Australian Author Says

There's Serious Political Trouble Ahead In Tahiti, Australian Author Says

By a Staff Writer

The exploitation of tourism on the principle that all tourists are millionaires, the swamping of the island with dis placed fonctionnaires, troops and atom scientists, and the decline of the old-fashioned copra, vanilla, sugar and phosphate industries could eventually cause serious political trouble in Tahiti, according to Australian author George Farwell.

i LL these factors, Farwell says, 1. are pushing up the cost of living i the point where most Tahitians are ;coming virtual beggars in their vn country. Meanwhile, they are owing increasingly resentful of the owing number of Europeans who e prospering while they struggle.

Farwell says this in Last Days in iradise, his tenth book, which was iblished by Rigby Ltd., Adelaide, September at 35/- (Australian).

The book, a cross between a avelogue and a sociological treatise, the result of a two-month stay in ahiti in mid-1962, during which arwell (and his wife) courted the >mpany of Tahitians and avoided at of other Europeans as much as jssible.

As Farwell sees it, Tahiti has gone the pack since the jet airport was aened at Faaa in 1960 to bring in urists; and hotel promoters, several : whom dominate the local Terri rial Assembly, set about emulating onolulu in their methods of ablicity and high tariffs.

Mat Hatters “Intelligently run, tourism could /en benefit the island people, bring ig in more money,” says Farwell, mt that is not happening now. It like a tea-party for mad hatters, veryone seems to be handed a new late except the Tahitians.

“The cost of living has risen armingly; more than 500 per mt., according to official figures. has been made worse by the ahitian’s own form of madness.

“When he finds that a popaa hotel ill pay 300 or 400 francs for one onito, or 100 for a 40 franc packet f fish, he charges his own people le same price.

“This inflation has now made it Imost impossible for people of ormal means to visit the island. It as why we found it so difficult to

find anywhere to live. Yet we could drive through half a dozen districts and see bungalows to let.”

Farwell says he was told that rents were reasonable enough until an American film company arrived in 1960 to make a new version of Mutiny on the Bounty. Bungalow owners raised their rents from 1,000 to 2,000 francs (£5 to £10) a month to 25,000 or even 30,000 francs (£125 to £150) a month.

“Promoters seemed to give up the idea of attracting people to Tahiti for any length of time,” says Farwell.

“Instead they were merely inducing them to break their journeys to other places, especially by air. The policy was to soak them quick and send them on their way.”

Farwell says Tahiti’s troubles cannot be wholly blamed on the French Government as this “no longer has all the say”.

Part of the blame is due to the popularly-elected Territorial As sembly which was set up after World War II “to appease strong demands for independence”.

The 32 members, Farwell says, were quick to follow the pattern of politicians in other lands—they voted themselves annual salaries at least twice as high as the highest paid Tahitians can earn in other fields.

Dominant Force Except for two radical interludes, the dominant force in the Assembly has been the demis (Tahiti-born people of mixed blood) “whose actions have done little more than further their own business interests” and whose policy has “remained identical with the French Administra tion’s”.

The only opposition has come from the popular party, the Rassemblement Democratique des Populations Tahitiennes (Democratic Party of the

Tahitian People), which “preferred to campaign for a complete break With France, backing it with a vague plan for social reform”.

Farwell goes on: “How much the French decision to foster a tourist trade was influenced by fear of this radical party is not clear. Certainly it was nervous of the growing clamour for independence. ‘The only solution seemed to be to produce more revenue, keeping the party’s mass supporters quiet. But the Republic was in a bad way.

With its empire crumbling, it was no longer in a position to finance Tahiti as it did before. . . .

“Paris suggested that its idle

daughter should earn her own keep.

We all know what happens to beautiful girls who can make a liv ing no other way. And so to tourism.”

About tourism, Farwell says: “It is dangerous to run an economy exclusively for foreigners, and, as in Tahiti, to neglect social needs.

The Tahitian has too much pride, too little subservience to accept the patronising airs of tourists. Once his living standards become really depressed, he may react violently, in the sudden, passionate, unthinking way of the Polynesian.

“Already some old hands talk of

leaving. One said to me, ‘Tahiti is an extinct volcano. But it may blow up in another way. If so, I just don’t want to be here. They won’t distinguish between their enemies and friends.’ ”

Farwell says that bitter feelings between the demis and the members of the RDPT (whose leader, Pouvanaa a Oopa, is now in exile m France) have led to several out bursts of violence in Tahiti since 1959.

During the elections in 1962, he says, he saw an RDPT leader knocked down and stoned by the hefty bodyguards of a demi politician after the RDPT man had asked the demi if he had paid a million francs to have Pouvanaa exiled.

“It was an ugly scene,” Farwell says, “all too reminiscent of Hitlerism in its early years.”

Farwell says there is also bitterness between Tahitians and the ever

increasing popaa.

“The old tolerance of the popaa (white man) is vanishing,” he says, and he quotes an old resident as say ing that signs of racial hatred are developing “especially in places like Punaauia, [a popular residential dis trict for foreigners] where the popaa sometimes looks offensively rich.”

Bitterness Another cause of racial bitter ness is that imported Frenchmen commonly refer to the non-colour conscious Tahitians as pieds noirs (black feet), an offensive term stemming from North Africa, where the Algerians particularly resented it before they ended French rule.

Farwell goes on; “Professor Parkinson is not a name the Tahitians know, but they are becoming aware of his famous law. [ln the mid thirties] a hundred Government servants had been sufficient to keep life flowing in French Polynesia.

These have grown to well above a thousand. Regulations, petty laws, documents in triplicate frustrate the smallest action, “ ‘What else are we to do with our fonctionnaires,’ the French say with their usual expressive shrug. ‘We have lost Algeria, so they must go somewhere else.’

“But the Tahitians feel they can fill these posts as well. Instead French officials are imported at three times the salaries paid to islanders doing the same work.

“Sixty or 70 pounds a week for a superior clerk is a generous wage, but it plays havoc with local prices.”