NEW CALEDONIA.

Dunstan Times, Issue 3381, 4 July 1927, Page 7

NEW CALEDONIA.

RICH, BUT UNDEVELOPED

(By Jean Schoen.) “Ah, Madame, it is indeed a pity,” complained the warden at He Nou, all that is left of France’s huge penal settlement in New Caledonia. “It is over two years since they borrowed our guillotine, and they have completely forgotten to return it; but,” he added, a note of resignation creeping into his voice, “that, Madame, is Noumea. ’ The principal port of France’s largest Pacific colony, you see, even in its immediate environs, enjoys an unenviable reputation. Here it was that the old barque had dropped anchor after her farewell voyage of sixty-two days—New Caledonia at last, a faroff laud that apprehensive friends in the States had peopled with cannibals and catastrophe, and from which I am sure they never expected the “lady midshipmen” of the Bougainville to re* turn intact. Consequently, we were not quite prepared for the prosaic atmosphere of the place when we stepped ashore Like most French colonial towns, Noumea has an unwashed, unkempt appearance: a criss-cross of glaring streets under the hot sun, a few straggly trees, 'here a colorful splash of flamboyants, double rows of low, iron-roofed houses, loitering natives, the shrill, tinny blare of French automobile horns. And all along the streets, through the shop doors, in the house windows, the curious, staring, unfriendly faces. Over the town, too, hovers an indefinable air of dejection, as if, as one writer has expressed it, the steady daily cursing of ten thousand men had cast a blight upon the place—a blight that will not be lifted until the last of the tattered figures on tho benches of the “Place” have faded into the past. Grim reminders of a penal system which paralleled in its brutality the convict settlements at Norfolk and Port Arthur, these old “Liberes” sit with folded hands and hopeless eyes looking into a future that can offer no greater mercy than death. With the abolishment of the convict transportation, the supply of free food and clothing was cut off and the unfortunate ex-convict, usually old and often sick, was thrown upon his own resources in a country which has consistently offered him little help to gain a livelihood or his selfrespect. —Shabby and Squalid'. — lb is a pity that the traveller must approach this really lovely land through tlie shabby and squalid depression or Noumea. ‘Still, it has its lighter side. It is typical of the enterprise of the City Fathers that they put in a water svstem of condemned pipes because they could be purchased, cheap. It is also typical, now that the mains break about once a fortnight and the sewage seeps in to contaminate an otherwise pure supply of water, that nothing has been done about it except to devise a signal code whereby tho town may be warned from the weather semaphore when a fresh break has occurred and the water will be turned off until repairs are effected —sometimes a matter of several days. It is also typical of the city’s administration that all kanakas must be within doors after 3 at night to ensure the physical welfare of white inhabitants, but the ixisanitary practice of diluting milk and delivering it in empty unsterilised wine bottles is looked! upon in the light of a necessary evil.

Nor is the business world immune. Imagine the consternation when a Government employee rushed in to the representative of a British firm with a message supposed 1 to have been dispatched 48 hours before, saying indignantly, after two days’ steady research. “Monsieur, you will have to pay double for this cable. You have devised a secret code!’’ Let me add, however, that it is not often you can steal a march on the unofficial information bureau at the Post and Telegraph. —Harbor to Hold a Navy. — But for all the red tape and petty graft, Noumea is a busy commercial centre of 10,000 population. With a deep harbor big enough to shelter a whole navy, it is the natural outlet of the immense resources of “Caledonio. ’ Owing to the present status of French finances, however, neither the moneyed interests in New Caledonia nor the debt-riddlen Government has been able to do much in the way of harbor improvements. There is no dry-dock; ships must go to Sydney to be overhauled. There is but one real wharf. along it ships often lie two deep, and then perhaps for two or three weeks it will remain practically deserted. The whole town, yellow, brown and white, turns out in its best togs for the arrival and departure of mail boats: woolly-headed kanakas in singlets of gorgeous hue, their faces smeared with gaudy daubs of paint; petite Javanese in picturesque sarongs; the usual excited gesticulation of French conversation; bicycles,’ baby-carriages and what not; swarms of dogs getting under everyone’s feet; and unheeded among the callous, laughing crowd, the bent figures of old “Liberes” threading their way along the wharf to pick up stray bits of coal that have been dropped in bunkering the ship. About the most genial people in Noumea are the police. They never seem to worry much how things are going, and if they do, they’re so polite about it that one doesn’t mind going to gaol. As for traffic cops, they simply don’t exist. Although the streets are full of vehicles of all kinds —autos, carts, the flock of bicycles that sweeps everything before it as the commuters go home down the one thoroughfare, and the old fish lady who drives a goat —there seems to be nothing in the way of traffic regulations, except for a general impression that traffic ought to go to the right. But every automobile in Noumea carries its plaque of Saint Christophe against accidents.