The Waves That Lap Our Shores

(A notable American writer, with quaint humour and delightful satire, gives his impressions of some visitors to Eastern Polynesia.)

POPULAR interest in the islands of the Pacific is a curious phenomenon. It moves in waves, but these do not follow one another, either with regularity in time or uniformity in size.

To survey the entire historical proces sion, from the first great tidal-wave of general interest that resulted from the dis coveries of Captains Wallis, Bougainville and Cook, to the present day, would be impossible without taking all the sea-room the Pacific affords. 1 shall, therefore, con tent myself with mention of some of the latter-day waves I have watched advanc ing and receding through French Poly nesia. No doubt other P.I.M. readers would have a somewhat similar story to tell of those they have seen splashing over their coral reefs.

There has been very little of the stately, rhythmical motion usually inherent in wave progression. To me, they seem to come in a somewhat messy fashion, the backwash of one meeting the onset of the next, and these conflicting impulses give a choppy effect to all. Nevertheless, waves are discernible, and as each one recedes, it is seen to have had a character of its own.

A QUITE general wave of interest moved outward, island-ward, immediately after the war. People wanted to get away from the kind of civilisation that could produce such a disaster, and where could they go if not to the small groups of islands in the remotest of oceans?

There were ironic ripples on the surface of this wave. We had, formerly, considered the inhabitants of these islands as savages, barbarians, in need of our enlightening in fluence. After the war we were less sure as to the direction from which enlighten ment should come.

Many of these post-war travellers still knew little of the South Seas except that Captain Cook had explored them. They expected to find the islands about as he had left them, and so they came with trunks filled with tenpenny nails, glass beads, spools of wire, brass curtain-rings for brown noses, and the like, to be used in barter with the savages. But the savages were not interested, and the result was that all the island roads and beaches were so cluttered with cheap trinkets and other trash, discarded by the disillusioned travellers, that the mess has not been wholly cleared up even to this day.

WHEN this wave had receded, came Y another which brought with it a mixed grill of human ingredients that seemed to have been assembled from every where. There were nature men with skinny shanks, mild vegetarian eyes, and a com plete preoccupation with matters of diet, which prevented them from thinking of anything except the raw fruit that went into their bellies. Pre-nudists, garbed in parens, ran up and down the beaches, half crazy with our larger island freedom, shouting and eating bananas.

Adherents of Gauguin came to paint what Gauguin did, better than he did, and the brisk slip-slapping of their brushes was the predominating music of the arrival of this wave. I doubt whether, in the his tory of painting, there have ever been so many masterpieces of primitive art smeared upon good canvas as were smeared at Tahiti during the years 1920-22. Where are they now?

MUCH the wettest of all the waves fol lowed. It came, of course, from the then-arid lands of the U.S.A. Prohibition brought us what amounted to an inunda tion of some of the most engaging old soaks that a man could wish to clink glasses with.

To be sure, their one topic of conversa tion was “the good old days” at home, gone forever, as they then believed; but they had qualities of heart that would have endeared them to any human being, and I have shed more than one tear over their graves. For this wave failed to recede, or most of it did. It seeped, drop by 90 per cent.-pure drop, into the sandy soil of our island cemeteries, where flowers of the most intoxicating odours sprang up with memorial promptitude. 7 ’HEN came the scientific wave—but it is scarcely accurate to speak of the scien tific interest in the islands as having a

wavelike formation. It is nearer the truth to say that wavelets of such interest are lapping the coral reefs at all times. Some of these bring men who are authorities in their various fields and who accomplish work of permanent value. Far be it from me to speak lightly of them!

But amongst them, though not of them, are scientists of another kind.

A perceptible number of these latter were wafted to Polynesia a few years back.

There were both men and women, some what on the adolescent side. It was as though certain universities had loosed at the same time hopeful young specialisers in anthropology, granting them travelling

scholarships, with the understanding that their specialising was to be done upon the long-suffering natives of the South Seas.

Wherever you heard the word “pattern” lingering in the air, you could be sure that a group of these young scientists was nearby. “Culture patterns,” “behaviour patterns” ... there was a ceaseless patter about patterns. They would have been speechless without the word —as dumb as American high-school students without their serviceable “swell.”

Some had taken post-graduate work in psychology, with special reference to the psychology of sex. Their enthusiasm for this branch of the subject seemed a bit lopsided. They gloated over it, and lost no time in ravishing the virgin field of Poly nesia. All the natives know, of course, that there is such a thing as sex; but they didn’t know, until these young specialisers came, how enormously im portant it is: a concern that occupies, or should occupy, an arc of 358 degrees of the circle of their interests.

It was difficult, at first, for the investi gators to get into action, for they could not speak the language of the islanders they were investigating. But they overcame this. They hired interpreters, and roamed through the native villages, whispering young men and women off behind coconut palms and purau trees, where they ques tioned them, at second-hand, about their love life. For all the natural reluctance of Polynesians—as well as other folk —to discuss these intimate matters with com plete strangers, to say nothing of discuss ing them through interpreters, the scien tists gathered bales of data. They filled trunks with notebooks dripping with secrets, and then rushed home to write books with such titles as “Adolescent Poly nesia,” “The Love Life of the Puka- Pukans,” “Relics of Phallic Symbolism in the Childhood Games of the Ahu-Ahuians,” and the like. They were trained—or better, perhaps, over-trained Phallic-Symbolists.

Everywhere they went they moved in a veritable forest of them. They spotted them even on absolutely plane surfaces.

The very waves of the sea that carried them from island to island were infallible phallic.

I REMEMBER one young woman who was, perhaps, super-typical rather than typical, of the others. She had thin sandy hair, squirrel teeth, and a lisp in her speech. She missed no chances. She was here, there, everywhere. She would even gumshoe up to some dignified old Colonial, old enough to be her grandfather, fix him with a glance, and startle him with some such question as: “Will you dethscribe to me, pleathe, the prethithe technique of copulation among the nativeth?”

She was a holy terror! Even the most hardened old sinners in Polynesia fled at her approach. But she had come for infor mation and she was bound to have it. I have often wondered what learned anthro pological treatise she mothered when she went home.

I remember one young male whose book, the result of his sojourn, was a huge one.

In his Preface, where he outlined the scope of it, he observed, by the way: “It was necessary for me to spend five months in learning the language.” Having so lightly leaped that hurdle, he had seven additional months to give to his studies proper. There are plodders in this same field who have been climbing the steeps of language for years, hoping to reach the fruit this young genius gobbled up at one meal, so to speak. There is nothing like having the gift of tongues!

BUT, to return to waves, I recall one that was horrible —truly so. Residents of the Society Group, of Tahiti in particular, will not soon forget it. Fortunately, it

wasn’t large, but it brought with it an assortment of flotsam and jetsam composed of numerous sexes, but with scarcely any representatives of the two old reliable ones: male and female.

This strange and sudden invasion of betwixt-and-betweens has never been ade quately explained. Some thought there must have been an accountable increase in their numbers elsewhere, and that Ta hiti was receiving the overflow. Others believed that, in some international con gress of these Viva Sexlessnists, new worlds to conquer had been discussed, and that a careful examination of all the worlds there are, had revealed only Poly nesia as lacking the ministrations of these latter-day missionaries. However that may be, come they did, from lands as widely separated as England, Germany, and the U.S.A. But further reference to this wave may be waived. It retired as suddenly, but not as unaccountably, as it had come.

There have been so many waves, of vari ous kinds, that it is difficult to speak of them in their order. The round-the-world tourist wave must not be forgotten. It is justifiable to consider the arrival of any round-the-world tourist hotel as a wave in itself. In ports like Canton, Bombay, Singapore, the arrival of these ships causes, I imagine, no more than a percep tible ripple on the surface of indigenous life. But on little islands like Tahiti, where the vessel arriving is larger than the island arrived at, the excitement is great. Great, but short-lived.

THE globe-girdlers’ wave is the funniest of all to watch advancing. lam speak ing from the point-of-view of the looker on.

The natives on the crumb of land where the vessel is to call, array themselves in flowers. The local merchants wear their broadest smiles as they dust the cobwebs off their curios. The people on the advanc ing wave itself smile in their turn as they see the green shores of these lotus-lands growing momentarily more distinct and entrancing. They load their cameras and don their sun-helmets and sun-suits for going ashore. Now the wave is close by.

The joyful local merchants are waving their cupped hands in welcome from the quai; the natives are singing one of their charming songs, the eager tourists waving back from along the rail.

And then, just as the wave is about to break, and everyone is happily thinking what a beautiful break it is to- be for all concerned—Whish-sh-sh! The wave has receded —gone! So brief was the splash that the sand of the beaches is scarcely wetted by it. Before welcomers or wel comed have had time to rub their eyes, the steamer is off again. The irate mer chants see nothing in their tills. The astonished natives see nothing but a van ishing smudge of smoke. The wistful travellers see nothing of the island save the peak of its highest mountain descend ing into the sea behind them, as though Father Neptune were sending it down in an express elevator.

Steamship companies offer their pros pective globe-girdlers a tempting array of ports in their beautifully - illustrated itineraries. Tempting is precisely what they must be, even after the voyage has been completed.

Many waves, besides those mentioned here, “have swelled, foamed for a moment, and gone,” across French Polynesia.

At present, the wave of world-wide in

dustrial depression has absorbed all the others. This wave, in defiance of natural law, doesn’t travel. It seems to remain stationary, over the smoke-blackened homes of its origin.

Polynesia is, therefore, enjoying a period of blessed peace; and it is blessed, I think, to the natives. They have their islands to themselves for a little while. I doubt if it will be for long. I predict that, once trans pacific airways are established —and that time is at hand—the islands of the South Seas will be, not occasionally, but per manently waved.

J.N.H.

Miss V. Roberts, who has been at the Samarai Hospital, will act as Matron at the Port Moresby Hospital until the re tiring matron’s leave of 10i months ex pires. Miss M. Franklin, who has been relieving nurse there for some time, is to be appointed to the position of Sister.

Mr. and Mrs. F. W. Bunting returned to Papua by the October Montoro. Mr.

Bunting has large plantation interests at Samarai, in the Eastern Division.

Miss Nellis Stead, of the Melanesian Mission’s school at Maravovo, Solomon Islands, arrived in Sydney on furlough by the Malaita at the end of September.