Articles > New Caledonia's Loyalty Islands

James Cook was a stickler for the tradition of giving improbable, ‘Anglophoney’ names to South Pacific shores that bear scant resemblance to their northern hemisphere namesakes.

in 1774 Cook proprietarily tagged New Caledonia and its Melanesian twin, the New Hebrides to the mud-map of European nostalgia, then sailed on. For decades thereafter in both archipelagos the French and British and their franchisees — missionaries, slavers, planters and traders — rattled sabres or poked tongues at each other like Python-esque grail knights.

These days, New Caledonia’s capital, Noumea is a Berlitz version of the tropics — French yachts and croissants, expat bureaucrats, subsidies and siestas. But hop on a plane 100 km east and it’s another world. The Loyalty Islands (Les Isles Loyaute) of Lifou, Mare and Ouvea float like coral platforms on a vivid sea, their interiors mercifully unravaged by logging or mining, their halo reefs and beaches much as they were when Cook was still a lieutenant. The islands, incidentally, owe their title not to Cook but to the wonderfully named Jethro Daggett, master of the London ship 'Loyalty' who saw them on a 1790 trading voyage.

Lifou, at around 1200 sq km, is the largest of the Loyalty group — and its outline is marvellously like that of a dodo bird. Its pines, conical-roofed case ceremonial houses and balmy waters are the stuff of calendar shots. Thanks to large French subsidies, the Loyalty Islands are also home to decent roads, schools and health clinics. Order, if it need be kept over Lifou’s Melanesian-Polynesian population of some 10,000 people, is maintained by blond gendarmes who, seemingly plucked straight from Paris point duty, look a little lost directing the coconut trees.

We drag ourselves from the balmy waters of Chateaubriand Bay to meet our guide, a reserved young Kanak woman named Rose. Driving us to the serene Baie de Santal — Sandalwood Bay — she pointedly reminds us of the traumatic intrusions made here by early European whalers, sandalwood cutters, convicts and colonists, not to mention particularly vile Queensland blackbirders. She seems to look grimly at me in particular. Should I protest that my ancestors were from well south of Brisbane?

In fact, she just wants to make sure that, according to custom, I have ready a suitable donation when we meet a local chief at the large, traditional case house in Hnathalo village. We organise the tribute, but the meeting seems an anticlimax for all parties, the number two chief (the main man is out of town, we are told) being as under-whelmed by the event as we are. Much seems lost in the translation, of which there is very little — probably Rose finds our clichés not worth repeating. Instead she leads us off to find Lifou’s most scenic spots.

From a high cliff at Jokin — a neat village of one chapel, one guesthouse and a quota of healthy-looking pigs, dogs and kids — we gaze down on a stunning lagoon vista. Coral heads, reef sharks and parrot fish shimmer beneath a plane of water so translucent that a dinghy moored there doesn’t so much float as levitate.

Next, after visiting a beautiful vanilla plantation at Mucaweng, I blow it by suggesting that the house specialty, a subtle, vanilla-flavoured coffee, tastes to my cappuccino-ravaged Sydney palate rather like Nescafe. Rose looks at me as though I were indeed son of a son of a blackbirder.

As serene as it is today, an early English official, Andrew Cheyne, made some massively unflattering observations about the island. “The natives of Lifu [sic] are very much addicted to stealing, and treacherous and cruel in the extreme, and generally speaking great cowards. They are also much given to lying - and seldom speak the truth even among themselves. The women appear to be kept under much subjection.”

Clearly, he hadn’t anticipated our Rose. Cheering up, she takes us to large 19th-century churches, thatched meeting houses and diving spots, while joking occasionally about early missionaries in pots. At one point we pass a bush from behind which are issuing definite sounds of human passion. She tries to pass it off as “just a goat.” “OK, let’s go check this noisy goat,” jokes one of my friends. She cautions, “Guys, if you don’t want to end up in the pot …”

“Horse, goat, sugar, ‘espoon’ — and numbers. On Mare Island we still say these words in English,” explains Jean-Pierre Yeweine as he shows us around his home island of Mare, a short flight south-east of Lifou. This residual English vocabulary is the legacy of the London Missionary Society that gained a foothold in the Loyalty Islands in 1841 and maintained for years a haughtily Anglophone-Francophobe posture. This tug-of-war for souls and tongues between colonialism’s point men — England’s LMS vs French Catholics — continued until the Loyalty Islands were annexed to France in 1864.

Mare’s coral landscape is pitted and tunnelled like Gouda cheese. We drive along a coast road that’s hemmed on one side by brilliant lagoons and on the other by hibiscus blooms, lipstick bushes and tidy villages. At a spot known as L’Aquarium Naturel, Jean-Pierre leads us to a beautiful, 50-metre wide sinkhole lagoon with a floor of white sand. Pandanus palms shade the aqua pool and the local couples who come to picnic or smooch beside it. He throws in a little bread and soon the water is alive with fish. As though awaiting a photo call a pretty turtle surfaces, poking its head up long enough for us to take a few shots before it drifts back down to its hiding place.

Mare is alive with stories. Jean-Pierre shows us a famous sea cliff that is sliced by a five-metre wide chasm called the Warrior’s Leap. According to legend, a pursued Kanak warrior cleared this formidable gap with one desperate bound, while his enemies plunged to their bloody doom in the sea 20 metres below.

“Dive here and you’ll see fish, not just bubbles,” he says as we later snorkel and sea-kayak in the open lagoon off Nengone Resort. Indeed, the waters — and the restaurant menus — are full of fish, with suitably exclamatory names like wahoo and mahi-mahi.

The Loyalty Islands are not a mass-market destination like Fiji, Bali or even Noumea. Instead they are untrammelled, upmarket Melanesia. The beaches are clean and almost empty, the accommodation ranges from village cabanas to modest resorts and prices, while not reaching Tahitian extremes, are those of the French Pacific not bargain-stay Asia.

Last impressions count. I see plenty of floral aloha shirts and pareus worn by Loyalty Islanders, a dress sense that reflects their mixed Melanesian-Polynesian blood. If it looks like Tahiti with a perm, the local music might be Jamaica with the handbrake on. Oozing from radios is a languid Kanak pop mutant, a sort of swing reggae that sounds like Bob Marley blowing a Prozac spliff.

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