SIX MONTHS IN VENEZUELA

New Zealand Listener, Volume 19, Issue 485, 8 October 1948, Page 7

SIX MONTHS IN VENEZUELA

contrasts. Imagine: a « primitive Indian civilisatior, modified, mixed with and moré or less replaced for 300 years by a Spanish civilisation, and then strongly. modified by the civilisation of present-day America. That is the country to-day. And as you will at once realise, the "man in the street" of this. country without many streets. has’ remained: un- . \ | ENEZUELA is a land of

developed, socially, and illiterate,‘to the extent of 50 per cent. The. discovery of. oil in, Venezuela early this century, accompanied by the rapid increase of American (mostly) money and methods, brought thousands into the larger towns and to-the oil camps, depleted the supply of»agricultural labour, made produce scarce,.and prices high. In the large towns the high prices for the modern American cars and piles of imported goods are maintained because where oil flows like water there is plenty of money. But not everyone has it. While the oil camp workers band together in unions and fight for higher wages and

better working conditions, business profits are not considered worthwhile below 100 per ‘cent. But get away from the larger towns and the scene changes dramatically. I have worked on the edge of flat coastal mangrove swamps where malaria and humid heat, snakes and crocodiles, impenetrable bush and foul mud make life difficult if interesting. I have also spent a few months in the agreeable climate of the northern coastal ranges (up to 3000 metres high) where extensive cultivation of sugar cane, maize, yucca, coffee (in parts), cocoa (in parts), tobacco, coconuts, and a variety of fresh fruits are seen in combination with a mixture of savannah grassland and pleasant bush and delightful mountain {streams and scenery generally. Between these ranges and the sea there is q narrow coastal plain which in the dry season at least is as hot as hell, supporting (in the more hummocky parts) only a scanty vegetation of cactuses and other 1 Re A LL TT LAL SRE

spiny and thorny trees, and in the brick-hard mud flats producing nothing at all. Water in these places may have to be carried for miles; but I spent part of the rainy season under canvas in bush-covered low hill country, and there it was a case of sloshing through mud and muddy water all day and every day and trying to prevent one’s motor transport from becoming bogged, and the bulk of one’s equipment dry. Then there was not much time for geology. In all these places the typical "native" is living under mud and stick thatched roofs and. on earthen floors. His huts, sometimes isolated and sometimes grouped into villages, vary in upkeep and cleanliness, but their open doors permit the entry of domestic goats, pigs, dogs, and hens, and outside the naked pot-bellied: children play in the dirt and dust watched by expectorating watery-eyed ancients sitting by the door and smoking or chewing their locally-grown tobacco, ‘The larger villages are cleaner than the smaller ones -white-wash covers both the inside and outside of most of the huts and many indeed have wooden floors. A _ petroldriven motor generator may even provide electric light for those who are progressive enough to replace the candle or kerosene or Coleman lamp. A fortnight’s vacation was spent in the far south of Venezuela, south of the great Orinoco river which im. places is as wide as Wellington harbour. Here, the country rises to 6000ft. and becomes a A RS

a high plateau, dissected by precipitous canyons 1000ft. deep into which tumble 1000ft. waterfalls-a region which contains no oil, and which therefore is largely unexplored, and where, Indians live as they lived several hundred years ago. And yet it is not completely unexplored, because diamonds and gold and iron and other minerals have attracted not a few Venezuelans, BritishGuayanans, Trinidadians, Frenchmen, Americans, and indeed a whole agglomeration of humanity, gold and diamond hungry just as they were Once in Otago and Westland, in Australia, in California and Alaska. Near a little village away down on the Brazilian border, which once had 200 people and now has 4,000, and which can be reached only by air, I spent four days living like the dogs around me and panning (unsuccessfully) for diamonds. At other points on the air route to this place I dropped off for odd days to look at company-owned reef-gold and iron mines. But on top of the native Venezuela, parts of which I have pictured to you, are planted the oil camps-oases of U.S.A. life separated by barbed wire from virgin jungle. Inside dare swimming pool, tennis courts, golf course, bowling alley, cinema and bar, grass lawns, gardens, roads, houses, schools, offices and laboratories. These are the nerve centres for the surrounding oil field, where perhaps a forest of 300 derticks is testimony to the thousands of barrels of black gold which are pouring from the earth into the pipe lines and thence into the tankers-the lifeblood’ of Venezuela. ~ ‘.

Sac writer of this article, ROBIN OLIVER, is a young Wellington geologist who has spent the last three years working for the Shell ° Oil Company. It is- an account of his life in Venezuela between November, 1947, and March, 1948.