home on the range

By Our Honiara Correspondent

YOUR correspondent has just moved in to a new house in Honiara. The house is part of the new Government building scheme; it is made of plywood on concrete piles, built in an L-shape, with bedroom and bathroom mosquito-proofed; has an open living room in the corner of the L; and'a neat little kitchen, all shining clean and smelling of new wood.

Prom the living room you can look across at a bush-covered hillside, or down a slope towards the road, and beyond the road the sea dreams or surges (according to mood) between Guadalcanal and the blue islands of Savo and Nggela, and the point of Cape Esperance towards the West.

This house, like all the other new houses, has all mod. cons., including plenty of cupboard space, a refrigerator and a septic tank. (Some of the new residences hereabouts have a plumbing system that specialises in extraordinary rumblings and roarings, so that the sur prised visitor emerges from the bathroom like a shot out of a gun, in case there might be some misunderstanding. This noise was once used, deliberately but not unkindly, to accompany a budding saxo phone player who was playing Isa Lei at a party, and the result out-Spiked Jones.

Reason for noise is supposed to be the excellence of the pressure in the mains).

THE move to this house was a Caution.

A large Works Department truck arrived at 11 in the morning and was loaded (by four lethargic types) with packing cases, suitcases, five chairs, a large cane settee, a year-old hibiscus in a box of earth, a large Malaita-work cane screen, a saucepan full of black coffee (brainwave of the staff in case Missus demanded it on arrival), a wheelbarrow, a mattress and about a hundredweight of firewood which the cookie had thought fully chopped beforehand and which was put on the truck by two, big-eyed picca nins who sprang up somehow from the earth as soon as the truck appeared.

Truck, cookie and labour moved off up the hill in the midday heat.

Missus walked, followed by the two piccanins, each with a large knife, a small biscuit and the expression of a boxing fan with a ringside seat.

Missus carried an ex-Army hat, and in it, kept carefully level, two eggs, more precious than rubies between Morinda’s; a bottle of Angostura; a bottle of Chanel

No. 5; and another of Shanghai. None of these had any effect on the aroma of the party, each one of which could have been used as a drag for hounds, including Missus who had had only an intermit tent water supply at the last abode for nearly a week. (It was thought at first that Prawns in the Filter were the trouble, as our water supply is piped from river springs; however, a check revealed no prawns, only a broken underground pipe.) THE new house is built in a small flat area cut out of the side of the hill.

The garden has all to be made yet, from heavy rich black soil, with here and there lumps of buried coral bigger than your head. All the scrub has been cleared from the hillside except for countless young paw-paw trees. Some of them have had to go, although I apologise to each one pulled up for end ing its young life —but you can’t have about an acre of garden entirely made up of paw-paw trees.

I have planted some Giant Zinnias— the pictures on the packet were nearly as big as saucers; and certainly they are going ahead like bean stalks. And there are hibiscus and frangipani, and I shall have some lagerstroemia, which we call Pride of India, and bauhineas, and the cookie has found in the bush (where a friend of his, now gone home, put them to makim line round a garden) plenty too much Bird of Paradise trees. The Agri cultural Department has provided seed for a lawn, and some young flowering shrubs.

Sixteen packets of flower seeds are on the next ship, and the vegetable garden is partly planted already.

t' l ' * s °dd what a difference there is be- JL tween anybody else’s newly-cleared hillside and your own. No doubt they all look alike to an impartial eye—but anybody else’s is just rather desolate ground, while your own is full of entranc ing possibilities. Already I can see the still unplanted shrubs and annuals flower ing in a glow of colour. I think the pub will see much less of me (it is our only community meeting place until the new Club is built) and I shall gradually be come one of those comfortable, fat middle aged gardening women, It only remains to develop a sense of proportion about things that go bump in the night. Certainly, my house is a little remote from the main settlement: if it was not there would not be all the beau tiful green jungle hillside to look at.

Sometimes it would be nice to feel more like Major Jim Corbett, the hunter of man-eating tigers, who, having considered the terrain on one occasion, “knew that he was quite safe as long as the tigress was behind him” And I should like to know who invented the phrase about land ing as lightly as a cat. He couldn’t have heard the crash-landings made by my cat.

The cat comes on big dog’s feet, hoping at 4 a.m. for something to eat. ov , .- . , .

Sumns floor ght U enmohnHv °^’ii^ C !™ t^^L some k oc * y tneep no more, There are only two ways about the Solomons—either you can’t wait to get out; or else they get you in. They’ve got me in—the sea, and the warmth, and the strong smell of copra; screaming white cockatoos, and red parrots, green plan tain leaves; sparkle of fireflies on the hillsides. Mud and mildew and all.

thrince Tungi of Tonga they put this cap tion: “His Royal Highness Tungi, Crown Prince and Prime Minister of Suva, wears an ancestral mat around his waist, a sym bol of devotion to his mother, Queen Salote.” * * ♦ THE 1950 Pulitzer Prize for the best original American play has gone to the musical production, South Paci fic, which was based on James Michener’s novel, Tales from the South Pacific.

Michener won the Pulitzer Prize for the best novel of 1948 with his story.

Tales from the South Pacific had many interwoven stories, arranged around the central theme of the assault on a heavily-fortified, Jap-held Pacific Island.

The play, South Pacific, is based on only one of the stories —the love story of the American nurse and the New Hebrides cocoa planter. * * * THE PIM and its readers have taken considerable interest in the children of the late Robert Dean Frisbie since they met them in his book, Island of Desire, and renewed acquaintance in daughter Johnny’s book, Miss Ulyssus of Puka Puka.

Since their father’s death the girls have been living in Rarotonga, Cook Islands, but they will soon be scattered. Johnny, in May, will go to stay with friends in Honolulu; Elaine is to go to school in New Zealand; and Nga is under the care of Mr. William Watson of Rarotonga. The two boys, Charlie and William (Jakey of the books) are still training as jockeys in New Zealand.

Articles on Robert Dean Frisbie by his friend, James Norman Hall, appeared in the August, September and October issues of the Atlantic Monthly last year. * * * GETTING AROUND: They are telling this story in Sydney: A Qantas pilot met a bank manager friend in the street. It was a Wednesday. The pilot said he’d just got back from London on the Mon day and was going to Fiji on Friday, back to Sydney on Sunday and to Noumea on Monday. He suggested a meeting at the same place for next Wednesday. His friend considered: “I’m going to Dungog (about 100 miles NW of Sydney) for the week-end, but I think I can make it,” he said. * * * THERE was a notable event when the firewalkers of Beqa, in full ceremo nial decoration, gave a demonstration in the grounds of the Training Col lege, Fiji, where the South Paci fic conference was held. Some 25 of them came across from Beqa Island, bringing all their mysterious equipment, including the stones. They

dug a pit, wherein they piled the stones; then, at 10 a.m., they lit a large wood fire, which blazed upon the stones until 5 p.m.; then, while half a dozen men engaged in incantations and meditation in a near by hut, the islanders, with loops at the end of long sticks, and with much ceremonial howling, dragged away the burning logs. Next, using a creeper-vine 30 or 40 feet long, they dragged the hot stones around until all lay flat in the pit.

At 5.30, the lads left their hut, and walked slowly down to the pit, formed single file, and walked smartly around two thirds of the pit, across the hot stones.

They hopped out, their co-conspirators immediately covered the whole pit over with bundles of green foliage, which smoked heavily—and that was all.

There is no doubt that they walked on the stones, for perhaps 30 seconds. This observer, a disbeliever, and supported by another observer, Mr. Harold Gatty, equally a disbeliever, would point out:— • That the islanders brought the stones all the way from Beqa, which means, of course, that the stones are peculiarly suit able for the purpose; That, after the removal of the fire, some considerable time was spent pushing the cooling stones around, and the top stones (nearest the fire) were not necessarily the stones walked on.

The stones, from a distance, looked white-hot—but they were originally grey white stones, and no one had a chance to test their heat because the pit, immedi ately afterwards, was covered with green ery. • That the Fijians were only 30 seconds in the pit, and they all have Well calloused feet.

I had never seen fire-walking before, and I was not impressed. But some of the delegates from non-fire-walking Islands of the Pacific got a great kick out of it. —RWR.