Hebrides
pp. 66-68 · Read in the full issue
Not Wanted
In The New
PIM in January received the fol lowing letter from an American now living in Sydney. It tells of his plans to start a new life in the New Hebrides, as a visitor with a business interest. He didn’t make it. He has some pertinent comment on Islands attitudes to visitors.
Dear Mr. Editor: Apparently this will be one of the few letters you have received that is not from an Islander, unless you con sider Australia or America an island.
We would have been Islanders by this time, except for some unusual laws written by the Joint Administration of the New Hebrides.
My wife and I, with our two girls, ages 2i and 6, bought two half-acre blocks of Gene Peacock’s Palikula Village, about four miles from the town of Luganville on Espiritu Santo.
We were on holiday in Hawaii in March, 1971, paid the deposit to Peacock’s Amalgamated Land In corporated and started the monthly payments. We all were excited about starting our new life with only 12,000 Melanesians and a little over 1,000 “Europeans” on that enormous island.
I sold my business in California for about 20 per cent, of its worth, we liquidated all of our holdings including an Avocado Ranch near San Diego at a sacrifice and we banked our monies until I could visit the New Hebrides with Peacock’s first tour group of owners in June, 1971.
Leaving my family behind for eight weeks, I joined 31 other new land buyers, all through Amalgamated Land Inc. in Honolulu, to see for the first time what we had bought.
On arriving in Port Vila, the capital city, we quickly met some very warm and friendly French people in the administration. Later in Santo, in Peacock’s Lokalee Beach Hotel, we met more friendly Frenchmen and British Government people. The whole atmosphere was so pleasant that I took an eight hour hike through the “bush” from Lokalee Beach to the St. Thomas and St.
Philips Bay (Big Bay) with a hill tribesman. Sure, I had read of the Na-Griamel movement in PIM and all about Jimmy (Chief Moses) Stephens. I even came out on to Big Bay in a village which was a “hot bed” for the Na-Griamel, which
(continued on p. 64)
amounted to running their flag up a pole at daybreak and tak* ig it down at dusk. I photographed the whole ceremony by the oldest son of the chief of that village.
I went back to Vila for several days, on to Sydney for two weeks, and then back to Vila for several more days. What I found was the “delight” of an engineer-turned manufacturer’s heart: a project in which I could earn my way in “my new found homeland”. There was, and is, an extreme shortage of hous ing throughout the New Hebrides.
So profound is this need that both London and Paris put up S 4 million to sponsor “low-cost” homes.
I tried my ideas to solve these
shortages on the locals, the French and British Government people, my fellow tourist/landowners from Hawaii, and the ideas caught on.
I flew back to California to work out all of the details, get my family together and migrate to Vila, when we received copies of Joint Regula tions 16 and 17. I knew as soon as I read them that the paradise in the South Pacific was once again an illusion. [These regulations taxed land sub divisions and also imposed a ban on virtually all but the most necessary immigration].
We had already sent all of our money to Vila. We had started to form a New Hebridean company to
prefabricate the Melanesian-styled homes. We had arranged to use the native timber from the local New Hebridean company.
We had arranged for Melanesians to weave bamboo wall surfaces and produce native artforms for the prefab. We had a resident partner in Vila to help with the running of the company. In short, we were going to provide an industry which would have been beneficial for the New Hebrides as well as our financial backers.
Now that dream is over. There will be no new migrant residents who need homes.
We have read every issue of PIM since we bought land last March. We still read them avidly, even if now a little sadly. The one expression we are almost sure to find in every issue is similar to the last paragraph on “Signs that New Hebrides land rush is ending” (PIM, Jan., p. 39): The condominium chants the litany of every other Pacific territory: “Who wants another Honolulu?”
With the “rape of the land” that nickel has brought to New Caledonia (PIM, Jan., p. 34); the continued slump of the copra market (PIM.
Jan., p. 105); inflation which grips the “independent nations” (PIM, Jan., p. 24); the growing labour crisis (PIM, Jan., p. 32); and the false hopes about Tongan oil (PIM, Jan., p. 134), what is wrong with having a tourist industry?
In the words of the Director of Tourism who almost singlehandedly organised the rebuilding of the water front in Papeete, Tahiti, from a “slum” in 1964 (when I first visited there) into a beautiful welcome for visitors to the Games in 1971: “Tourists do not take anything away from the island, except a little sun on their skins, and do not bring any thing to the island, except their money which they freely leave behind.”
And that money, Mr. Editor, which costs the Islanders and the Islands nothing except a little patience, raises the standard of living of the Islanders. That has to be the prime goal of any humanitarian effort for the Islands.
“Who wants another Honolulu?”
When tourism in Hawaii fell 4 per cent, in August, 1971, and tourist space was overbuilt by 6 per cent., it threatened a statewide crisis. Why does everyone continue to knock Honolulu? Is it any worse than New York, London, Paris, Tokyo or Sydney?
Isn’t the problem really over population and affluence?
Respectfully yours,