Writing Business

Johnny Frisbie

Enters The

FRISBIE fans have wondered why Robert Dean, of that ilk, did not continue what he began in “Island of Desire,” and give us more of the Swiss-Family-Robinson adventures of his own brood. ‘But it apnears now. that the iob will not be completed by Papa, but by teen-age daughter Florence Ngato korua Frisbie.

Florence—better known as Johnny— was one of the heroines of “Island of Desire.” and is hard 9t work on a book of her own which, it is hoped, will be oublished early in 1947. Three ton-rank ing American nublishers have asked for an option on it, at all events—which is three publishers and three options more that most fully-grown Oceanic authors get for their books.

But mavbe Johnnv Frisbie has been born under the right kind of star. Her young life has been so full of the stun romanticists wot of. that if she stopped having adventures right now she would still have far more than the regulation quota.

Her nick-name is derived from the fact that at the time of her birth her father was rum-running between Tahiti and Mexico; carrving. so he savs, thousands of cases of Johnny Walker to down-trod den Yankees.

She has alreadv been over most of the South Seas, in trading schooners, warships and Armv bombers; and lived in some of the remotest islands in the Pacific. She knows well Puka-Puka, Manihiki. Penrhvn. Maupiti—and Suvar row. where a map-sized hurricane in 1942 almost wrote “finis” to her young life.

Since her own mother died some years ago, she has been mother, cook, nurse and guardian to her father, her two small sis ters and her brother. When father be came ill in Penrhyn last year, and was flown to hospital in Pago Pago she stayed behind in Penrhvn and looked after the rest of the family, at the same time teaching in the local school because the former teacher did not know enough to teach her. Later, unaided, she packed up their gear, shepherded kid sisters and kid brother on board an Army bomber, and flew to Pago to join her father.

But Johnny wasn’t long in Pago, either.

She got aboard the smelly old schooner “Samoa” and set off on the long journey to Swain’s Island to see if it were a good place for Papa to recuperate from his ill ness. It wasn’t. She decided that it was too hot. there was not enough fresh food —and there were no movies.

Right now Johnny and sisters Elaine and Nga and brother Jakey and father are all in Western Samoa, where Johnny is at work on her adventures (as yet un named) and Robert Dean on a novel called “Dawn Sails North.”

Pacific residents—who are a hopelessly critical public when it comes to books about their own domain—are going to be more than ordinarily interested in the writings of a youngster who knows only the Polynesian world, and who will write from the inside looking out, rather than from the outside looking in—a slant, how ever well disguised, that has characterised every other writer on the Pacific up till now.

THE FRISBIES: Elaine, Papa, Nga, Johnny, Jakey.