The Day We Jacked Up!

By Doug Askew

The first European strike in the Islands happened on Vanikoro in the Eastern Solomons about 1929. I know, be cause I was in it.

rJSRE were about 32 of us em ployed on Vanikoro by a Mel bourne concern in those days, and we could muster 11 nationalities.

There we were, for better or worse, on a two-years’ contract —the most isolated group of men in the Islands. Vanikoro is just a mountain

ous place, completely surrounded by reef and covered with beautiful kauri pine—and these were not just saplings, either.

The largest tree I felled there measured 38 ft around the girth, 10 ft off the ground: and I cut ten 12 ft logs out of it before coming to the branches.

For the first year, everything went pretty well. We left the beach at seven in the morning on the log train, which ran inland on the flat about three miles, and then we climbed the mountains to where the kauri commenced at 2,000 ft.

Self-respecting Bushmen

We did not receive the food any self-respecting Australian bushman would consider necessary to start the day’s toil, such as porridge with a hunk of butter, plus a slab of steak with a few eggs, and lashings of toast and tea. That kind of food just didn’t exist on Vanikoro!

But we got by—losing weight steadily, and beset by malaria and blackwater fever.

There came the day when we farewelled our Westralian manager, who had served his two years. He was popular—“a scholar and a gentleman”, as we say in the bush.

We got in his place a roughneck type who breezed ashore and started to lay the law down about how he expected things done.

He was not the manager type.

Especially for a place like Vanikoro. (What we needed, I guess, was a cover like Dag Hammarskjold!) So, up went our hackles against the, oppressor with his trivial rules, until his final order carpe: “All bushmem MUST be up in the hills ready to swing the axe at 7 a.m. and NOT—repeat NOT—just leaving the beach.”

“To hell with that!” we said. We told ourselves that he had just landed, full of New Zealand fat, as you might say, and that by this time we were a pretty debilitated lot of wrecks, in our second year. I had dropped down from a nice solid 12 stone to 10 stone.

We Jacked Up

So we all jacked up and went fishing. It’s funny to look back on it now. Another Nino Culotta would have been in his element, for we were a “weird mob”, by any standard. , The new manager shot on radio messages all over the place. We held a meeting (during which he got pushed off the wharf into salt water).

Well* Melbourne office droppe us, and backed the new boss.

We expected it, anyway, but w did not expect the Resident Corn missioner to arrive from Tulagi o the Government yacht Ranadi , ph his offsiders and a contingent c native police!

Maybe, they expected a Cong situation, or a Eureka Stockade ac and were surprised perhaps to fin nary a corpse around!

The good ship Calula breezed i shortly after that, and we took o for South with whoops of joy an certain appropriate gestures.

The fare to Melbourne was on] £l5, and I reckon that each of i ate about £4O worth of tucker o the trip, after being half-starve on Vanikoro.

That lovely grub—with the Chines stewards lashing it out to us, the: eyes popping at the spectacle ( really hungry men.

That was the highlight of my ir troduction to the Isles of Illusion and it was a tough place.

D. S. Askew, on Vanikoro, with the large[?] kauri tree he felled there—38 ft around t[?] girth, 10 ft off the ground.