THE REAL FIJI

Taranaki Daily News, 25 July 1931, Page 13 (Supplement)

THE REAL FIJI

PALMS AND SUNNY SEAS

(By

“Juvenis.”)

Lautoka Hotel, June 18. When I arrived at the hotel last night at six o’clock Lautoka .seemed a town of bells. Church bells, cow bells and dinner bells rang all at once. Hotels all the world over it seems are the same. The same strange people with strange ways live in the Lautoka Hotel as in all the other hotels of the world. There is the young married couple, both billing and cooing when I came in last night. She was in the bathroom—she is always having baths —and he knocked at the door. "Can I come in, Doris, darling?” And she, very sweet and babyish, says, “Turn in, Toodles.” At night men from the township came in and sang Cockney songs round the bar, one singing second ‘‘somethink beautiful.” Lautoka is the centre of the Colonial Sugar Refining Company, known as the C.S.R. All businesses in Fiji are known by their initials. At Suva Brown and Joske are B. and J., Morris Hedstrom’s stores are M.H., and so on. Nobody at Suva knows much about this side of the island. It is owned body and soul, root and branch, by the C.S.R. They have an existence apart from all the other businesses. They are a complete community, socially and financially, and they live behind the veil. I feel already very inquisitive about them. I want to peep behind the veil, but I doubt if it will be possible. If ever letters of introduction would have been useful to me it would have been here.

People say that if the C.S.R. pulled out from here this part of Fiji would collapse. They own or lease the cane land on long terms and they let it out to Indian tenants on condition that they supply all their cane to the company. They say that the capital of the company is owned in Australia, and by influential men in England. I went through the mill this morning, a nightmare of physical energy. I saw the cane go in green, be crushed between massive rollers, the juice boiled and treated, and come out into sacks as brown, sticky sugar. The sacks were stacked, from floor 1 to ceiling, (50 feet high. The pulverised cane was used as fuel.

There arc no boarding-houses where I am going, and no hotels except at 'Singatoka, which is again 15 miles from a beach. Consequently there is some difficulty in getting accommodation. That is precisely where I have come up against the Sugar Company. The best beach is at Cuvu, and the only people there arc four company overseers. There is a rest house belonging to the company where those on leave bach. This morning I went round seeing company heads to try to- be allowed to stay there. I was treated very politely and was listened to with interest while I explained what I wanted. Then, at precisely the same place in each of the conversations, came precisely the same question: “Are you an officer of the company?” “No,” I replied, and each time had the unpleasant sensation of a door being shut and barred in my face. They, regretted that the rest-house was reserved for officers of tho company. If they allowed one outside person in others would want to come. Besides the proprietor of the Singatoka hotel would object and have something to say. It struck me that if a peer from England came to Lautoka they would ask: "Are you an officer of the company? No, Then, for all the interest we have in you, you can go to hell.” Of course, they wouldn’t say that but, boiled down and translated into action, that’s what it would mean.

The servants, or officers, of the company live quarantined in a little community on the hill. No one in Lautoka has a telephone but an officer of the company. The houses of the officers of the company have their own electric lighting system. The company has its own stores for purchases by officers of the company. And probably at their banquets the Royal toast is not “The King,” but “The Company, God Bless It.”: For the night and the day, the sun and the moon of this part of Fiji is The Company. Lautoka is a paradox. With the sea licking its boots so to speak, there is no place to swim except 15s away by taxi. To-morrow morning I catch a sugar train and go on to a place called M’geregere, where there is abeach.

M’geregere, June 22.

At last .1 have found the Fiji that I was beginning to think was merely a creation of my own mind. For a fortnight, while I was at Suva and crawling round the coast in the flatbottomed Andi the Cow, people had been trying to hoodwink me into believing that I was in Fiji. Towards the end I was on the point of giving in and saying, “Yes, how nice!” and making the best of a bad bargain. Suva was a modern port; Lautoka. was a sugar factory; M’geregere is Fiji. The company’s passenger train Tattled me 80 miles down the coast free of charge and dropped, me hot and dirty at M’geregere. I wandered up to the little white bungalow a short step up the hill and asked to be taken in. The saints, be blessed I was accepted and I knew my quest was over. From the verandah I look straight down the steep hillside on to the light blue water of the bay. Tall coconut palms fringe the shore and 50 yards out is a small coral island. In a- wide semi-circle the creamy reef is thrown around the mouth of the bay, and all day and all night the waves roai- as they smash themselves on it into foam. For a space inside the reef the water is lilac, but outside it is the deepest blue. Bright red and pink hibiscus flowers and brackets of gold flowers that they call God’s candles just etir in the breeze outside.

For three days the sun has shone down in a fierce glare, so hot that in the early afternoon I dare not venture out to swim. Each morning I slip down to the salt mouth of the river, sandy bottomed and safe from sharks, and swim and sun and exercise my foot. On the bank of the river in the grassy patch of coconut grove is a small Fijian village, with houses' of thatch and grass and bamboo. In the cool of the afternoon I change into swimming togs and wade up to my knees in salt water all over the reef. A channel, a, harbour for fish, runs between the island and the shore. To the right of the bay a long low point runs out towards the reef. In the afternoon the sun sets there in gold, and in the evening the moon hangs there above the palms and throws a silver track across the water of the bay.