Telling De Gaulle

About Tahiti In No

Uncertain Terms

When President de Gaulle visited Tahiti in September, 1966, in the course of a week’s visit to France’s Pacific terri tories, he granted an audience to John Teariki, then French Polynesia’s deputy in the French

Parliament, who presented a

submission on the territory’s problems and views.

The submission must have been one of the most strongly-worded documents ever made to the French President by a citizen of a French territory.

In it, Teariki accused the French Government of deliberately exploiting the economic situation in French Polynesia so that the CEP (the organisation responsible for the nuclear testing programme at Mururoa Atoll) would become dominant.

“Likewise,” he said, “our crushing budgetary problems have been adroitly manipulated to increase the power of the State over the local administrative service, leading irresistibly towards the disappearance of our last territorial freedom.”

Teariki went on to say that most Polynesians did not wish to be separated from France, but they did wish that their relations with her might be “cleansed and regularised” by a revision of the territorial con stitution.

Victim of plot

He made no bones about the fact that, in his opinion, French Poly nesian’s former deputy, Pouvanaa a Oopa, who was imprisoned and exiled in 1958 after being convicted of arson, was a victim of a political plot.

And he wound up by bitterly denouncing the establishment of the nuclear testing project, without the Polynesians first being consulted, as an act which seriously endangered the health of the people and their descendants and constituted “a serious violation of the contract which binds us to France and of the rights which the Charter of the United Nations recognises we have”.

Whether President de Gaulle did anything more than grunt or hrrrrmph when he received Mr. Teariki’s submission has not, as yet, been vouchsafed to us. But a full summary of the submission itself has now been published in an interesting article by Professor Jim Davidson in the second volume of the Journal of Pacific History, which was issued late last year.

The Journal, which is produced by the Department of Pacific History, at the Australian National University, is an annual publication of some 240 pages dealing with the political, economic, religious and cultural history of the Pacific Islands, their archaeology, prehistory and ethno history, as well as contemporary government and political develop ment.

Other features

Besides Professor Davidson’s article, there is an article by David Stone on the Cook Islands’ view on the French nuclear tests. Other articles on current affairs include one on Tonga since the death of Queen Salote by a Tongan scholar, Dr.

Sione Latukefu, and others on the South Pacific’s new universities in Papua-New Guinea and Fiji.

Among the articles on historical subjects is a portrait of the Pacific Islands labour trade by Deryck Scarr; a discussion on linguistics and the prehistory of the South-Western Pacific by S. A. Wurm; a study of the NSW sealing industry from 1800 to 1821 by D. R. Hainsworth; and others on urban growth in Hawaii, politics at Atiu; and a strange out burst of religious hysteria at Onotoa Island in the Gilberts.

Other features in the Journal include reviews of Pacific books, notes on recently-discovered or recently-acquired manuscripts and papers of interest to Pacific his torians, etc., and a survey of the holdings of the Archives of Hawaii.

Copies of the Journal are obtain able from the Editors, The Journal of Pacific History . Australian National University, Box 4. P. 0., Canberra. ACT, Australia, at 5A3.50,

SNZ3. 30/- Stg. or SUS 4.-

RL.