New Books About The Pacific

A Grimble Book

250 Pages of Entertainment

SIR ARTHUR GRIMBLE, formerly a Resident Commissioner of the Gilbert and Ellice Colony, and a distinguished officer of the British Colonial Service, always was known as a “born writer”; and now he has proved his merit by producing A Pattern of Islands, acclaimed in Britain and United States as “a book of the month”.

It is a collection of his memories of the Gilbert and Ellice Islands, and nothing quite so delightfully readable has come our way in years.

Grimble went originally to the Islands as a cadet officer, with a young wife and a very small salary; his official status grew, and so did his family; but he brought to his official troubles, as to his private economic difficulties, a habit of observation, a sense of lively humour, and a memory which have enabled him to hit the literary jackpot.

As a fellow-resident, he got right into the lives of the Gilbertese, and those interesting and generally lovable Micronesians never have been more sympathetically presented to the world. They may be primitives, in some respects; but, all through his descriptions of them, Grimble shows them as Nature’s gentlemen.

The value and virtue of the book lie in the fact that the author gives us a long series of facts and incidents, and leaves us to make the generalisations. In the majority of books of this kind, one gets the summaries and conclusions, without the essential facts.

The newspaper reviewers, quoting liberally; show that the book’s sections are devoted to humorous incidents, gay adventure, nature studies, native myths. The parts we like best are those in which the now retired Grimble, author, describes without mercy the ridiculous and ex ceedingly funny situations in which Grimble, the eager young cadet, frequently found himself. There is the story of how he was sent out in a storm to a ship off Ocean Island, to bring in the RC’s new bath and the community’s Christmas whisky, and of the deplorable things which happened to him; and, another, of the occasion when he went in a small boat to arrest a very large chief engineer who had chased the captain off his ship.

Grimble spent some time on

Abemama; and here we have— probably for the first time—the full

and authentic story of that remark

able man, George McGhee Murdoch.

Murdoch shares with Bully Hayes the

doubtful honour of having been the

subject of an extraordinary number

of purely imaginative tales, by un

scrupulous penny-a-liners. Murdoch

may have been occasionally in con

tact with pirates; but Grimble, who

seems to have known his story well, says nothing about it.

Pattern of Islands, well indexed,

is a useful work of reference, as well

as providing 250 pages of fascinating

description, sketch and story.

★ RALPH RASHLEIGH: This is Aus tralia’s wonder-book of the year which, in recent weeks, has received the full attention of local book-reviewers. The story itself, classed as a novel, is re markable enough; the fact that it ever saw print in its present form, even more so.

James Tucker, the author, arrived in Sydney in 1827 as a convict —sentenced to deportation “for the term of his natural life’’ for trying to extort £5 from his cousin. At the time of his arrival in NSW he was 19, 5 ft. 3 in. tall and des cribed as a clerk. During his first five years in the Colony he evidently spent some time at the notorious agricultural establishment at Emu Plains of which he writes in his book, probably served in one of Mitchell’s road gangs and also spent some time in the Campbelltown district. It was during this period he founded his long friendship with a sturdy Scots carpenter, Alexander Burnett, into whose keeping the manuscript of Ralph Rashleigh was eventually given and whose descendants preserved it for 70 or 80 years.

After these first five years, and inter spersed with periods of clerking, Tucker had tickets-of-leave which he invariably forfeited for some misdemeanour or other.

In 1844 he lost the latest of his tickets at Maitland and was sent as a “special” to a convict establishment at Port Macquarie. At that time William Gray was Police Magistrate (and a founder of the Macquarie Literary Club) and Stephen Partridge, Superintendent of Convicts. Their patronage of literature provided him with a new interest and it was here, with government pens, ink, paper and time he wrote “Ralph Rashleigh or the Life of an Exile, by Giacomo di Rosenberg”—also a drama called “Jemmy Green in Australia”, and a drama “The Grahames’ Vengeance or the Fate of James the First, King of Scotland by Otto von Rosenberg”—and probably others.

In 1847 the establishment at Port Mac quarie was closed down and Tucker was granted a ticket-of-leave for Port

Macquarie but lost it again in 1840 an was sent to prison in Goulburn. He r< ceived a ticket again in 1850 but lost for stealing a watch. In 1853 he had ticket for Morton Bay district but tl rest of his life is obscure—he died i Liverpool Asylum of “decay of natun in 1866. His age was presumed to be 7 actually it was 56—comment enough the life he had led as a deportee.

Tucker’s wasted life was largely tl result of the penal system, but he w essentially a weak man without the mor stamina to beat his environment. It w a vicious system, but men did rise abo it—as did his friend Burnett. Tuck knew the dire punishments, but he st succumbed.

The manuscripts of Ralph Rashk etc., were then forgotten until 19 when the Royal Historical Society he an exhibition of rare manuscripts, it a Mr. Robert Baxter brought t tattered manuscript that had been h to his wife, Margaret Burnett, 50 yea earlier by her father. He could tell t Society nothing about the author.

A garbled version of the story was pu lished in London in 1929 but for 30 yea the identity of “Ralph Rashleigh’ author remained a mystery. In 1949, IS Colin Roderick who edits the prese book, was given all the facts as th were known then, and set out to pro the identity of the author. It took h two years of intensive research—he te how it was done in the Foreword to t book.

'TT'HE story that Tucker tells is pai fiction obviously part - autobi graphical. For the most part is concei sheer brutality—the brutality of the t portation system as a whole; t brutality of prisoner to prisoner; of pel official to prisoner. Of not-so-petty offic to prisoners—and of all and sundry anyone of weaker fibre. Here and the like a rare flower rising out of a stinki swamp, there is an official or a man or woman with the ordinary virtues of fa mindedness. These latter seem to ma the story credible. One interrupts on reading a thousand times to ask—coi men live through such savagery apparently was the lot of the ordina convict? Yet, there remains the undi lying conviction that Ralph brought most of his troubles himself.

At one stage he is sent to the Ne castle coalmines. There the coiivi exist underground, seeing no light 1 six days of the week, living on a mea| ration of cornmeal and salt beef, doi an incredible amount of the most arduc labour. On Sundays they are brought the surface and men, apparently at ra dom, were picked out for punishment 50 or 100 or more lashes.

In these vitamin-conscious, heali conscious days it seems almost pi believing that the human body coi stand such treatment.

Much of this part of Ralph’s story believed to have been based on the st< of the author and one begins to undi stand why, at the age of 56, he looked The remainder of the story is pi

fiction. Ralph escapes from Newcastle, eventually falls in with some aborigines end in company with two lubras makes his way to the tip of Cape York. In the light of modern knowledge, his adventures luring this phase are silly but they are In accord with the knowledge a convict rould have of the natives and the sountry beyond the narrow confines of lis ticket-of-leave. - Ralph Rashleigh is a remarkable book -of deep interest to the student of Inman nature as well as of history. It B the only book written by a convict ibout the NSW convict system. Its author Feak, drifting, an outcast from decent ociety is resurrected in his book, more han 100 years after he had written it, 10 years after his death. He would be a ■rprised man if could know it.—JT.

Published by Angus and Robertson, Ltd., lydney, for 18/9. ★

Come Away, Pearler; By Colin

llmpson: It is a stock axiom of the Bviewers’ trade that a writer cannot urn out fact and fiction with equal acility. It may be so, but the average eader will probably find Colin Simpson’s irst novel entertaining enough, if ntertainment is what he is looking for— nd why read a novel if you are not?

Last year Simpson gave us “Adam in khre”, a factual story of the Arnhem md native which quickly became an astralian best-seller. “Come Away, 'earler’’ is a different kettle of fish.

I has a heroine, two love stories, a plot, nd is certainly action-packed—sudden eath, hurricanes, opium dens, fights, and 11 the perils of pearling.

It is a story of pearl diving around bout the 1890’s; the location—all the way rom Thursday Island to Derby; and the haracters a mixed bunch gathered from ranee, England, India, the South Seas, nstralia and the Pacific Islands.

It is not the “Great Australian Novel’’ ut as Australian novels go it is better lian most. If one must drop a brick Mnewhere (in order to maintain one’s lembership of the Book-Reviewer’s hion) then let it fall on the heroine who »uld have been, with profit, less full f high principles and more like a human eing, and who engenders in one a esire to kick her in the lace drawers or hatever real ladies wore in 1890.—JT. [Published by Angus & Robertson, Ltd., ydney, price 16/-. ★ THE CANNIBALS, by Lucille Iremonger, I about Fiji, But it is not, as one light think, about Fijian cannibals. Al kough a Fijian girl indirectly supplies lie motif, the native Fijians are in- Idental to the story which is peopled by lie same sort of small-time, small-town ige-of-the-outer social class who in cited her previous novel (about the Pest Indies). Whether she does this ecause she believes all Colonials are art of the submerged tenth, or because he finds this class interesting, is any ne’s guess.

This is no glamour story about the South Sea Islands—she draws a cruel picture of Fiji, but it is a picture that could be drawn about most any small community. If Fiji scores badly, New Zealand (and New Zealanders) come even lower down the scale.

The time is 1942, when most South Pacific communities expected to find Japs at the bottom of the garden (and many did). And that is part of the theme—whether to bolt or to stay put.

Viti, the heroine, who at one stage goes as a nurse to a nearby (and mythical) phosphate island says; “If they (the native women) are to be left here why should I be saved? It is bad enough for all the phosphate staff, all the tea drinking, mahjongg-playing European wives running away like scalded cats!”

The plot concerns the momentary lapse of Viti’s bethrothed—a plonky, un imaginative, John Bull of a District Officer—with the village virgin and the

male child that resulted therefrom. The reactions of the characters from that point on are credible enough—but the lapse itself seems scarcely so. The village virgin was never out of mother’s sight— except when, in the dusk, she once sat near the stream and dabbled her feet in the water. There the District Officer stumbled upon her in the dark, and, although he had not set eyes upon her previously—presto, a part-Fijian son.

It is interesting to reflect that beneath the forbidding front of some Colonial Officers (who, taken in the main, have been within the category Stuffed Shirt) there maybe beats the heart of the Wildest Wolf.

Summing up; It will make some Fiji residents spit—for the things that are true rather than for its inaccuracies.

Good entertainment, even without the Fiji background.—JT.

Published by Hammond, Hammond & Co., Ltd., London, for 9/6 Stg.