Up Front

with the Editor

Despite some apparent indications to the contrary by a number of speakers at the South Pacific Conference is Noumea in October, tourism is accepted as a necessary evil in the islands of the South Pacific.

Those who are most vocal in warn ing of its dangers are often those who haven’t yet managed to participate fully in its financial benefits.

When they do they will be as anxious as anybody else to supply the visitor with what he wants, or what they hope he wants, and encourage him to come back. The Islander’s innate sense of hospitality will see to that.

But New Caledonia is in a separate position. This French territory has managed to build up tourism a respectable degree without either the government or the local people be coming closely involved. Or wanting to.

I was in Noumea in October on my first visit for some years. In the intervening period I had listened to report after report from returning travellers with cries of “the French don’t care about tourists”, and “they’re pricing themselves out of the business with high charges and poor service”.

The Matson ships had meanwhile stopped calling at Noumea, and the :rews of others were warning cruise sassengers not to expect a warm welcome in Noumea, but to “save jp your money for Suva”.

I noticed before I left Sydney that dsitor figures for 1969 were down )n those for the same period last tear, which seemed ominous.

After having spent a week in Noumea —and a pleasant week, too, )e it noted—l am ready to predict hat visitors will continue to lose nterest in Noumea unless Noumea, is a whole, makes more effort to ittract them. And I am not sure Noumea will be bothered making the ;ffort.

New Caledonian tourism is the esult of the efforts mainly of the lotels, the shipping and airline com

panics and the travel agencies. There is a government-sponsored tourist bureau, with an inadequate budget.

The travel business works hard at it overseas, where the customers are, and attracts the customers to Noumea.

Then Noumea lets them down.

Noumea is busy with its own affairs and can’t trouble about tourists.

There is a booming nickel economy and much greater riches to come.

Labour is so short that European migrants are being encouraged to work there. Wages are high, and so are food and liquor prices. Most food has to be imported.

Greener Fiji

The hotels continually struggle to provide competent staff, and what they do acquire is high-priced, which helps push up the hotel tariffs. The customers complain about the service and the tariffs, and wonder out loud whether they wouldn’t be better off in Fiji, where the local people are supposed to be friendlier.

One can’t help being sorry for the Noumea hoteliers, even if one does suspect that their prices don’t have to be as astronomical as they are in the dining room and the bar. They’ve got their troubles, and the situation in Noumea is not their doing.

For it’s Noumea which is the problem. Noumea is not New Cale donia, but such is the geography of the island that it might just as well be, for most visitors.

There are areas and islands outside of Noumea without the prosperity of the nickel that would appreciate visitors, not only for their money, but it will take more support from the government to establish them than the government is giving. Or willing to give.

For I don’t believe that the New Caledonian administration is interest

ed in developing tourism. Like the people of Noumea, the government is otherwise occupied.

I believe that it is conscious of having an economy that will expand and expand in the next two or three years without a tourist having to set foot in the country. Nickel is big and getting bigger, and as it grows with the new exploitations that are planned, there will be new social and political problems to deal with, and the government knows it.

The hotels, the airlines, the travel people are going to have even a harder time to convince the govern ment that tourism has its value too.

And a hard time to kill the apathy of the average Noumean towards the tourist industry.

But I do sincerely wish them luck.

THE awful deathroll in the New Guinea Highlands from the influenza epidemic, which is mounting as I write this, will bring some bitter memories to many older people in Western Samoa.

Samoa had its time of tragedy 50 years ago, and history was altered by it.

It was in November, 1918, a few days before the World War I Armistice, when the ship Talune reached Apia from Auckland with some passengers suffering from pneumonic influenza. Samoa, taken from the Germans, was still under NZ military administration, and nothing was done to quarantine the ship, despite the fact that this pre caution had been taken at both her Fiji ports.

Flu ran unchecked through the population, then totalling 38,000.

That November and December, 7,542 people died from it. This figure re presented a little under 20 per cent, of the population.

The epidemic continued into early 1919, and the total deaths were 8,500, or 22 per cent, of the Samoan popu lation.

Thirty years later, a UN population report said that that Samoan epidemic of 1918 “ranks as one of the most disastrous epidemics anywhere in the world during the present century, as far as the proportion of deaths to the population is concerned”.

Professor Jim Davidson, of the Australian National University, in his modern Samoan history, Samoa mo Samoa, points out that deaths in New Zealand from the same epidemic totalled 5,471, or less than 0.5 per cent, of the population, and that NZ war dead in World War I were 16,000 to 17,000 —or 1.5 per cent, of the population, spread over a period of

four years. But the Samoan death roll from flu was 10 times heavier than these combined deaths in pro portion to population, and it was suf fered in a period of only a few weeks.

In Apia, the newspaper ceased publication for a fortnight (the editor was among the dead). When it started again, the obituary notices inserted by the local people were appalling witness to personal tragedy.

O. F. Nelson, leading trader, lost his mother, only brother and his brother’s wife, and one of his two sisters. Toleafoa Lagolago, a politi cian, lost his mother, brother, two of his sisters and a nephew. S. H.

Meredith, another merchant, lost seven close relatives.

Of the members of the Fono of Faipule, the Samoan advisory council, 24 died, seven survived.

The New Zealand government at home appointed a Commission of Inquiry, which brought to light a story of administrative confusion, delay and folly, as well as many acts of courage and energy.

The administration of the military commander in Samoa was brought to an end by the epidemic.

Nobody knows to this day what effect the influenza deaths had on Samoa’s search for a national identity, but Jim Davidson has recorded that even in recent times the epidemic has been cited to him by older Samoans as a wrong done to Samoa by New Zealand.

He believes that the epidemic, while weakening the forces of an older traditionalism because of the deaths of many elders, also provided the people with anew reason for resentment of the administering authority, and resentment is a classic base of nationalism.

Stuart Inder