Cook Is
p. 51 · Read in the full issue
Atoll Up
For Sale
The Cook Islands’ big com mercial copra plantation, the
1,500-acre Hervey Isknds atoll
is up for sale.
Owned by the Cook Islands Co operative Bank Ltd., the Hervey Islands atoll is a closed lagoon 160 miles north of the territory’s capital, Rarotonga.
There are two islands—Manuae, 530 acres, and Te Au O Tu, 990 acres—and neither rises to much more than 15 ft above sea level.
Owned by the bank for several years—following a dispute over their ownership with Islanders of nearby Aitutaki—the islands are currently on a 99-year lease which will expire in 1999.
Getting away from it all
The bank is now hoping to interest someone who “wants to get away from it all”, or overseas investors contemplating a tourist resort in the territory when it goes jetset in the early 1970’s with an international airstrip at Rarotonga.
No price has been mentioned, but in recent years the atoll has produced between 100 and 200 tons of copra a year. As copra prices recently have been very good in the Cooks it is not likely to go for a song.
A Mr. Lazara, a Canadian with business interests in Fiji, has already had a look at the atoll. He made a special flying trip in early March on an Air Tahiti Aztec aircraft out of Rarotonga with Mr. David Murray, registrar of the bank.
Mr. Murray said in January that the atoll’s plantation was worked by 20 Cook Islanders. Four hundred acres of coconuts had been replanted in recent years and fertiliser had been applied to “part” of the plantation.
Equipment included a deep freeze, tractor, transceiver, copra drier, buildings, workboats and tools. The buildings were the manager’s home, workshops, workers’ quarters, a copra shed and a shop.
“Hervey may lend itself admirably to development as an island tourist resort,” Mr. Murray said. “It may interest bankers, insurers, tourist resort developers, industrialists and generally those who have funds for investment”.