Commentary

nderstanding And

te Screens on Nauru

T of the heartburning that has ttended the proposal of the ian Government to resettle uruans elsewhere might have /oided if some of the reasons it had been given, and all the of the problem thrown open ;ood public airing. This, after not a cloak and dagger job; simple peacetime proposition ve several thousand people remote Pacific Island which )r 40 years will not be able >ort them in the manner to hey have become accustomed, ecrecy has attended the whole ight from the first public an nent last year of Australia’s I to move the Nauruans to the an mainland. It turned out ■ Nauruans had already indi ) the Australian Government y didn’t want to become New ans and they repeated it again len the matter became public, ave made visits to Canberra ss the problem, and even got flying boat and inspected a )f islands in Australia’s north, his has also been shrouded in No Government spokesman fitted anything about the de nts of the last six months or virtually only PIM readers en aware of the strong feel the subject among the Nau here in this issue, Ludwig , a Nauruan university stu pes his solution to the prob ; rehabilitation of Nauru to fit for Nauruans to live on. the obvious solution to the of course. So obvious that ;edingly unlikely that the Ad ng Authority has not already ;d it and, for good reasons, down. ig suggests that the ships that ; phosphate out of Nauru re n Australia with loads of soil a that was rejected about 10 ) when an Indian representa- JN suggested it; nor can he Nauru cannot develop a xport industry, copra produc side industries such as oil soap making, or a fishery. 3f these things is impossible, they practicable? is a tiny speck in mid-Paci q. miles in area, right off al shipping and air lanes. It lative population of about

2,500 which has doubled itself in the last 30 years, a rainfall that averages about 75 inches a year but in some years falls to a quarter of that.

It is fringed by a narrow coastal strip of beach and fertile land that rises to 30 ft in height and in places is up to a quarter of a mile wide. Be yond that, in the centre of the island, is the plateau of phosphatic rock.

Most of the villages are around the fertile coastal fringe which has no phosphate deposits and remains un disturbed, The remaining four-fifths of the island is phosphate bearing, grows few food plants naturally al though food-bearing trees have been planted on some of it. It is this four fifths that has, over the last 44 years, been whittled away for the enrich ment of Australian and New Zea land agriculture.

But that is only part of the story.

It was a two-way trade and the Nauruans have done pretty well out of it. Royalty is paid to individual land-owners for every ton of phos phate mined; compensation is made for each acre of land used and each tree destroyed; housing funds are also financed by fees on each ton of phosphate.

Other fees from phosphate have produced the Long Term Investment Fund which is now well over £200,000; with a similar amount in the Rehabilitation Fund.

All fine while it lasts, but when the phosphate peters out around the year 2000, Nauru is back where it was in 1900. The big income from royalties and other fees is finished, all that is left is a string of villages around the fertile coastal strip, and no communications with the outside world.

Would the Nauruans be wise to spend the money that then stands to their credit in Rehabilitation and Trust funds to try to invent another economy? Or would they be better to leave the place and try somewhere else, closer to civilisation?

The Australian Government has obviously decided they would be wiser to leave—and it is prob ably right.

But no one can blame a couple of thousand Nauruans not wanting to lose their identity amongst 10,000,000 Australians. The best solu tion seemed to be the compromise one of another island. The problem is which island—there are few left in the Pacific that are both suitable and available.

A lot of common sense and fore bearance on both sides will be neces

sary before the Nauruans and the Administration find a solution to this conundrum—but little will be gained by the Government maintaining its lofty mother-knows-best attitude, and keeping all its moves secret. All that has resulted from it so far is that the Nauruans feel that somehow they are being got at. ☆ ☆ ☆

Round the Vicious

Circle in N. Caledonia

TN view of the issues at stake, the * result of New Caledonia’s snap election on Sunday, April 15, might be considered a mild surprise, al- : though not even the most optimistic of opposition parties could have been too hopeful of whittling M. Maurice : Lenormand’s Union Caledonienrie down to the size that they would, like.

M. Lenormand and his left-wing party have been a big pill for both conservative New Caledonians and the French administration to swallow since 1957; but no matter what tac tics they have adopted, the Lenor mand pill tends to get bigger all the time.

The last New Caledonia Assemblee Territoriale was dissolved when the Governor exercised his right of veto in March, because he and M.

Lenormand could not agree on finan cial assistance to the Nickel Co.

The Nickel Co. bolstered the Governor’s stand by closing down • part of its smelters and laying off men. This, it was thought in some : quarters, might cause some of M. 7 Lenormand’s workers to desert him/ on the principle that a vote for the opposition might help the Nickel Co/ to change its plans for retrenchment.

In the event nothing of the sort happened and the Union Caledon ienne now has 18 seats in the As semblee instead of the 16 it previously enjoyed.

This possibly can be regarded as a triumph of principle over expedi ency and certainly it is a triumph for the natives’ sense of political unity and maybe even civic duty.

An unofficial estimate is that 75 per cent, of them voted, while less than half of the Europeans bothered.

The million franc question in New Caledonia now is not so much who voted for whom—but where does the country and its government go from here. When the Assemblee reassembles, the Governor will be confronted with almost the same set up that he dissolved in early March, except that M. Lenormand is now slightly stronger. (Over)

Furthermore, the new Conseil du Government, a sort of Executive Council, will be stacked against him because the majority party will have the privilege of choosing most of the members.

The Governor does, however, have the power to veto any legislation passed by the Assemblee, although this in itself, as shown by the re cent election, can sometimes lead only in circles.

And where does M. Lenormand go? Although he always sees the Nickel Company as the Big Bad Wolf, at present it represents New Caledonia’s main export income.

It may be a fine thing, in principle, to refuse to subsidise its operations from New Caledonian taxpayers’ funds, but if the economy loses any more of its markets, at a time when there is a world slump in nickel, New Caledonia and M.

Lenormand’s supporters could face economic ruin.

Presumably M. Lenormand has socialistic ideas of what could be done with the country’s mam in dustry but whether they would pro duce better results is open to doubt.

New Caledonia has, in miniature, all the elements that produced poli tical chaos in Metropolitan France between 1940 and the re-entry of de Gaulle to the political scene a few years ago.

One tense situation has followed another for a decade and affairs have been little improved since the inauguration of modified common roll voting in 1957. There then were over 32,000 people entitled to vote, more than half of them natives, and the first election resulted then, as in the most recent election, in 18 seats for the Union Caledonienne party, the rest of the 16 seats being distributed between half a dozen different parties all more or less supported by business and industrial interests.

There have been four elections since—all with similar results, and all producing the same sort of sec tional friction.

In addition to discord between the two groups, there is also the local New Caledonian dislike of fonction naires—public servants from Metro politan France —and the result of the recent elections is being hailed in some quarters as a slap in the face for them also.

The fonctionnaires have had, nevertheless, a traditionally important role in French government every where. They are the constant fac tor, carrying on regardless, no mat

ter which political dog is consuming other political dogs and thus fre quently saving administration from utter chaos. ☆ ☆ ☆

Fiji Baits the Hook

For Transistor Tourists

AS Shakespeare once said —or maybe it was Australian writer Frank Clune—travel broadens the mind and lightens the pocket-book.

And the pocket-books that some people in Fiji would most like to lighten are those of American tourists who are alleged to find bargains that “cost even hundreds of pounds” abso lutely irresistible.

With this end in view some sections of the community want to make Fiji a Little Aden of the Pacific: A tourist’s delight of cheap Japanese transistor radios and cameras, Scotch whisky, French perfume and Swiss watches.

Fiji already has gone a long way in this direction. It has its duty free shop at Nadi Interantional Airport where people who don’t have to spend more than half an hour in the country can buy all the desirable goods mentioned, at prices lower than most (although not always).

For others who have talked them selves into spending a couple of days in the darned place, there are facil ities for draw-back of duty on the same items. But this, say the quid nuncs, is not enough. Too cumber some, Much better if there is an open-go, so Fiji can get a reputa tion as a Pacific shopping centre.

If this cynical view is correct — that it isn’t the lure of far-away places that matters, but the price of transistor radio s—then the Fiji Visitors Bureau has been wasting its time for years. Instead of churning out pieces about the yaqona ceremony and the significance of the tabua or whale’s tooth, and in trying to lure people out to look at reefs in glass bottomed boats, or to inspect Fijian villages, it should have been getting itself some good agencies for Scotch whisky and Japanese radios.

Fiji isn’t the first and won’t be the last to bait her tourist trap with duty free, so-called luxury goods. Duty free shops stretch right round the world from Shannon, Ireland, to Syd ney, Australia—each selling the same line of goods of universal appeal. In the end they cancel one another out.

There might be more dividends in the Fiji tourist industry if someone came up with an original thought occasionally; or considered the pro position that all tourists are not necessarily morons.

Lord Maugham 'Salves'

The 'Joyita' Mystery

LORD MAUGHAM, nephew Somerset Maugham, and pn owner of the notorious Joyita ai recent visitor to Fiji, has now g his solution—syndicated—to mystery of what overtook her in on a trip between Apia, Wei Samoa and the Tokelaus.

So far as Sydney was concei it came in three instalments in Sunday Sun-Herald, a triumph o genuity and imagination that without a doubt leave the widow relatives of the late Dr. A. D. sons very unhappy. (Dr. Parsons a West Samoa medical officer disappeared with the rest of people who were on Joyita).

Maugham’s theory is that the ran into a storm and during it sons ordered Captain “Dusty” IV to return to Apia. When Mille fused, there was a scuffle in v Miller fell off the bridge onto deck below, was knocked uncons and sustained a gaping head w which Parsons sewed up.

At this stage the ship has tak so much water the rest of the plement feel she is going to sinl They—including Dr. Parsons to the rafts immediately and cas leaving the unconscious Miller o deck with his faithful Gilbertese vant. The rafts are set off the by a current and the people in

eventually perish.

Meantime Joyita drifts and s time within the next weeks, a anese fishing boat sights and b her, finds the Gilbertese still but guarding the dead body of IV In a fight, the Gilbertese falls board. The Japs throw the bot Miller after him and loot the All very entertaining of cou and already being spoken of as pel truth “because it appeared i paper”. It would nonetheless b teresting to know why Maugham imagines that the people on the vessel t all have gone off and left unconscious man and a native b( a vessel that they believed woulc within minutes. It is even hard imagine why Dr. Parsons, \ whole training was for the prei tion of life, would do such a tl The normal procedure under circumstances would have been 1 the injured man into the raft / and it will take more tffi Maugham to convince anyone knew any of these people thai would not have been done.

Maugham expose therefore ! nothing and is merely another tion to the growing fiction 01

subject.