In Defence Of

Bods And Smells

BODS have softly and suddenly vanished from Honiara, as though Judy Tudor were a boo jum. Involuntary users of the word may be seen looking furtively back wards. Close behind them treads a reader of the June PIM.

It’s a pity, really. The word in Honiara grew up, gradually, and as your correspondent now sees, un noticed, from the usage of certain Administrative Officers, most of whom have transferred to other Colonies, and it became not so much a habit as a custom.

Its essence was the genuine and most sensitive courtesy of the Eng lish towards strangers and other people you aren’t on familiar terms with. By inference, as J.T. has partly seen, it implied the oneness of humanity—His Excellency the High Commissioner, Heads of De partments, tourists, cookboys and the poor native labourer with the polio withered leg. There was neither Jew nor Greek, Government nor free, male nor female; but all Bods.

I don’t know where we’ll get a better word.

Honiara is more used to critic ism than to the generous praise J.T. has given to those aspects of the

settlement she saw and appreci ated, but I should like to speak for Government staff.

The arrival of the High Com mission intensified both the hous ing shortage and the shortage of junior staff. For a time every avail able resident applicant (or bod), together with staff already em ployed, was needed. All were given a trial and most proved very good value. Few 7 earned anything like £l5 a week.

I believe that in general no Gov ernment staff in the British Com

monwealth has worked harder, and for longer hours of voluntary un paid overtime, than both senior and junior members of the Western Pacific High Commission, during the last six months.

Our total losses usually deport themselves, in due course, drifting back to Sydney hotel bars, where over the years, and beers, they have gained publicity by anathematising the incompetence of any Govern ment which failed to appreciate their worth. In most small tropical communities, they come, and they

go, and are forgotten, except for an occasional reminiscence.

One more word, mainly about Rabaul, which has so many greater attractions than indoor outhouses.

Tourists are ex officio preoccupied with plumbing, since travelling in small ships is hard on the works, and nature does not automatically lead people to the right place, I have been grateful to my nose for guidance more than once.

Rabaul may be primitive in patches, but it has charm and colour, and it is arguable that colour to the mind is the result of a variety of smells combined with visual im pressions. Nostalgic memories of the gorgeous East are almost in separable from stink. Memories of post-war Rabaul pleasantly combine frangipani, wet grass after rain, the salt sea smell of the harbour, an overtone of beer and sulphur fumes and dust, incense and mildew from Chinatown (with an occasional acrid undertone of drains) the fresh, clear coolness of morning at first light; the strong scent of wharves slippery with copra, and the aromatic warm smell of the lovely tree-lined Kokopo road by moonlight, where the fireflies flash their brilliant fairytale signals.

There is no colour in the sight or smell of a scrubbed orphanage, or of asepsis in a hospital theatre, though admittedly there is no glamour in a dirty saucepan.

Most of us coming back from leave have scrambled ashore from

a dinghy somewhere on the way home, or landed on a tumbledown rickety wharf, where a few old coconuts and bits of driftwood and pumice are bobbing on the tide, and taken a deep breath of copra, and mildew, and something unidentifi able which is possibly not quite

clean, and suddenly with an in describable thankfulness known that we were back again in the islands.

This is not a song about Please don’t burn our Outhouse Down, taut a plea for the unabashed variety of tropical smells, by contrast with the

grey disgusting combined odours of tens of scrubbed basement restaur ants, hundreds of washed early morning delicatessens, thousands of hygienic dieseline bus exhausts, and half a million deodorised workers, all breathing our civilisation.

I like Rabaul.—KAY POOLE. (Mr. D. S. Askew, writing from Wewak, TNG, says that “Bod” is a war-time word —e.g., “How many bods will be needed for a certain operation?”)