More briefly

TONGA’S 50 years of friendship with Britain was celebrated in Nukualofa February 15-17, 1951. The Governor of Fiji was there for Britain.

CAPTAIN P. G. TAYLOR and his crew of three, in a Catalina flying-boat (Frigate Bird II) provided by the Australian Govern ment, reached Chile from Australia on March 27, 1951. The sur vey flight was via Noumea, Suva, West Samoa, Aitutaki, Papeete, Mangareva, Easter Island, and ending in Valparaiso in 13

days.

IN MID-1951, encouraged by the devastation caused by the erup tion of Mt Lamington, the Papua-New Guinea Administration announced that Rabaul would not be rebuilt as the HQ station for New Britain. A new site had been chosen about 20 miles away at Rapopo, near Kokopo. The new centre would be built ‘with all speed’. Of course it was not. Parts of Rabaul remained tropical slums until the move was officially called off seven years after the war.

NINETY Japanese were tried as war criminals at Manus between June 1950 and April 1951. Of these 32 were acquitted, 12 were hanged, and the rest imprisoned.

TOM NEALE and his tom cat were marooned by request on Suwarrow Island, Cook Islands, in September 1952. He later wrote a well-received book on his life of isolation on the atoll.

THE DEATH occurred in Suva on June 2, 1951, of Sir Maynard Hedstrom, co-founder of Morris Hedstrom Ltd, one of the big trading firms of Fiji and elsewhere. His founding partner, P. A.

Morris, had died in Sydney the previous year.

BY JUNE 1951 NZ watersiders had been on strike for three months and were to continue for another two. Union Co’s Matua had missed three trips to the Islands, which were now running out of supplies. Matua was in process of recruiting a volunteer crew.

IN JUNE, said PIM editorially in July 1951, ‘the P-NG Adminis tration paid no less than £8025 to the Kila Kila and Korobosea natives for 321 acres of land which is to be included in the district of Boroko, a new suburb of Port Moresby. In other words, the Administration paid the ridiculous price of $25 per acre for land in a muggy little valley tucked away in the hills at the back of PM when it is obvious that the only suitable place for European settlement there is the cool and accessible country close to the sea.’

IM MID-1951 Mr Harold Gatty established Fiji Airways as an internal air service for the colony despite the dire predictions of old-timers who remembered Guinea Airways’ efforts to do the same in the 19305, with float planes. This time, however, there were airfields at Nausori, Nadi and Lautoka, and strips at Labasa and Taveuni were soon built. The initial service was with de Havilland Rapide aircraft and the five-minute flip between Nadi and Lautoka at 12/6d became popular with local Indians trying flight for the first time. Within a year, however, Lautoka was abandoned.

JAMES NORMAN HALL, US novelist and co-author with Charles Nordhoff of Mutiny on the Bounty, died at his home on Tahiti on July 5, 1951. On July 11, Sir Albert Ellis, the man who first realised the worth of the phosphate on Ocean Island and Nauru, died in Auckland, NZ.

BY THE END of 1951 it had been decided to send a Fiji battalion to Malaya to fight terrorists. The decision produced considerable controversy in Fiji, and PIM asked editorially whether Malaya was sufficiently important to warrant it. The anti-terrorist cam paign there had already gone on for seven years. PIM did not doubt that there would be no difficulty in recruiting the necessary 1000 Fijians (nor was there), but asked whether it would not be better in the long term if they stayed home and gave more time to solving some of Fiji’s domestic problems. The Fijians who in

itially were to serve for two years ended up spending four in

Malaya.

SOMETIME in 1951 PIM said that tariff at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu was a frightening £3O a day. But it seemed that we had got our£’s and s’s mixed and an infuriated RH man ager wrote that the rates ranged from $lB-$2B single, and that included meals. In today’s terms they sound more like YMCA rates. But at the time we pointed out that our original paragraph was written more in sorrow than in anger there were few of us who would not like to see what things were like in Hawaii and beyond but, although planes shuttled back and forth like ex press trains, those in authority had decreed that hard currency $s and Stg. bloc£s should never be permitted to meet. There were ways around some of it, of course, by paying at the Sydney end.

Pan Am, apparently desperate for customers, advertised ‘Strato Clipper to London Double deck Strato Clippers fly direct from Sydney to San Francisco New York London. Superb food: complimentary champagne. No dollars needed fare payable in Australian £s.’ What’s more you could travel in a real private berth or a sleeperette which gave each passenger about six feet of room. Those were the days, before some idiot invented econ omy class, 10-in-a-row, 500 mph orbiting sardine cans. Fare in those days was about £265, Sydney-San Francisco.

THE DEATH occurred in Honolulu on December 1, 1951, of Sir Peter Buck (Te Rangi Hiroa). Son of an Irish father and a Maori mother, he had been director of the Bishop Museum in Honolulu since 1936 although always remaining a NZ citizen.

THE NEW HEBRIDES in 1952 was having its usual labour short age and this inspired one French planter to import 20 Italians as copra cutters. Their contracts were for three years and they were paid about £3O per month and all found. The experiment lasted weeks rather than years; contract or no contract the Italians left to take more highly paid jobs elsewhere.

IN APRIL 1952 Dr T. R. A. Davis, Chief Medical Officer in the Cook Islands, quit his job and with his wife and two young sons left on his 48-ft ketch for the USA where he was to take up a

post-graduate scholarship.

IT GAVE Fiji a laugh when some time after the Fiji hurricane of 1952 the Sydney Sun interviewed a woman traveller. The hur ricane had blown down most of the schools, she was reported to have said, and school was therefore being held in the breweries of which there were several in every small town. What the lady really said was that schools were being held in bures Fijian houses of native materials.

THE PARTNERSHIP of Bulolo Gold Dredging and the Aus tralian Government, set up to exploit the pine forests of Morobe, had been announced in 1949 by the then Territories Minister Eddie Ward but had gone into limbo with the change of Aus tralian Government. The plan was exhumed and dusted off in mid-1952 when Commonwealth New Guinea Timbers was formed, 51% Australian Government, 49% BGD owned. A ply mill was built at Bulolo and plans for systematic reafforestation made.

ALL VITI LEVU was interested in the making of the movie, His Majesty O’Keefe , with Burt Lancaster in the name role. Most of it was shot at Deuba but in July 1952 the old Customs house in Suva was temporarily turned into a 19th-century Hong Kong bank, with locals playing bit parts for one sequence of the film.

Western Samoa was also in the movie business in 1952 when one of James Michener’s stories from Return to Paradise was being filmed with Gary Cooper as the star.

ECONOMIC conditions were bad in American Samoa after the Navy pulled out in 1951 and in mid-1952 one batch of almost 1000 Samoans sailed from Pago Pago to Honolulu. The small amount of land in the American territory was unable to support the population which had increased from 6000 at the time the Navy set up its base in 1900 to 20 000 by the time the Navy left.

The 1952 exodus left 1000 behind who would be fitted into jobs in Guam, Hawaii and the US West Coast.