Polynesian Spontaneity
p. 35 · Read in the full issue
Charms a Sydney Audience
LIFE is not all beer and cheer for members of concert parties who visit military establishments and hos pitals in Australia. The Aussie Service man, in the mass, is not known for his politeness and he suffers fools neither gladly nor silently. Knowing these things, arid also the type of “entertainment” that is served up to the troops under this guise, it is easy to imagine why the Sydney Polynesian Club’s concert-party, in its natural spontaneity, has won the whole-hearted approval of fighting men upon scores of occasions.
On Friday, August 20, in the theatre of History House, Sydney, the public was given the opportunity of sampling the kind of entertainment dispensed by the concert-party—and the public found it good. The great charm of these people is that they pretend to nothing that they are not: they, as Polynesian singers and dancers, obviously get as much happiness from giving a song or a dance as the audience does in taking it. If the cur tain gets stuck—well, it gets stuck, and there is no panic; if someone loses a poi, the incident becomes part of the show; if the accompanist pitches his tune on too high a note, he begins again, and no one cares two hoots.
The programme was a long one of items culled from the length and breadth of Polynesia—from New Zealand to Hawaii, and from Tahiti to the Ellice Islands.
The most lingering impressions left in the mind of this part of the audience was: the strangely beautiful quality of the Maori voice, reminiscent of the double-stopping of a master-violinist; and the thought of battalions of brown
men, charging across North African sands, and scaring hell out of the Axis forces.
Probably—such is the unromantic nature of modern war—the Maori Bat talion from New Zealand, and the Paci fic Battalion of Fighting France, go into battle like anyone else; nevertheless, it is a happy thought to imagine them attacking with all the blood-curdling eye-rolling, tongue-twisting and war whooping of the haka and other similar Polynesian dances. —J.T.