Nutshell

In A Nutshell

THE UK Secretary of State for the Colonies has approved the annual Estimates for the Gilbert and Ellice Islands Colony, which provide for expenditure of £A864,000 and revenue of £792,000, leaving £72,000 to be met from Colony Reserve Funds. This compares with an esti mated gap of £A79,000 in 1963.

According to a Government spokesman in Honiara, one of the reasons for the deficit is the drought, which has affected the copra in dustry. Export duty on copra is esti mated at £92,000, compared with £136,000 in 1962.

The Estimates include Colonial Development and Welfare expendi ture of about £50,000, the main item being preparations for the air service from Fiji which is expected to begin soon.

Provision is also made for the con struction of reef causeways to con tinue, and for dredging the boat-basin at Betio, where the mole was damaged by storm in December. • Two Islands newspapers have completed their first year of publi cation in the last few weeks. Le Journal de Tahiti, one of Tahiti’s two daily, French-language news papers, became a year old with its 304th number on March 31. Samoa News, American Samoa’s only news paper, brought out its 52nd weekly issue on April 24. • The New Zealand Prime Minister, Mr. K. J. Holyoake, said at the end of March that he hoped to call for a report to see if there was value in New Zealand appoint ing a commissioner in Fiji.

He was commenting on a state ment in the House of Commons by the Colonial Under-Secretary, Mr.

Nigel Fisher, that the British Govern ment welcomed the appointment of an Australian commissioner in Fiji and hoped that New Zealand would follow suit.

Australia’s commissioner, Mr. R.

N. Hamilton, arrived in Suva early in March.

O The dedication of American Samoa’s new airport terminal build-

ings at Tafuna and the new television studio building, which was to have been held on April 17, has been postponed until later in the year be cause several VIPs could not be pre sent in April. • The chairman of the BSIP Ports Authority, Mr. L. M. Davies, announced in March that tenders for the deepwater berth at Point Cruz, which closed in London on February 25, were very competitive, and it was now certain that a wharf within the financial limits which the Authority was able to accept could be con structed.

Part of the cost would be met by the Ports Authority and part from a loan from the Commonwealth Saving Bank.

The successful tenderer would probably be announced in April. • Local councils in the New Hebrides are being supplied with radio transmitters, paid for partly by the councils and partly by the Condominium Government. The first set was installed recently at Dillon Bay, Erromanga. Councils at Aoba and Tanmaru, Malekula, will get sets in the next two months. • After a visit to Wagina re cently to assess crop possibilities, the BSIP’s Acting Deputy Director of Agriculture, Mr. W. I. Laing, said he was optimistic about the future of the Gilbertese settlement. He said a narrow coastal strip similar to the village area appeared suitable for

SYDNEY HOLIDAY: Seen at a social gathering of the Polynesian Association in Sydney recently were Mr. and Mrs. John Allen, of Suva, who were in Australia on long leave. — Tele-Photos.

growing coconuts, some inland ridges seemed promising for yams, sweet potatoes and other vegetables, and other parts of the island seemed suited to wetland crops such as taro and rice. Soil samples were taken for analysis. • The first airfield at Mururoa Atoll, the centre in French Polynesia for France’s proposed nuclear experi ments, will be ready for use in July.

The strip is 2,000 metres long. A work force of about 600 Foreign Legionaires, Tahitians and scientific personnel is employed at Mururoa. • Western Samoa’s Government has bought 77 acres of land at Alafua from the Western Samoan Trust Estates Corporation for the building of a college of tropical agri culture and an experimental station.

Construction will begin soon, and the first students from both Samoa and neighbouring islands are expected to be admitted next March, The NZ Freedom from Hunger Committee has made a grant of £BO,OOO towards the cost of con struction. The United Nations and the New Zealand Government will pay most of the maintenance costs for the first five years. • After a great deal of publicity, a deportation order from the Com monwealth Immigration Department and several days in hiding, Nancy Prasad, a five-year-old Fijian-born Indian girl, was still in Australia at the end of April, pending a court hearing.

Nancy, who was sick at the time, was allowed to stay in Sydney with relatives last November, when her parents, Mr. and Mrs. Shri Prasad, and four of their other children re turned to Fiji from a stay in Aus tralia on the expiry of their tourist visas.

Nancy’s relatives did not send her home when she recovered, and have since resisted official attempts to compel them to do so. Their case has been given thousands of inches of space in Australian newspapers, and more obviously will come before their fight is resolved. • A bill to pave the way for the introduction into Fiji of pay-as-you earn income tax will come before Fiji’s Legislative Council in May. It is intended to introduce PAYE from January 1, 1965. • The British and French Resi dent Commissioners in the New Hebrides, Messrs. A. M. Wilkie and M. Delauney, made a joint inspection in March of a property at Lakatoro, Malekula, which is being bought as

a British District Agency for Central District No. 2. Part of the property will also be used as an agricultural station.

Messrs. Wilkie and Delauney later visited the island of Paama to in spect damage caused by fall-out of volcanic ash from the recent and frequent eruptions of Lopevi, the island-volcano three miles to east ward. They found coconut planta tions, gardens and houses had all suffered, and that a thick carpet of ash was everywhere.

The Condominium Government is arranging for seeds to be taken to Paama to re-establish ruined gardens. • The number of automobiles in Tahiti reached 6,000 in April, and at the present rate of increase, the is land will have 10,000 by 1966. The figure for 1963 was 5,041, and for 1962, 4,226.

9 There will be no official Fiji representation at the Olympic Games at Tokyo in October. Instead, the Colony will concentrate on preparing for the Commonwealth Games to be held at Jamaica in 1966, and the second South Pacific Games at Noumea, also in 1966. An official of the Fiji Amateur Sports Associa tion said the Olympics were out for Fiji because of cost, and because there were no Fiji athletes of Olympic class. And Fiji would need “an especi ally strong team” for Noumea to de fend the dominant position the Colony attained at the First South Pacific Games in Suva last September. 9 Niue, the isolated New Zealand dependency between Tonga and the Cook Islands, may get an airfield soon. Two New Zealand Government engineers, Mr. W. J. Smith, of the Civil Aviation Department, and Mr.

N. A. R. McCulloch, of the Ministry of Works, left for Niue via Tonga in April to survey the possibility of building an airfield. In Tonga, they were to join HMNZS Royalist, which was taking the NZ Governor-General, Sir Bernard Fergusson, on a Pacific cruise.

If an airfield were built at Niue, it would mean that the DC3 aircraft of Polynesian Airlines Ltd., which oper ates between Western Samoa and the Cook Islands, could carry twice as many passengers on that service by landing at Niue to refuel.

The PAL aircraft is now limited to 12 passengers because it has to carry enough fuel to fly non-stop between Aitutaki and Samoa, some 800 miles. • Plans are going ahead to move several hundred natives of the Kil inalau (Carteret) Islands to either Bougainvile or Buka because their land is becoming overcrowded and food is becoming short. The Kil inalau Islands are about 43 miles north-east of Buka. Present popula tion is about 720. • Dr. Richard Shutler, the American archaeologist who is work ing on Tanna, dug up two human skeletons recently which he says are the first to be discovered in Melanesia on an archaeological site.

In a cave near Bethel Village he has also found fragments of stone tools.

Dr. Shutler has already received dates of more than 400 years ago for some material from Aneityum, sent to the US for dating.

O Prince Radziwill, head of a European banking organisation, which has bought all interests in the King fisher Hotel on Norfolk Island, will visit Norfolk Island on his next visit to Australia —probably in June. He will be accompanied by Princess Radziwill.

HAPPY REUNION: Two islanders, Mrs.

Bonita Rounds, of Suva (centre), and Mrs.

Olga Page, of Apia (right), had a happy reunion after many years at the club rooms of the Polynesian Association, Sydney, recently. With them are Mrs.

Round's son John and wife Barbara, and Mr. Tom Rounds, also of Fiji.- Tele-Photos.

• An Australian educationist, Mr.

M. Yaxley, expressed doubts on whether Western Samoa’s education system was sufficiently orientated to the needs of the country when he lectured at Apia’s Nelson Memorial Library in April. • Fiji’s new Governor, Sir Derek Jake way, has been named Senior Commissioner for the United Kingdom on the South Pacific Com mission. He is expected to go to Noumea in October for the next SPC session. • Violent earth tremors were felt in Vila, New Hebrides, on the night of April 4, and early next morning.

Walls swayed and the sound of build ings moving was heard. A Vila message says that shocks estimated to be about force three and force four on the Mercalli Scale were re corded for 22 minutes. • Construction of a £500,000 deep-water wharf at Nukualofa, Tonga, is about to begin, according to Mr. J. A. Williams, of the en gineering firm of Wilton and Bell, which is supervising the project. Mr.

Williams was in Vila, New Hebrides, in April. His firm is also advising on wharf proposals for that port. • The Commonwealth Works Department will call tenders for seven big architectural and engineering pro jects in Papua-New Guinea in the next two or three months. The pro jects are: A wharf at Madang big enough for overseas ships on the regular P-NG run; 20 miles of road, plus a bridge over the Gogol River,

between Madang and Mawan; a teachers’ college at Goroka; police training depot at Bomana, Port Moresby; a two-storey Supreme Court in Port Moresby; a two-storey court house in Rabaul; and a residential high school at Keravat. • The Secretary-General of the South Pacific Commission, Mr. W. D.

Forsyth, was due to leave Noumea on an official visit to the Cook Islands on April 22. One purpose of his visit was to be present at an SPC training course for islanders in Rarotonga on “Incentives of Economic Development” from April 18 to May 8.

En route to the Cooks, Mr.

Forsyth was to stop off in Apia for talks on the UN-SPC rhinoceros beetle project; and on the way back to Noumea, he will visit Suva. He is due back in Noumea on May 11. • Patrol Officer J. S. Hicks, of P-NG’s Southern Highlands District, has reported an outcrop of inflam mable rock near the junction of the Lai and Mendi Rivers, Mr. Hicks saw the outcrop while on patrol in the Southern Highlands in an area where most of the rocks are weathered limestone.

He says the inflammable rock appears to be a type of shale, and in various sections of this there are small fissures which give off sulphur fumes. These fumes apparently permeate the surrounding rock which can then be ignited by a small flame.

The rock then bums with a blue light and when disturbed blazes vigorously.

Villagers told Mr. Hicks that on occasions in the past the whole mountainside had been alight. • An association of more than half a century with the South Pacific was severed in April with the departure from Suva of Dr, Alex Frater. The son of a Church of Scotland missionary, he spent part

of his childhood in the New Hebrides and returned there as a medical missionary after graduating in medicine at Melbourne University.

Dr. Prater was later appointed Principal of the Central Medical School at Suva—now the Fiji School of Medicine. He relinquished this appointment to open a private practice in Suva. Dr. and Mrs.

Prater, after a visit to London, will settle in New Zealand. • Pineapples from the Cook Islands may reach New Zealand con sumers later this year, according to Mr. H. E. Radley, a director of Fruit Distributors, Limited, who visited the Cook Islands on behalf of the com pany recently.

He said growers on Mangaia ap peared enthusiastic, following advice given them by a Queensland pine apple-growing expert. Great efforts were being made to grow the popular smooth cayenne variety.

First Of The Many

The entire population of Tonga is cur rently being vaccinated against smallpox by the US Public Health Service. The work started on April 1 when a team of five began vaccinations in Nukualofa with a new jet injector immunisation gun —a hydraulic powered instrument which in jects vaccine into the skin under high pressure without a needle.

Photo: Tulua Brothers.

Wedding In

Rabaul

Mr. Kenneth Pen rose and Mrs. Anna Kaese were married at the District Regis trar's Office recently by the District Com missioner, Mr. J.

Foldi. Mr. George Kassi was best man, with Mrs. Julie raus, matron of honour.

Photo: C. H. Meen.