PORT OF MACASSAR

Bay of Plenty Times, Volume LXVI, Issue 12332, 22 April 1938, Page 8 (Supplement)

PORT OF MACASSAR

The quayside, with its long god-

owns, that is to say, warehouses, extends for half a mile up and down the beach, for Macassar is the capital, metropolis and trade centre of the huge island of Holland’s Indies called Celebes. Several liners from far seas and distant home ports lie at the wharves—-English, American, and three or four Dutch. The harbour itself is half-full of Malay prahus and two-masted island trading schooners not unlike those of the South Pacific.

It is a busy place, this colourful port of the Orient seas. Back from the godowns is the waterfront business street, one of the most picturesque in all the tropical East. Chinese and Indian and Malay shops, Dutch mercantile and trading establishments line it on either side. Chinese cafes abound. The street is noted, too, for its bird market. Celebes is full of rich-plumaged, exotic winged creatures, chiefly a huge parrakeet easily tamed into a pleasing house-pet and requiring no cage. Along Macassar’s main street a hundred of them are screaming at once, and their staccato calls are echoed by a bewildering variety of other birds of every size and blend of col-

The clamour of a score of peoples, mandatory hoots of automobiles trying to edge a way through the throng in the street, cries of peddlers, pleat for patronage of Chinese shop-keep-ers, clatter of hooves of shaggy litt?. horses drawing diminutive gharries, screams of brown and yellow children,’the occasional shriek of a departing ship’s siren drowning it all, such is the Oriental blend that is the day-by-day life of the port of Macassar.