Walk into Paradise

I spent the last couple of days of the old year in a contemplative mood watching an old movie, WALK INTO PARADISE. It hasn't much of a storyline but the New Guinea Highlands scenery is wonderful to watch!

As my old friend Noel used to say, "My spiritual home will always be New Guinea". He said it as he tried to settle at Caboolture in the late 70s, and he said it again after he had moved to Mt Perry, and was still saying it in Childers where he passed away in 1995.

After having spent his whole working life in New Guinea, Australia had become a foreign country to him. He, as so many others (myself included), had become lost souls after leaving New Guinea. We hadn't gone there because of a particular job but because of the country itself which offered something for everyone, be he missionary, moneymaker, or misfit.

 

Of Christmasses past

Christmas 1970 inside my donga in Camp 6 on Loloho Beach

 

It's that time of year again! This photo is from 1970 when photography was black and white but not so our lives. It's Christmas in Camp 6 on the island of Bougainville in New Guinea. I'm sitting on the most important piece of furniture, a beer fridge, flanked by Neil "Jacko" Jackson on my right, and Bob Green to my left.

Neil Jackson was Bechtel's head-timekeeper, a titular job description at best as the only time he could be relied on to keep correctly was opening time at the local "boozer". For him it was always 5 o'clock somewhere. He's shown in the photograph when he's already well into his drink but still some time away from turning ugly and disagreeable.

Bob Green was also a timekeeper who got married just before he came up to the island. He liked his drink but also his wife back in Australia who wrote him long, passionate, and multi-paged letters every day which he received by the fistful on mail-day. He replied to them after the nightly drinking was over but the mental torture became too much and he returned to Melbourne after just a few months.

"Jacko" also moved back to Melbourne where he inherited his auntie's mansion in blue-ribbon Toorak. He finished his days fighting off the neighbours who tried to have him and his dozens of cats and mountains of empties evicted from their genteel neighbourhood. It's rumoured that he was knighted for his services to the Australian brewing industry and lived out his days as Sir Osis of the Liver.

Bob Green and "Jacko" were just two of several unlikely characters who back then I called by that shifty English monosyllable that covers such a vast array of meanings that you can never be quite sure what anyone means when they use the word "friend". We were friends not because we had sought out each other's company but because we were thrown into each other's company through work and circumstances.

I still wonder how in this company of alcoholics and misfits I didn't permanently impair my young body and tender soul. I'd just turned 25. My short life until then had been a series of lucky breaks, and the word 'regret' had not yet entered my vocabulary. An endless succession of more lucky breaks and golden tomorrows seemed to lie ahead of me. How wrong and how right I was!

Looking at those old photos brings back lots of memories which make me feel young again and help me forget that these days when I try to leap tall buildings in a single bounds, I always hit the wall halfway up.

 

Gutpela Nait, Holi Nait

 

 

“Gutpela Nait, Holi Nait” i wanpela song bilong Krismas. Em i kam long maunten bilong Ostria (Austria) klostu long Jemeni (Germany).

Long 1817 Binksu Joseph Mohr i kam long St. Nikolaus Sios long taun Oberndorf klostu long Salzburg, Ostria (Austria). Em karim wantaim em tok bilong wanpela song em i raitim long 1816. Olsem, em i askim Franz Gruber, wanpela tisa long skul long Arsndorf, wanpela taun klostu, long raitim nek long dispela tok. Olsem, long Krismas nait 1818 dispela song bai ol i singim. Long dispela Krismas, organ bilong sios bai i bruk, olsem ol i singim waintaim gita tasol.

 

Gutpela nait, ho-oli nait,
lukim nau bik-p’la lait
raunim nupela Pikinini.
Em i Ki-ing bilo-ong glori.
Lukim em i slip, lukim em i slip

Gutpela nait, ho-oli nait,
wasman nau lukim lait
i stap klostu long Be-ethlehem.
Ensel li-itima-apim nem
bilong Jisas i ka-am, bi-ilong Jisas i kam.

Gutpela nait, ho-oli nait.
God i no moa stap hait.
Kamap kli-ia long Pikinini,
Em i bri-ingim marimari.
Krais Bikpela i ka-am. Kra-ais Bikpela i kam.

 

 

"Cannibal Tours" (1988) Documentary by Dennis O'Rourke

 

"Cannibal Tours" is a 1988 quasi-documentary film by the late Australian director and cinematographer Dennis O'Rourke. While it borrows heavily from ethnographic modes of representation, the film is a biting commentary on the nature of modernity. The film is also widely celebrated for its depiction of Western touristic desires and exploitation among a 'tribal' people.

The film follows a number of affluent European and American tourists and ecotourists as they travel from village to village along the middle Sepik River in Papua New Guinea. Most of the villages in the film are inhabited by the Iatmul people. The film shows the tourists driving hard bargains for local handcrafts such as woodcarvings and baskets, relentlessly taking photos of local people, handing out cigarettes, balloons, and perfume, viewing staged dance performances, and offering naive comments on native people living in harmony with nature. The film, too, tacks between the tourists and black-and-white photographs from the era of German colonialism of New Guinea (1880s–1914). With some prodding, the tourists unwittingly reveal an unattractive and pervasive ethnocentrism to O'Rourke's cameras. The tourists thus become somewhat dehumanized by the filmmaker's camera even as they themselves dehumanize and exoticize even the most mundane aspects of Sepik River life.

The title of the film can be read in at least a couple of ways. At one point early in the film, a German tourist, clearly titillated, describes the bygone practice of raiding and cannibalism. He is obsessed with cannibalism, asking local men about the former practice, and snapping photos of locations where local people once practiced headhunting; other tourists also attempt to discuss the "symbolic" meaning of cannibalism. But the narrative plot of the film is to portray the tourists as the real cannibals who consume the world through their arrogance, acquisitiveness, primitivist fantasies of indigenous people, and photography (the cameras in the film double for the guns of past colonial administrators). In short, the film presents the tourists as the people driven by truly bizarre beliefs and behaviors. By contrast, the local people are represented as eminently practical and reasonable. Thus the 'natives' display the rationale logic of modernity, while the Western tourists are guilty of the very irrational traits they attribute to the natives. The climax of the film is when a group of tourists, faces painted in 'native fashion' by local men from one village (Tambunum), prance, dance, and assume a boxing stance to the music of Mozart. The message is clearly: we have finally succeeded in our quest for the primitive, and he is us.

 

 

P.S. Dennis O'Rourke passed away in 2013, aged 67. If you are interested in his filmography, look for:

Yumi Yet – Independence for Papua New Guinea (1976)
Ileksen – Politics in Papua New Guinea (1978)
Yap… How Did You Know We’d Like TV? (1980)
The Shark Callers of Kontu (1982)
Couldn’t Be Fairer (1984)
Half Life – A Parable for the Nuclear Age (1985)
The Good Woman of Bangkok (1991)
The Pagode da Tia Beth (1993)
Cunnamulla (1999)
Land Mines - A Love Story (2004)
To order any of these films, go to CAMERAWORK

 

These pages are all about memories, so it's perhaps appropriate to have some idle thoughts on memory

Why not read along as you listen? Click here

 

Oh, give me back the good old days of fifty years ago!" has been the cry ever since Adam's fifty-first birth-day", wrote Jerome K. Jerome in his book "Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow". I can't remember when I started looking back to the good old days, but it must have been when I had found Eve and settled down.

Ah, memory, the pleasure and the pain of it! Jerome's last essay in this delightful little book is entitled "On Memory", and he begins it by remembering the first poem he learned. Memory is not always reliable and much of the things we should or would like to remember are forgotten. Men will always want to return back in time but that is impossible and so we must try to enjoy the life we have.

Perhaps listening to the reading of this essay, or reading it, or listening while reading along, will help you do just that. Happy memories!

---

For "Memory" in Jerome K. Jerome's "Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow", click here.

 

Why didn't I think of this?

One of the most wanted men in the South Pacific, conman Noah Musingku, has promised duped investors he will pay them in his own currency printed with pictures of himself and Jesus Christ.

"Since I was born I've never seen any monetary unit with the face of Jesus Christ on it. To me this will be the first time to see such money and it's also a sign of disrespect to our Lord Jesus Christ," one investor said.

Another investor asked if the new Bougainville kina would be legal tender. A police officer told locals should stick to their gardens rather than be constantly conned by Musingku.

For more, click here.

 

Alan Smith was right

 

When I set up the Bougainville Copper Project website way back when dinosaurs still roamed the earth, I had in mind the four-thousand-plus expat workers who built the mine, the mine access road, the port and power-house, and the Arawa township, and who cooked the meals, ran the camps, bashed away on typewriters or, as I did, ticked and flicked the hundreds of progress claims by contractors working for the construction managers Bechtel Corporation.

Given that all that work was done in the early 1970s when the workers' average age was around 30 which, if they haven't succumbed to the booze and other occupational hazards, would make them octogenarians whose failing memory or computer skills may prevent them from responding to my website. All the more reason to welcome the odd email that still does come in, or the even rarer phone call, or the rarest of all, an unexpected turn-up at the gates of "Riverbend".

When that happens, we talk and talk and talk, about Loloho, Camp 1, the early days of the mine access road, the then seemingly metropolitan delights of Kieta, and fifty years disappear in a cloud of memories. We feel we are again in our twenties when it was always morning, when time was endless, and we and the world were young and full of hope.

We agree that those years on what was then the world's largest construction project to become the world's largest open-cut mine have been the best years of our lives when we gained experiences and formed friendships that would last us for the rest of our lives.

Alan Smith, who worked in BCL's IT Department in the "civilised" later years of 1986 and 1987, and also authored the BCL Blues (no contender for "Hot August Night"), was right when he wrote, "... that special place in my heart grows with the time that passes since we were there."

 

From little things big things grow

 

"Hello, Just stumbled upon your site. Name is Chris Jefferies and I lived and worked at Loloho assembling the drying plant. Lived at Camp 1 for a short while, but for the most part Loloho. Worked there from 1969 to Jan. '72 when I got the hell out to save my neck!

Canadian and worked for MKF and Johns and Waygood. I don't have many more photos for the reason that the "Pella" who was running the mail truck from Kieta, at that time, thought it was really fun to toss the mail out the window and watch it flutter away like the little birds, so a lot of us lost a considerable amount of correspondence and, of course, my return photos. Nothing surprising about that behavior, but doesn't help old memory lane. When I left Bougainville, I went to then Burma to work for Toshiba on a hydro project and there I was most definitely not permitted to even have a camera, (Viet Nam time.), so only memories there too. I would not trade my time in those places for anything; especially Bougainville, the Islands and Papua. Don't know that I would go back, given the opportunity, hard to say, and the likelihood of having that opportunity is little to none, so no point in conjecture. I don't know if this info is of any use to you, but there it is. Contact me if you have anything that you think that may interest me.

P.S. As an aside, I see that they are talking of re-opening. Are they going to throw us a party to show us their appreciation for the good job we did of putting it together? I'm still wearing a damned hard hat and still busting my butt. What the hell have I done wrong?"

I added these comments from an ex-expatriate from my Bougainville days to the Bougainville Copper Project website in or around 2002.

Even though we seemed to have lived in the same camp at Loloho, we never met in person on Bougainville. However, it must have been a meeting of the minds - or a matching taste in wall decorations? - that kept the correspondence - and the ensuing friendship - going until now.

For auld lang syne, we'll take a cup of kindness yet. Here's to another eighteen good years, Chris!

 

Happiness is a red plastic chair

Camp 6 Loloho, Bougainville Island
Click on image to go to the Bougainville Copper Project website

 

Happiness was a red plastic chair when my "home" was a 9x9-ft donga tastefully decorated with PLAYBOY centrefolds of girls waxed to the point of martyrdom, when all my wordly possessions easily fitted into a 2ft-wide metal locker, and when my needs for comfort were satisfied by a red plastic chair on the porch.

 

... because, Roy, an electrical engineer, forgot to plug it in!
Photo courtesy of Roy Goldsworthy, now residing in Malaysia

 

It was on Bougainville Island where it all began, the dreaming of a bigger and better future and the searching for wider and farther horizons. Almost fifty years later, I put this old bleached-out red plastic chair on my jetty (under the OSASCOMP-rules, is "bleached-out" a colour-adjective or an opinion? Please put me out of my misery!)

Colour or opinion (or coloured opinion), I sit on it often and dream of the past, with my horizon no farther away than across the river.

 

 

These days, happiness is a bleached-out red plastic chair on my jetty!

 

P.S. A certain expat, originally from Sunshine Vic. but now residing in Trump's America (and officially designated on the internet as a Republican voter), emailed this photo of himself and three fellow-donga dwellers (presumably not all in the same donga) at Camp 6 in Loloho, suggesting that happiness is FOUR red plastic chairs.

 

Where are they all today?

 

From the air Bougainville is a romantic island. Lush and rugged, surrounded by reefs and an emerald sea. Cloud sits on the rain forest that mats the mountains. The tall volcanic cones of Bagana and Balbi smoke sullenly and glow at night.

But along the Crown Prince Range and down on the flat country, life was not always as romantic as it seems from a passenger's window.

Rain, mud, dust, heat, boredom. These are deep in the memories of the men who built the mine. But deeper in their consciousness is another feeling, almost of pride, that they were part of a tremendous and exciting adventure. That they were pioneers.

The Bougainville Copper Project in the then Territory of Papua New Guinea ran from 1966 to 1973 and cost some US$350 million. At its peak in mid-1971, it employed a labour force of some 10,700. The Bougainville Copper Project was not only the largest grass roots copper project undertaking in the world to that date - it was truly a monument to every man who turned his hand toward its successful completion.

As the Mine neared completion, so did Arawa, the "dormitory town" for most of the mine workers. What had been a beautiful copra plantation on the long sweep of a black-beach bay, became a bustling town with supermarket, tavern, post office, and a general hospital which was the best in the Territory. A total of 446 residences were completed in 20 months employing a labour force of some 600. Seven different houses were built ranging from 3- to 4-bedroom residences, some fully air conditioned.

But there was always Kieta with its hotel, the Kieta Club, the sailing club, a branch of Breckwoldts, several Chinese shops, and Green & Co on the waterfront. This shop as no other catered to the "touristy" needs of the mine population with postcards of 'maris' suckling pigs, carvings, grass skirts, and tee shirts. And beyond it, Aropa Airstrip, the 'Gateway to Freedom' after the daily 10-hour grind of the construction work.

The Loloho Powerhouse had already been built to supply power to the copper concentrator, mine, portsite facilities and townships of Arawa and Panguna via a 132 KV transmission system. Loloho Port was also nearing completion. What a moment when the first Japanese ore carrier tied up alongside it! The beach at Camp 6 was always an attraction for those of us who lived at the Minesite and had to endure daily downpours and mud and slush.

The construction of the new 16-mile 24 ft wide Mine Access Road t hrough the Crown Prince Range posed many problems and was the most spectacular of all the work undertaken. It became trafficable in October 1970 and, except for a few major deviations, followed the route of the first access road built by C.R.A. Building it involved a mammoth earth moving operation: ridge tops were cut off and sometimes used to fill ravines to provide a gradually ascending route. A complicated bench system often rising 200 ft. above the road was necessary in some sections to protect it against landslides and also to allow for the effect of earth tremors in the area.

Bougainville Island is 30 miles wide and 130 miles long with its dominant feature a range of mountains which rises to 8,000 ft. and runs the length of the island. This mountainous land is jungle covered and swampy in low lying coastal areas. The terrain formation for the most part consists of volcanic ash and fractured and weathered rock. The weather is tropical with coastal rainfall ranging from 100 in to 150 in. per year while the mountain areas receive from 150 in. to 300 in. per year.

Did you spend some time on the Bougainville Copper Project in the sixties and seventies? If you did, we want to hear from you! They aren't many of us left and it would be good to hear from those who lived with us in the camps or in Arawa or Kieta and shared with us the experience.

Wouldn't it be great to revisit Bougainville, drive up to Panguna or swim at Loloho Beach? The Bougainville Copper Project shaped our lives as many of us continued in overseas projects. Others returned to suburbia and ordinary jobs but they, too, were forever changed by the experience.

Where are they all today? Many are settled back in Australia while others stayed on in New Guinea and some are still on the move. When were you on Bougainville? Who did you work for and what did you do? Have you photographs or memories to share which we could publish on the Bougainville Copper Project website? [Read some of the other comments here]

As one contributor put it so aptly, "You only have to scratch the surface and you bleed PNG..." So next time you bleed a little and feel a bout of "Bougainvilleitis" coming on, share your thoughts and memories with us. I very much look forward to hearing from you and any of your mates who may have spent time on the Bougainville Copper Project.

My email address is

riverbendnelligen[AT]mail.com

(By the way, do you remember the rumours about the stuff they put in our tea in the camp, to keep our minds off it...? Well, 50 years later, I think mine's beginning to work.)

---

P.S. A South American scientist from Argentina, after a lengthy study, has discovered that people with insufficient brain and sexual activity read their websites with their hand on the mouse. DON'T BOTHER TAKING IT OFF NOW; IT'S TOO LATE!!!

 

From WALKABOUT, March 1972

 

"Youth is a blunder, manhood a struggle, old age a regret"

 

It was Benjamin Disraeli who is supposed to have said this. I have reached old age, and should start to regret, but I don't. I have made mistakes - many mistakes! - but when I think of the frailty of human nature, of the pitfalls that surround us, and the crazy world we live in - I was going to shorten it to 'the vicissitudes of life' but I didn't want to confuse you, Des! - , I merely wonder why I did not make more mistakes.

One thing that I have noticed is that, whereas during all those past struggles I hardly ever looked back, I now look back all the time. As there is no future to speak of, I live in the past, before the struggle began - a harking back to youth which, alas! has departed for ever.

An email received from an ex-colleague of my days on the Bougainville Copper Project makes me think that I am not so different from others:

"Until old age caught up with me very suddenly - it sneaked up on me without my realising it - work had been everything to me. I was in demand and there was one project after another. Altogether, it has been a successful career, all thanks to my time on Bougainville. A lot of people worked there for lots of reasons; dollars were probably the main reason. I had just spent a year living in a boarding house in Melbourne run by Jews which was all right except that the cooked dinner was beef schnitzel and mashed potatoes every night, so a change of food and scenery was enough for me to sign up. Engineering-wise there was a lot of "new" technology on Bougainville with little back-up information which taught me to innovate. Thanks to my time there, I enjoyed a working life which I would never have dreamed of."

And can't we all relate to this? I certainly can! After my first and futile attempt to rent a furnished room with a family in a Canberra suburb - I spotted their Jewish menorah on the sideboard before they spotted my German passport! - I also had moved into a boarding house - click here - with an also very predictable menu - "if it's Chicken Maryland, it must be Friday!" - after which I went to Rabaul where I shared a house with two other chartered accountants - click here.

I'd gone to Rabaul just for the adventure on a much reduced pay and an even more reduced menu because, as each one of us took a turn in doing the weekly shopping, when it was the turn of the other two, they merely bought a leg of lamb and spent the rest on beer.

I had answered a similar ad when I worked and lived in Rabaul, except mine gave Bechtel's Kieta postal address to which I replied. By return mail, I received a return ticket to present myself at Panguna for an interview which I did and, as they say, the rest is history ...

When the local newspaper, the POST-COURIER, began carrying ads for audit personnel on the Bougainville Copper Project, I applied and was invited to fly across for an interview in September 1970. I was hired on the spot, returned to Rabaul to give notice, and within a few weeks was back on what was then the biggest construction project in the world. Woo-hoo!

AUSTRALIA'S MOST WANTED accountant
For more revealing photos, click here

Seeking adventure had been my main reason for coming to New Guinea, seeking more money was an added reason for going to Bougainville - I went from $2,000 to $7,500 a year, plus full board and lodging and a beat-up Toyota Landcruiser - , but it was the professional challenges that kept me there for several years.

"Auditing" meant checking contractors' monthly progress claims against contractual terms and conditions. Those contracts had been written not by accountants but by engineers in far-away Melbourne, often with little or no regard to the practicalities on the ground.

Pitting our brains against those of the contractors' representatives whose aim it was to make the most of a once-in-a-lifetime chance, interpreting contractual clauses and, where necessary, pushing through essential contract changes which could save vast sums of money, made those long ten-hour days often seem not long enough.

Of course, there were those to whom Bougainville was just a great disappointment. There was one who had arrived on the island and, taking one look at those cloud-covered mountains behind which Panguna was supposed to be, refused to leave Aropa airstrip and took next morning's plane back out. Another one, having scored the much-coveted trip to Bechtel's Melbourne office to hand-deliver the monthly batch of computer punched cards (remember punched cards?), was never seen again. This act became known as 'doing a Joslin' (take a bow, Frank!) Then there were those who, having run up an adding-machine striplist from 365 down to zero which they taped to the wall behind their desk, would each morning cross off another number. Not many endured this agonising mental torture long enough to reach the longed-for Day Zero.

As for me, and a select group of others, we revelled in the challenges, in the comraderie, and eventually in the opportunities that, thanks to our time on Bougainville, came our way on other projects and in other countries.

As my former colleague wrote, "Altogether, it has been a successful career, all thanks to my time on Bougainville." And so say all of us!

 

Echoes of Marquis de Rays

 

The Marquis de Rays' Expedition is known by name to practically everyone who has wandered in the Pacific; but very few knew the actual complete story, with its attendant tragedies of fraud, disillusionment and death.

It is generally known that the Marquis, by highly-coloured promises, induced a large number of people to go to a "new colony" on the southern shore of New Ireland, and that many of them died there, in that hopeless, fever-ridden hole; but a detailed account of the enterprise has not previously been published.

We should therefore be grateful to Mademoiselle J.J Niau for writing "The Phantom Paradise", which is not only a most readable book but also a valuable addition to available records. Alas, it has long been out of print, and is only available at selected libraries - click here.

One is surprised at the extent of the fraud - for there seems little doubt that it was simply a gigantic "racket". One gets the impression, from this carefully-compiled, well-documented book, that the Marquis did not launch his scheme with fraudulent intent. A member of an ancient aristocratic family of Breton, he was a dreamer, a wanderer and a visionary. France was rent by political troubles. He made a plan - as many another patriot has done - for establishing, overseas, a new, free home for his oppressed countrymen. But, instead of going personally to see the home of La Nouvelle France, he took the word of one Duperry, commander of the "Coquille", who had landed on August 12, 1823, at Port Praslin, on the southern extremity of New Ireland. Dupeery described this place as a Pacific Paradise; and De Rays, who had half the Pacific open to his selection, by a most unlucky chance chose this as the location of his new settlement.

De Rays threw himself with great energy into the work of organisation. His first advertisement, offering land at two francs an acre, with "rapid and assured fortune", appeared in Le Petit Journal on July 26, 1877; and, within the next two or three years, people in France, Italy, Belgium and Spain almost fell over each other in their eagerness to join the expedition and pay the Marquis liberally for the privilege. The progress of the enterprise may be seen from the dates of the sailing of the four vessels which carried the poor, deluded colonists,to the number of nearly 1000, to Port Breton (as it was christened):

Chandernagore, left Holland September 14, 1879.
Genil, left Barcelona July 9, 1880.
Nouvelle Bretagne, left Barcelona April 7, 1881.

Clipping from the Mount Alexander Mail, Vic., of 19 March 1880

No ship sailed out of France. The French authorities were suspicious of the Marquis from the first, and did their utmost to dissuade people from joining him, and refused clearance to his ships. He defied them, and despatched his ships from other countries. He may have sent away the Chandernagore in good faith - he was dreamer enough - but he knew, before the Genil left in March, 1880, that Port Breton was totally unsuitable for any colonising enterprise. He made no effort to delay the sailing of other ships, or to seek other territory for colonisation. Instead, his lieutenants drove the colonists ashore in the rain-soaked, fever-stricken place, and some even went to extreme length to prevent the wretched people escaping to a more hospitable country. One commander, Captain Henry, refused to put his quota of colonists ashore in New Ireland, and tried to find a home for them elsewhere; but the others seem to have ben rascals in the pay of De Rays, and their chief object was to maroon the poor, deluded people and prevent their getting back to civilisation with their damning tale of deceit and cruelty. Altogether, a thousand people were brought out in those ships, to the great enrichment of the Marquis.

Clipping from Maryborough Chronicle, Qld., of 29 April 1882

The detailed story is a most tragic one - it is hard to believe that the people could have lived through such misery. As a matter of fact, only a proportion of them lived - the graves of the others line the shore of Port Breton and Liki-Liki (another place just around the corner on the south-east coast, to which some of them moved).

The only bright spots in the story are furnished by the heroism of Dr Baudouin, who stayed with the colonists and fought for them against the Marquis and his gang; and by the hospitality of the missionaries (Rev. Brown and Rev. Benjamin Danks) and traders (Mr and Mrs Farrell) in the Duke of York Islands. Mrs Farrell, presumably, is the lady who was the daughter of Mr Coe, consul in Samoa. She ran away to the Western Pacific with Mr Farrell, who was very successful as a trader, and subsequently became known throughout the South Seas as "Queen Emma".

In time, the settlers either died or got away to Australia, the Philippines, Europe, or some other Pacific island; and, in a few years only a few sticks and stones, many unmarked graves and some cruel memories were all that remained of La Nouvelle France.

Even as a romance, "The Phantom of Paradise" would be an amazing story. Yet it is true - a tragic bit of the strange chequerboard of Pacific history, more recently invoked by the following article in THE BULLETIN of August 1982:

 

For a scholarly dissertation of this colossal real estate fraud, click here.

 

Further reading:

1) Three articles by J.H. Niau in THE SUN, three years before her book:
Part I, April 23, 1933,  Part II, April 30, 1933,   Part III, May 7, 1933.

2) "The South Sea Bubble of Charles du Breil" by Louis Becke - click here

3) "Charles I, Emperor of Oceania" by James A Michener - click here

4) "The Marquis provided the mill-stone", PIM, February 1949 - click here

5) It inspired Daudet's burlesque "Port Tarascon" - click here