On Falling Head Over

Heels For Fiji

According to some old sage, the easiest way to learn a language is to sleep with it. By the same line of reasoning one might say that the best way to get a slant on a new country is to have a tender, loving interlude with one of its inhabitants.

This is what Sheree Lipton did in Fiji and her story-picture book, Fiji, I Love You, Full Speed, certainly has piquancy as a result.

Young and American, Sheree is obviously a girl of the make-love not-war persuasion and sometimes sees through rose-coloured glasses.

But although you may not share her admiration for Fiji’s Leader of the Opposition as an orator, may know the gaps in her history of the Hen nings family, and fail to see the Banabans of Rabi as quite the out raged victims or wicked British colonialism as she makes out, even the biggest fuddy-duddy reactionary will have to admit great warmth in her light-hearted story.

Of her attachment to her hand some Lauan, Lepani, she says; “It is not easy for an author, especially a woman, to write about an intimate part of her life in a non fiction book. ... Yet I could not honestly write about the Fijian with out admitting that much of my personal knowledge came from an intimate relationship with one in particular.”

But Lepani is only a small part of her book which, first to last, is about people. She is a great adventurer and takes off at the drop of a hat on horse-back, canoe, small ship or bus in order to reach some precarious objective. But island or inland, village or city, the scenery is always incidental to her encounters with those she meets along the way, head on and with exuberant enthusiasm.

Fijian villager, Indian cane-farmer, witch-doctor, fire-walker, preacher, teacher; a sleeping mat shared with others; a one-room flat in Suva with

Lepani and umpteen of his relations; domesticated rats at Keiyasi, at the top of the Sigatoka Valley; bed-bugs in Lau; cold taro for breakfast. This is Lipton Fiji, written about with such gusto that it sounds romantic even to someone who did pioneering long ago and now, Fiji-wise and otherwise, prefers a $l6-a-night room with bath, at Travelodge.

Sheree arrived in Fiji by accident —a four day wait in Suva for a plane to Tonga where she had a commission for coloured photographs.

She was not enthusiastic about the city and, with a change of clothing, her cameras and a ukelele, took off by bus for the top of the Sigatoka Valley to see “real village life".

The four days eventually stretched into many months, the end result of which is this book in which she tells it as she saw it.

Even the title is typical. It came from a young Fijian of Fulaga Island who had taken her skin diving. “We were out at sea, rowing back to shore after running out of petrol for the outboard motor,” she says. “His eyes goggled at me and he said ‘Man—l love you full speed.’ I got so hysterical 1 almost fell out of the boat. ‘That’s it, that’s my title,’ I cried. What he had just said were the words I was searching for.”

The book is illustrated with scores of her own professional colour shots —all but a few of them of people, not places.— J.T.

(Fiji, I Love You, Pull Speed.

Seven Seas Publishing Pty Ltd. NZ price $8.50).

Sheree Lipton, against a background of her beloved Fiji.