yesterday

“Is there to be war in the Pacific?” asked a PIM editorial in August, 1941. The situation was exceedingly grave. PIM admitted that it didn’t know—that it was guessing like everybody else, but it felt Japan would go to war against America only if there was a “completely irresponsible gang of military fascists in complete command in Toyko” Thus the picture in the South Pacific 20 years ago this month was one of strain and tension.

There were political events “of an extraordinary character” in the Free French colony of Tahiti.

Commandant Richard Brunot, who had arrived in the South Pacific earlier as the envoy of General de Gaulle, had placed the Governor of Tahiti and other high officials under arrest. * • • The copra outlook was much better. Prices had in fact started the rise which was to continue. Copra production was falling, and prices were going up.

Because of the laws of supply and demand, the elaborate copra pooling and marketing machinery planned for the South Pacific the previous January was not being used because it was not needed. ♦ • ♦ Mr. Ivan Nelson, head of the Islands firm of Nelson and Robertson, died at his home in Lindfleld, NSW, on July 30. He had gone to Australia from Sweden more than 50 years previously. He pioneered the cocoa industry in the Samoan islands. A week earlier, on July 20, the Tongan Premier, Prince Tungi, consort of Queen Salote, died in Nukualofa. His passing “removed one of the most successful and best loved Polynesian administrators, for his was the guiding hand behind the felicitous reign of the Queen for the past 23 years”, said “PIM”. Tungi was 54. Queen Salote and Prince Tungi married in September, 1917, when she was the Crown Princess. * * * The strike of Europeans employed by New Guinea Goldfield on the Morobe goldfield had now “practically ended” and a Commonwealth industrial inspector was making final settlement of industrial conditions. The Australian Territories Minister visited Wau in July and suggested the formation of a New Guinea Miners’

Union, and thus movement was afoot to form a registered trade union. Many New Guinea people described this as a “deplorable development in a country like New Guinea”. • • • Because Britain was short of shipping, Fiji’s guaranteed sugar market for the year had failed. It was not expected that more than two-thirds of Fiji’s sugar crop would be shipped to Britain, and there was no indication about what was to be done with the remainder. * ♦ • West Samoa began petrol rationing. Petrol was available only by permit—four gallons a week for private cars, six for business cars, 18 for taxis and lorries, 10 for light vans and plantation vehicles. * * ♦ In Fiji they were talking about a fish-canning Industry —as they have since. The Governor, Sir Harry Luke, told the Legislative Council that despite the abundance of fish, 100,000 lb of canned fish was annually imported into the Colony, and fish canning should be a local enterprise, with the surplus fish being frozen or smoked. Some of the unofficial members, however, doubted whether fish canning was practicable, and they opposed a bill introduced to the Council to control and organise Fiji’s fisheries on the ground that £2OO would have to be voted for a fisheries assistant in the Department of Agriculture, and “this might lead to heavy expenditure in establishing a fisheries department”.