Books, Reviews, writers

When Volunteers Serving Abroad

Earned A Mere $6 A Year

As a rip-roaring adventure story f rough life in the Pacific in the Id days, William T. Wawn’s The outh Sea Islanders and the Queens ind Labour Trade is one of the ;adable items of classic Pacific terature. But the book went into nly one edition, and that published l 1893 in London, so it has been mailable only to the keener col ctors or specialist libraries, and at price the average reader would ardly be prepared to pay.

H. E. Maude, who writes a fore ord for this reprint by the Austra an National University Press, re tarks that he paid only 3/6d for the )py that he picked up as a youth i Charing Cross Road; I got mine >r about $B, by mail from a British ookseller at a time when prices adn’t started their current climb, Lit today you might have to pay lore than $lOO for it in the original.

ANU’s new edition, photo -aphically reproduced, with a new idex, bibliography, notes and long itroduction by its editor, Dr Peter orris, is available for less than SAIO, ad is better value than the original ayway. There is no point in obtain ig high-priced originals when there a more informative reprint avail ble, unless you have an eye for ivestment. Who, for instance, but an yid collector/investor would want ook’s voyages in the originals when e can have Beaglehole’s massively (formative Hakluyt Society works?

One certainly gets a picture of aptain Wawn by reading his account f his many labour recruiting oyages over the final quarter of the ist century, when 100,000 Islanders, om every Pacific environment, were jcruited to work in the cattle ations, mines and plantations of lueensland, Fiji. Samoa and New aledonia. But Dr Corris is able to anfirm our picture of Wawn, or at mes change it, in his notes on /awn’s book, which he compares ith Wawn’s journals, so that he an show us what has been glossed ver or added to.

Wawn was not an entirely pleasant haracter. Born in Durham in 1837,

the son of a banker, shipowner and member of parliament, he had the kind of comfortable background and sound education which enabled him to write his one and only book. He also became a competent ship’s master, with experience in command of many ships operating throughout the Pacific Islands, including New Guinea and the Marshalls, but he was a stormy petrel, who had frequent clashes with officials and missionaries.

He had the sailor’s poor opinion of landsmen and took his bias out on the Government Agents sent aboard the labour recruiting ships to see justice was done.

But of course it wasn’t an easy trade for anybody to be involved in.

Although Wawn’s accounts help to make it clear that the incidence of kidnapping in those times has been exaggerated, kidnapping and cruelty there certainly were, but the more horrible excesses are the ones that we

keep hearing about. The vast majority of the recruits who went to Queens land volunteered for their three-year terms as a way of seeing the world, of becoming big men or of escaping village problems.

Having signed on, the recruit’s kinsmen ashore would receive an immediate parcel of trade goods, and what the recruit got for his three years’ work was $lB, his keep and his memories. But first he had to survive the voyage to Queensland, and with frequent outbreaks of diseases such as dysentery aboard the recruiting ships, his chances were reduced for a start. Then he had to survive the rigours of work he was not used to; the mortality rate in Queensland being five or six times as high among recruits as among the European population generally.

Each year he worked his chances of remaining the full term increased, as he became fitter and acclimatised.

Then he had the problem of being returned, because the recruiting ship, despite regulations, might not always put him ashore among friends, and at best he ran the risk of being robbed of his hard-won possessions, end at worst of being despatched by an enemy.

The recruiters too had their share of problems, with the frequent risk of a tomahawk attack or a stray shot even in areas where they had previously been well received. The Government Agents, poor fellows, responsible for the general welfare of the recruits, often had their life made a misery by masters and crew anxious to bend the regulations and to expect the GA to look the other way while they did it.

The smell of it all comes through strongly in this great adventure story of fights, murders, blockades, mutiny, cannibalism, human greed and endeavour in the early days of Euro pean penetration of the Pacific Islands. —Stuart Inder.

(The South Sea Islanders And

The Queensland Labour Trade, By

William T. Wawn, edited by Peter Corns.

Australian National University Press.

Canberra. $A9.95).