Father McHardy’s Simple Story

THERE comes to hand from the Roman Catholic Missionary organisation a volume that is wrapped in tragedy— “Blazing the Trail in the Solomons,” by Rev. Father Emmet McHardy.

Father McHardy is dead. He was born in New Zealand in 1904, and was ordained only six years ago. He went as a mis sionary to Tunuru, near Kieta, Bougain ville, in the Northern Solomon Islands, and he worked on this new station in a kind of fury of devotion, never sparing himself so long as there was work to do.

He arrived in Kieta in 1929, and he left, desperately ill, in April 1932; and a year

later he was dead. During his term in Bougainville he wrote many letters to his relations and friends; and those letters are now collected and published. Thus we get a book that is a vivid human docu ment, and should be read by everyone in terested in mission work in the South Seas.

The letters were not written for publi cation —and so they are the more valuable.

They disclose, with terrible clarity, the task that is undertaken in these malarial Islands by conscientious missionaries — the struggle to get the station established, the fight against dirt and superstition and loathesome disease, the fearful isolation and loneliness, and the ever-present threat of deadly fever. Every man who reads this martyred priest’s letters, with their staunch courage and quaint humour, will take off his hat to the missionaries.

Blazing the Trail in the Solomons, by Emmet McHardy, S.M. Edited by Eileen Duggan. Our copy from the distributors, E. J. Dwyer, 711 George St., Sydney. Price, 4/6.