Hilarious, Earthy Account

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Hilarious, Earthy Account Of Life In The Cook Is.

Among the 66 candidates who contested the 22 seats in he recent Legislative Assembly elections in the Cook Islands vas one, Robert Julian Dashwood, 66, whom a New Zealand ournalist described last year as a lean, knobbly, eccentric inglishman “with an impeccable accent, a nimble mind, and in uncontrollable urge to shock the rest of the world.”

R. DASHWOOD was the only • European to be elected in the mbly poll—beating his Polyne opponent in the Mauke elec te by 197 votes to 43. He has e been made a member of the k Islands Executive Committee >inet).

Mr. Dashwood has lived on Mauke, an island of 41 square miles, 150 miles north-east of Rarotonga, since the late 1930’5.

He went there as a £25-a-month branch manager for a Rarotonga trading firm after a varied career, which, according to his own accounts, included studying for the ministry, serving as a midshipman in the Royal Navy and reaching the rank of lieutenant in the Royal Air Force during World War I, representing a motor firm in the north of England, working as a schoolteacher in Con stantinople, farming in South Africa, rubber-planting in Malaya, and running a school of applied psychology in Australia.

According to his self-supplied biography in the Pacific Islands Year Book and Who’s Who, he has been decorated with the Greek Order for Valour N class, which sounds rather like the sort of decoration the Greeks would award to the Duke of Plaza Toro.

Correspondent

Anyway, there is no doubt that Mr. Dashwood has lived in the Cook Islands since the 1930’5, as in those days—under the pseudonym Julian Hillas—he used to act as PlM’s cor respondent, and we have his stories on file to prove it!

However, Mr. Dashwood eventually found that collecting shells and selling them to conchologists throughout the world was far more profitable than writing, and little has been seen from his pen for the last 25 years or so.

Now, at last, Mr. Dashwood— still writing as Julian Hillas—has broken the long drought with an earthy, light-hearted and often hilarious account of his life in the Cook Islands.

The book was originally published in the United States under the title

Today Is Forever. But the English version, which is the only one we have seen, and which we understand has been much edited and ab breviated, is called South Seas Paradise (erk!).

South Seas Paradise begins in Sydney in 1930, where the author, with an incompatible wife in tow called Winifred, was on his beams ends, and one of more than 100,000 unemployed.

A silent movie, White Shadows in the South Seas, moved him to sell his last remaining asset, a decrepit car, and buy a steamer ticket to Tahiti.

When the steamer sailed, Winifred was left behind, and Dashwood decided to “remedy a lack of ap preciation shown by the war office some years previously” by adopting the rank of captain.

On reaching Rarotonga, he met an old friend, James Carfax-Foster (now

of Fiji), whom he had last seen in Constantinople “organising a football game on the floor of a night club and insisting that the White Russian hostess take part.”

Carfax-Foster invited him to visit a plantation he was running at the far end of the island, and Dashwood wound up running the place himself instead of going to Tahiti. His self adopted captain’s rank helped him to bluff officialdom into permitting him to stay.

He subsequently made a living by trapping rats and collecting a bounty from the Administration-delivering the rats whole, and very dead, when officialdom refused to accept only their tails; and by serving in a Rarotonga store.

Then he spent an idyllic year on Rakahanga atoll in the Northern Cooks—a place where “today is forever, and tomorrow never comes”, and where he wrote a novel called I Know An Island, which is his only other published book.

In Rakahanga, the author married a Polynesian girl—Winifred having divorced him, presumably for desertion; but wife No. 2 got divorced herself after Dashwood found her in bed with someone else; and the author eventually married a third time after his third wife’s Polynesian grandmother found him in bed with the girl.

Rabelaisian

The Dashwoodian descriptions of the dereliction of wife No. 2 and of the author’s premarital adventures with wife No. 3 are among the more Rabelaisian episodes in South Seas Paradise. But also high on the list is the author’s account of his highly profitable life as a “pox doctor’s clerk” during a visit to Tahiti in the ’thirties.

Another highlight—a cruel one— is a side-splitting account of the visit to Mauke during the war of New Zealand’s vice-regal pair, Lord and Lady Galway.

Throughout the book are many acute observations on Polynesian life as the author sees it and some brilliant pearls of Dashwoodian philosophy, which clearly explain how the author has managed to live where he has all these years and to enjoy every minute of it.—RL.

(South Seas Paradise. Robert Hale

Ltd., London, 26/6).