Salient: Victoria University Students' Newspaper. Vol. 24, No. 11. 1961

A Report on the Cook Islands

A Report on the Cook Islands

Sun-drenched lagoons, coconut palms curving in the gentle breeze, unhurried and uninhibited folk with flowers in their hair, laughter and plaintive song drifting through mysterious tropic nights . . .

Is this your idea of life on a tropic isle? If so, you live in a dream world of cheap novelists and Hollywood film producers—a world created to allow us to escape the frustrations and disciplines of our modern civilisation. The picture is half truth and half fantasy and, like all such creations, is misleading in the aspects it does not portray. In Polynesia, as in modern civilisation, there are frustrations and resentments and, further more, there is poverty and malnutrition, despair and dismay. If we neglect to notice this important part of Polynesian life, we are left with a hollow caricature. But when we look on its "wholeness" Polynesian life, while not losing any of its natural charm, takes on rounded depth and added reality.

In the summer vacation, two Geography Honours students spent 12 weeks in the Cook Islands trying to understand Polynesian life in Its wholeness. Rarotonga, the largest Island and centre of administration in this scattered, far-flung group of Islands is 1600 miles from New Zealand. Ranging from 110 to 737 miles from Rarotonga are a further 10 inhabited islands. Those in the south, Rarotonga, Mangaia, Atlu, Mauke, Mltlaro and Aitutaki are volcanic Islands whose moderate soil fertility supports large population densities. The five northern islands, Manihiki, Penrhyn, Rakahenga, Palmerston and Pukapuka are coral atolls, which, although providing only the bare necessities of life, also have high population densities. Since the beginning of this century, the Cook Island Maori people (numbering now some 18,500) have been citizens of New Zealand. Their economic and social development is being guided by the Department of Island Territories.

We visited only two islands in the group, staying three weeks in Rarotonga and nine weeks in Aitutaki. Our precise research task, "An Investigation into the Pattern and Form of Village Agriculture" was centred in Amuri village, Aitutaki. Attention will be given here to some rather more general impressions of Cook Island life, as we experienced it in Aitutaki and Rarotonga.