Our friend Andrew Mollison from "Mollycoddle" has been in Sydney on his way South home to Hobart. We first met Andrew and Margaret in Coffs Harbour on our way out, and fortunately our paths crossed several places along the way. We have been reflecting with Andrew about places we visited. We thought we'd put a few thoughts down.
New Caledonia is socially a very interesting community. The French are quite determined to maintain control there as long as possible. The reasons are probably a combination of national pride and economic interest. While the nickel mines continue to produce it is unlikely they will voluntarily relinquish sovereignty over the islands. They have shown some flexibility, but only slight and only in response to violent armed insurrection in the 1970's and early 1980's under Jean-Marie Tjibaou. They have ceded some local autonomy in the Loyalty Islands - but these were always less "French" anyway, and have less economic value as mining is insignificant there.
Gallic national pride has led to urbanised parts of Grande Terre, the main island, being more French than France - and in some ways this struck us as an old-fashioned, romanticised memory of France rather than the increasingly Euro-bland France of 2008. It is as if the Europeans are clinging to a sentimental past that doesn't exist in Metropolitan France any longer.
But it is the mines that really matter. All over Grande Terre one sees great ugly gouged-out open-cut red gashes on hillsides. Where the nickel and iron has become too difficult to remove economically, the machinery has simply been left to rust amongst the colonial pines and the banana trees. Erosion chewed away at the areas around these relics and we saw no obvious efforts at reconstitution, replanting or landscaping.
On Grande Terre traditional culture, clan structures and family discipline exists in a dilute form in the remote areas, and not much at all in the city and large towns. Young people in Noumea itself do not feel part of a social structure and are thus not constrained by chiefly oversight and traditional social norms. This has led to an increasing dislocation which shows as drug use, drunkenness, kava abuse and social ills, violence in the home and increasing street crime (although we never felt anything other than safe ourselves in Noumea or any other town). Additional to this, it seems that few locals progress to the highest levels of administration and government - there are exceptions but they are not the rule.
We heard more than one indigenous New Caledonian say that many view these things as an inevitable concomitant of continuing French presence in their islands - but they seem to see this as the other side of a deal which brings them free healthcare, street lighting, cheap electricity and good roads. One man in Prony called this situation here the "amarres d'or" - the Golden Chains. While lip service is paid to Kanak culture and there will be a referendum in 2014 to decide whether to start moving to independence at some undetermined future time, we felt that the 40% of the population who are European, along with the 25% who are of Asian origin, and those Kanaks who feel comfortable as they are, will ultimately defeat any sentiment towards independence.
By contrast, in the Loyalties, where the Tricolor is not flown and where French may not own land, tribal structures survive and there is a sense of pride in self and place. Land is held by individuals as trustees for their tribe and family, and town businesses are based on the principle of communal ownership which seems to suit them very well. Because this communal ownership is linked to chiefly discipline and oversight and because the Kanaks in the Loyalties seem darned happy, it all seems to be reasonably stable and socially self-sustaining in those islands. Kanak music, song, cuisine and dress remain healthy there. Independence however remains a delicate and vexed question - LouLou the harbourmaster in We (he is fiercely proud to be Kanak, and the harbour corporation is owned by the Kanak community) told us that the cool heads amongst them have come to realise that they cannot sustain their current living standard without the French and so they have to work out a means of having it both ways - optimistic, but good on them for trying! Even on Lifou, capital of the Loyalties, it is not possible to openly buy a Kanak flag, and they are flown in only some places in a kind of surreptitious way - not out of fear of official retribution, but more to avoid inflaming a delicate situation and causing unnecessary friction.
All of that said, New Caledonia remains a joy to visit and its best asset is the local population, who are on the whole friendly, welcoming and enterprising. We hope that the scars of 18th century colonialism do not run too deep to allow a happy long-term outcome.
We'll be back soon with a few more thoughts, particularly on the quite different path the Ni-Vans have chosen.