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Ba, Bowling - And Beer!

A Day Out With the Lads from Vatukoula

By Judy Tudor

rpHE day had been sufficiently hot to A blister a brass monkey. There had been nQ wind and strangely for Fiii, total lack of cloud I had spent most of it underneath a disporting themselves on the new Ba bowling green — scarlet in the face and looke" as fantastic as Tt was m£ , T hnnp thnt hpwiino- P laced - ? n °P e j£at my Fiji bowling Wends will agree that bowls to the non- Player can be a terribly boring game, But I had not gone there to see the bowls, anyhow, but to see the people and that happy thought had sustained me through the heat of the day. Now, getting on towards seven o’clock, it sus tained me no longer. Frankly, I was getting fed-up. 1 was to return to Tavua, and had P e ri rsu^ ded d ° ‘he bus chartered by the Vatukoula bowlers.

Dusk see med to intensify the heat rather than relieve it- and instructed bv the bowlers that thev wnnld he lea vine/“a nv right good pal and one of the nicest women I met in all of Viti Levu) and I tore ourselves loose from the drinking

party that had been the culminating Point of the day and, slightly wilted, in serted ourselves in the big, raw-boned, blue bus. A few odd souls who appar

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of his instructions 4 ‘ I A roar of good humour came from the tarpaulin shelter; and one of the people ‘ n f^ e voice as sour P as vfiLl ii ey on t f?, me un “ U 1 me Deer ana wni sky rUn out - It took about three-quarters of an hour for that to happen and, by then, several men had gone straying and could not be found. Others were sent in search, and they became lost in the darkness and we saw them no more for long minutes But

finally, we had a full roll-call and we got going—to the hotel, where luggage was to be taken aboard. Then the Indian driver, although he had been sitting in the bus for a good two hours, in the manner of his kind, discovered suddenly that water was necessary, and a fur ther 10 minutes was taken to dribble water into the radiator from a small can.

AT last we hit the high road, roaring through the night on the gravel road and over narrow bridges, like a bat out of hell. But this was not the finish of our delays. Three times we stopped in the 16 miles between Ba and Tavua, each time at the request of one of our passengers, who bawled his re quirements with devastating naturalness.

The driver, apparently used to such jags, would obediently stop, the back door would open and two or three earnest gentlemen would tumble out and start away back down the road a piece. “Aren’t you coming with us, Bob?” someone asked. “No,” answered Bob, with engag ing simplicity. “I haven’t been drinking beer; I’ve been drinking whisky.”

The mosquitoes had been either over come by the alcoholic fumes or driven from the bus by the rush of air, so they had given up biting me, but I was still soured.

I SANK into a fit of dark reflection . . .

These people didn’t know there was a world on, obviously. They must be quite unaware that in Europe people did not have enough to eat; that the Javanese wanted to fight the Dutch, and the Indo-Chinese the French; that in Australia the finest thing in class wars was in full flower or that our so-called

world leaders could not even lead them selves into mutual agreements.

I should have liked to have said in a loud voice that poor, darned New Guinea, who should have been a sister to this country in prosperity, had no plantations left and no towns; that her mines were at a standstill, her people were treated like moral lepers by the drooling Government that runs the coun try, and that 300 of her best citizens whom we had hoped were in prison camps, had only that week been posted as dead —drowned over three years ago in the hold of a Jap prison ship which was sunk by our Allies.

In the darkness of the . bus, I realised that I had never known how anti-social I had become, until I came to Fiji, where grog is king. In this month I have seen more liquor than I have in Australia in all the war years strung together. I have been bowed down with awe and admiration of a few of the women here, who can sink straight whiskies and brandies in a never-ending chain. But I found no desire to go into training, so that some day I may emulate them. Any hankering I might have had along those lines has been ironed out flat by the stern war years—when it has been im possible. anyhow, to buy as much as a bottle of ale, much less a bottle of spirits.

That —and, of course, a long line of Cal vinistic ancestors who bequeathed me few of the social graces, and a low, common preference for straight orange juice.

At length, we came out of the dark ness and, on a hill, in a blaze of lights, pulled up at the Tavua Hotel. But that is not the end of the story.

NEXT day I visited the mines at Vatu koula and met again most of those festive lads of the day before. They

now were ordinary, sensible citizens go ing about a job of work, and I liked them.

That is the silly part of this Fijian set-up. You meet people socially, and wipe them off as a pack of muddle heads who just don’t know whether this planet has a place in the firmament or not. You meet them in a different set ting, and they are fine jpeople—the kind with whom you like to associate and work.

The real answer I don’t know—not yet.

Fiji has suffered almighty little in this war; the South-west Pacific far too much. Between those two extremes prob ably lies the solution.

Perhaps there is a moral in this story.

But is it for me, or for the white Fijians?