Migration From Cooks ‘Serious’

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31108, 11 July 1966, Page 14

Migration From Cooks ‘Serious’

(New Zealand Press Association» AUCKLAND, July 10. The move by Cook Islanders to New Zealand had reached the proportions of a flood and was having serious repercussions on the isolated islands as well as on Rarotonga, said Mr P. H. Curson, of the Department of Geography, University of Auckland.

Islanders who migrated were often well educated and enterprising, Mr Curson said. The migrations caused an irreparable loss in terms of skilled and productive workers.

He might also want to savour new forms of social pleasure or to benefit from the medical and educational services which were concentrated in the towns. However, Miss Andrews said, the power of the village was stronger in Western Samoa than in American Samoa, where urbanisation had gone further and appeared more economically motivated.

They left behind a large proportion of the very old and the very young.

week-end course in Auckland for geography teachers. Reasons for the rural-urban migration in Samoa appeared to be social as well as econo-, mic, said Miss E. P. Andrews, also of the Geography Department. The Samoan would-be urban dweller did not necessarily change his place of residence because of a job but might wish to escape the traditional authority of the chief and social restraints of the village.

Mr Curson said one of the most oustanding characteristics of a South Pacific town was that the greater proportion of its inhabitants had been born elsewhere and subsequently migrated to the town.

Mr Curson was one of three speakers on urbanisation in the South-west Pacific at a