the Papuan pioneers

Literary licence among the Papuan pioneers

No one could say that Maslyn Williams latest novel, The Benefac tors, hasn’t got everything; New Gui nea cannibals with other nasty habits; sacrificial rites; gin-sodden lugger cap tains; unscrupulous traders and land grabbers; fanatical missionaries; stiff necked officials with invalid wives and sexpot daughters.

It’s a rollicking adventure in darkest Papua through which stalk old ghosts —imaginative distillations of just about every hero and anti-hero of the last quarter of the last century, all telescoped together in character and time for the purpose of this story.

Through this mish-mash one dimly sees Chester, real-life magistrate of Thursday Island, who abortively ran up the British flag at Port Moresby in 1883 but, in the novel, also en dowed with some of the Victorian upper-crust bigotry of Sir Peter Scratchley, Special Commissioner of British New Guinea, 1884-5.

There’s a great non-conformist missionary compounded of the Lon don Missionary Society’s Dr. Lawes (who lived to a ripe old age) and the same LMS’s Chalmers (who managed to get himself killed and eaten in

Western Papua). There are the proto type Roman Catholic missionaries who defied authority to set up in business at Yule Island; and there is even the shade of Queen Emma of New Guinea in the headstrong daughter of the magistrate who plays sex games with the younger son of British aristocracy who for the mom ent is serving as Dad’s assistant.

Schooner captains, blackbirders, traders and other baddies of the period, who are already too well stereotyped to need prototypes in this or any other novel of the South West Pacific, make up the rest of the dramatis personae.

As the novel opens Thomas Goffett (Chester/Scratchley) finds himself Magistrate on a “tiny island settle ment on the extreme tip of the colony of Queensland”. He has come to the end of the line as far as his career is concerned and feels that he has let his upper-class wife and children down.

He eagerly grasps the opportunity, therefore, when his great friend Dr.

Hogbin (Lawes/Chalmers) arrives with sealed orders from the Queens land Government instructing him to

proceed forthwith to raise the flag at Port Moresby.

He does just that even though Dr.

Hogbin disapproves of annexation as strongly as he disapproves of traders, but as the real life Chester and the fictitious Goffett both learned, the British Government swiftly repudiated the annexation and Goffett therefore finds himself out of a job.

Meantime daughter Charlotte, who has none of her father’s social inhibi tions, has tired of playing games with aristocratic Anthony and has married the trader Gaimon, arch-enemy of Goffett and Hogbin.

The novel then winds to its climax somewhere west of Port Moresby in a free-for-all between missionaries, cannibalistic Papuans, traders. Magist rate Goffett and the British Navy.

Charlotte and husband, rescued in the nick of time from being sacrificial offerings at an orgy, are subsequently deported to the Carolines where hus band dies, Charlotte marries a Ger man Baron (who also dies) and lives on to become the most famous plan ter/widow in the Pacific.

There have been thousands of such novels published about similar exploits in other parts of the world and no particular reason why there should not be many more about Papua New Guinea. While some of the incidents are far-fetched, the back ground is authentic enough and, on the whole, it is quite good fun.

However, it does not come into the category of a serious novel; nor does it tell us anything new about this era or this area; or point up a moral or a point of view that might escape us in a book of non-fiction.

It seems odd, therefore, that this book should have been written with the assistance of the Commonwealth Literary Fund. I have always under stood that the purpose of the fund was to finance struggling authors not yet established or to help publish material that was important but not commercially viable.

Maslyn Williams has half-a-dozen published books to his credit and al though this novel is entertaining en ough, it would not matter to literature, Papua or the world at large if it had never been written at all. —Judy Tudor. < The o Be " e f ac tom, By Maslyn Williams.

Angus & Robertson. $3.95.)