Eternal Spring'

New Caledonia 'Isle of Eternal Spring'

Noumea bookstores have just released a new volume of colour

plates, Nouvelle-Caledonie, He

de VEternel Printemps (isle of

eternal spring).

It’s printed in Japan by French publishers in collaboration with the Caledonian Office du Tourisme, and its 128 pages provide an extensive portrait of the territory and its in habitants, from the smelters at the Societe Le Nickel to the stockmen, punt drivers and fishermen of the coast and inland.

The old French colonial buildings are there, beside the bustling new constructions of bayside Noumea.

Watch especially for the fascinating faces—the Melanesian, Polynesian and Indonesian, besides those who have come out to settle from France or old French colonies in Indochina, Africa, and the Caribbean.

The text in French and English says of these faces: “The history of New Caledonia can be read on the faces of the people. The present variety of human types keeps the memory of past migrations. Euro peans came in the middle of the 19th century to join the Melanesian natives.

“Wanting to settle there, they were reinforced in 1863 by the establish ment on Caledonian soil of a girls’ middle school trasferred from France to assure the continuation of the French ethnic presence in the Pacific.”—Gß.

(Nouvelle Caledonie “Ile De

L’ETERNEL PRINTEMPS”, published by Editions Delroisse, Paris. 500CFP). • Worthwhile literature on An tarctica has been further added to by The Year of the Quiet Sun, a personal impression of a year with a NZ wintering party at Scott Base in 1964-65. It’s written by party leader Adrian Hayter, NZ school teacher already known for his story of a single-handed yacht voyage from England to NZ, Shiela in the Wind.

His personal comments on Antarctic life are intelligent, revealing and valuable, capturing, as they do, routines that are already changing as the Antarctic becomes less of a preserve for the select few. Hodder & Stoughton, 54.25. —RCI.