 18 by air for Noumea, in New Caledonia, and Suva, Fiji, returning to Sydney on August 31. Air travel will be used throughout.

THE Mission is to stay five days in New Caledonia and a week in Fiji, where it will break up on August 30. Later, Mission members will have the opportunity of visiting individually other Pacific Islands— Tonga, Western Samoa, the New Hebrides and the Solomons.

This will be the 11th Trade Mis sion to leave Australia in the last seven years, and the first ever to visit the South Pacific area. Its organ ization shows the importance with which Australia regards the opening of further trade opportunities in the South Pacific.

The Mission has been sponsored by the Australian Junior Chamber of Commerce, Central Square Branch, Sydney, and organized by the Aus tralian Government’s Department of Trade. An Australian Government Trade Commissioner, Mr. D. Walker, will travel ahead of the Mission to prepare its reception and arrange appointments for businessmen in the area to meet Mission members. Mr.

Walker will be in Suva on August 2, at the Grand Pacific Hotel and in Noumea on August 14, care of the Australian Consulate.

Australia already sells a consider able variety of goods to Pacific markets, including foodstuffs such as canned meat, dairy products, wheat flour and beer, and, in the manufac turing industry field, iron and steel products, cordage, ropes and twines, motor cars, metal furniture, electrical appliances, food machinery, tyres and tubes and leather products. Australia now supplies about 2 per cent, of the £26 million worth of goods imported every year by New Caledonia and Fiji.

Mission members will visit the area with the intention of helping Aus tralian trade generally. For this reason, they are prepared to act as representatives not only of their own firms but of industries allied to, but not competitive with, their own.’

Members will meet commercial

trading and industrial organizations as well as Government Departments in the cities they visit.

The itinerary of the Mission is: Depart Sydney by Qantas, 10 a.m., August 18; Arrive Noumea, 2.30 p.m., August 18; Depart Noumea by TAI, 3 p.m., August 23; Arrive Nadi, 5.50 p.m., August 23.

From Nadi, the Mission will ; by Fiji Airways to Suva, arriving the morning of August 24, and o part from Suva by Fiji Airways t Nadi on August 30. The afterncH and evening of August 30 will spent in Lautoka, where memtu will meet businessmen of this ii .portant area of Fiji. A Qantas a liner will leave Nadi at 5.20 a.m.

August 31 for Sydney, arriving the at 8.20 the same morning.