IMPROVED CONDITIONS

Dominion, Volume 36, Issue 309, 24 September 1943, Page 7

IMPROVED CONDITIONS

Camps In New Caledonia (Official War Correspondent. N.Z.E.F.) NEW CALEDONIA. Those who can look back on more than half a year in New Caledonia never cease to wonder at the transformation in living conditions at all the New Zealand camps. Where once the sole evidence of army habitation amid acres of gaunt trees was an array of tents with muddy log-strewn approaches and the smoke from a rough cookhouse, now the lay-out is systematic, the felled trees cleared and used as firewood, the dilapidated cookhouses replaced by clean, concrete-floored structures.

The New Zealanders are well prepared to meet the coming summer. They have improved their camp roads and tracks with load on load of shingle, dug two feet deep trenches round their tents, anil walled up the sides, with bamboo, coconut: leaf matting, or the thick, soft, pulpy niaouli bark. The bure-type building they had learned to fashion in Fiji has been adapted to New Caledonian style with niaouli bark, grass thatching, or woven coconut leaves. Bure walls normally stand about live feet high, with a gap of two or three feet to a widecaved and steeply gabled thatched roof. The buildings can be made of any size. They are found in any New Zealand camp on the island.

Thanks to the efforts of the people of the Dominion, through the National Patriotic Fund Board, the men have an increasing number of recreational facilities with which to fill their leisure hours, they build their own tables and chairs but most messrooms now have dartboards, chess and checker sets, radios, playing cards, table tennis, and quoit games. Outdoor sporting gear is arriving in good quantity. This is winter—the dry season of the tropics—when temperatures in New Caledonia hover around 55 to 60 degrees by breakfast: lime and may rise to .80 degrees at midday. Nights are chilly in the hills, but on the average the winter is well-nigh, asdact.—