Up Front

with the Editor

Robert Hunter is, I think, a fellow to observe in these South Seas. In two years he has grown considerably in stature and financial resources, and there is every indication that over the next two he’ll grow even bigger.

It’s too early yet to describe him as another American farm boy who made a million, but that might be the way his story comes out.

Bob Hunter is now 34. He was raised at Shelton, near Seattle, where his folks ran a thousand head of cattle and 200 dairy cows, and where young Hunter got up at 4 a.m. to do the milking. He liked life on the land, and he liked land itself. When you had a dollar, Hunter decided at an early age, you should buy some land with it.

I met him for the first time in 1967, in Nukualofa, where we shared for a week a tight little room in Bella Reichelmann’s joyously over crowded guesthouse while King Taufa’ahau’s coronation was enacted.

It was a busy week, but Bob Hunter’s noisy high spirits and jackass laugh added to the fun. I have had many less-amiable room-mates.

Hunter was in Tonga because he felt that among the thousands of visitors who flooded into Nukualofa for the festivities he might find leads to South Pacific islands for sale.

The Island Specialist

Back in Seattle he had established himself as a business broker who specialised in buying and selling islands anywhere in the world—he was an “Island Specialist”, his busi ness card said. He had been buying small islands in New Zealand for American clients and he was now interested in South Pacific pos sibilities.

As real estate, he said he believed the South Pacific to be undervalued.

Land values tended to be judged by copra returns, but good land—with a beach and an anchorage—could, he was convinced, fetch premium prices in a few years from Americans look ing for vacation spots.

There were many American businessmen ready to own a South Pacific plantation, and to live on it for a month or two every year for the heck of it. And watch his land improve in value.

“Believe me, Stoo’it, old feller!

The South Pacific’s gonna be real surprised about land values a few years from now!” That was Robert Hunter talking in Nukualofa in 1967.

He soon began flying between Seattle and the South Seas as regu larly as an airline steward, buying land for the clients back home. His main interest centred on Fiji, where he bought two tracts, each of 150 acres, on Vanua Levu, followed by 1,300 acres on the island of Koro, and 500 acres at Raki Raki.

He established in Fiji a company called Plantation Management Ltd., able to work anywhere in the South Seas, and aimed at managing and improving plantations for clients, using more efficient methods.

Things got to look so hopeful that Bob decided to permanently base himself in Fiji, and even acquired a fiancee locally—the lovely Annette Lepper, a former Miss Hibiscus, whom he plans to marry in Aueust.

Because Bob Hunter is a dedicated wheeler-dealer, not usually found at

social gatherings, he is not widely known even in business circles—but he got his name into the newspapers in February with his unexpected purchase for $F340,000 of Fiji’s historic Wakaya Island, 2,100 acres.

There was a court action to stop the deal going through, but the action failed.

He now seems to have the bit between his teeth. In June he pur chased—sight unseen —the Hervey Islands, in the Cooks, for SNZI4O,OOO. He currently has his eye on about 175,000 acres of SNFH “wild land” holdings in the New Hebrides, which is an enterprise that might well be fraught with difficulty in view of some recent developments there (see p. 23), but this doesn’t deter Hunter.

He’s bent on acquiring the Fiji based airline, Air Pacific Ltd., and expects to be the biggest shareholder by the end of the year. From July 1 he becomes the company’s general manager, and he has hopes of adding a helicopter to the airline’s small fleet and to really get stuck into charter work and aerial photography.

Whither?

His respect for land thus seems to be leading him in some unexpected directions. But Hunter says that land will be the basis of his fortunes.

He aims to buy up the choicest plantations in the South Pacific.

His acquisitions, acquired and yet to be acquired, will be developed in different ways. Some may be split into residential blocks, each with its own beach and moorings, others may be operated as plantations.

Wakaya could become a tourist resort, a private vacation retreat, or be cut into blocks. He is getting a Honolulu firm to give him pro fessional advice on how best to develop the island. Hunter will know more about the Herveys after he has looked at them from the air in early July. They may make a vacation snot for Americans.

The Herveys currently produce about 200 tons of copra a year and have a 30-year lease left to run.

Bob Hunter, the farm boy, has his own money in nearly all of these deals, but the greater part of the finance is being supplied by perhaps 20 well-heeled clients back in the States.

They’ve taken Hunter’s word for it that the South Pacific is under valued, and he seems to be well on the way to proving himself rieht.

Anyway he is, I suggest, a fellow to observe in these changing South Seas,

Stuart Inder