There's some fun being

an Island missionary

Contemporary accounts of what life was like in the South Seas in the early 19th century have come to us through the writings of the early missionaries and to these people stu dents of the Pacific owe a great debt.

Missionaries have been pretty ardent scribblers ever since, although a good many of their books, in later times, have been directed mostly at those like-minded about saving the heathen, being a bit too evangelistic for the ordinary reader. Two new books from missionaries that are not unduly so are Married to Melanesia by Murial Jones; and Doctor in Papua by Berkeley Vaughan.

Both make pleasant enough read ing, each writer having a well developed sense of humour.

Together these two books show that Melanesia and Melanesians don’t change very much in a generation.

Although Dr Vaughan writes of Papua before World War II and Mrs Jones of the Solomons in the late 19605-early 19705, the problems en countered by each differ very little.

Dr Vaughan went to Kwato, a tiny island near Samarai in SE Papua, as its first medical officer, not long after he graduated from St Bartholomew’s Hospital, London in the early 19305. Kwato was already an unusual organisation in the miss ionary world of New Guinea, having begun as an offshoot of the London Missionary Society by the Rev Charles Abel in 1891. It emphasised the practical side of missionary work and was a generation before its time.

It early went into the business of saw-milling and taught boat-building, carpentry, engineering and ran suc cessful coconut and rubber plant ations. It also gave its people a fair standard of English and in the 1930 s a Papuan who had passed through Kwato was set apart from his fel ows in the same way as in England a graduate of Oxford might have aeen set apart among the coal miners af a Welsh valley.

Dr Vaughan’s story covers the aeriod between 1935 and when he eft at the beginning of the Pacific War in 1942. After the war great changes took place in Papua and one af them was the gradual demise of Kwato, at least in the form that he cnew it.

When he arrived with his wife and

three young children in 1935 Kwato, although advanced in technical edu cation, was back in the dark ages— medically speaking. How this was put right, under very difficult circum stances, is the most interesting part of the story, told in the best tradi tions of writers of “doctor” books.

Due to Anglican bishops’ habit of dropping their surnames and calling themselves after their diocese, it is easy to jump to the conclusion from the title of Mrs Jones’ book that she was married to the Bishop of Mela nesia. She wasn’t. Her husband was a theologian, posted to St Peter’s College, Siota (later transferred to Guadalcanal) to train Melanesians for the Anglican priesthood.

Before her marriage, Mrs Jones was, more or less, in the same line of business and spent 14 years in Ghana, which should have prepared her for anything the BSIP could offer, but obviously didn’t. Although their business in the Solomons was religion, she doesn’t let it get her down and writes a good domestic story about the kind of things that happen to everyone who has stayed long enough in Melanesia. Further more, she does it all with a welcome and irreverent wit.

Of the new Anglican Cathedral in Honiara which is beautiful, spacious and cool, she says: “It is embellished with some remarkable local works of art including the inevitable shell de coration but also the only example I have ever seen anywhere in the world of what you might call Our Lady of the Mini-skirt, a most lovely figure in wood that depicts Mary as a Melanesian schoolgirl, bareheaded and in a simple short frock”.

She then describes the other Anglican church, in what the Yanks might describe as downtown Honiara, which has among its other art objects a gift from a carver in an outer island.

“More than life size”, she says, “it purports to be an effigy of the late Bishop Alfred Hill, an Englishman who died in 1969. The figure is in ebony wood, lavishly decorated with shell-work which would be tolerable perhaps in the trimmings of the cope and mitre, but when it comes to the fingernails and teeth ... It was in tended as a lectern, with the book rest growing, as it were, out of the

shoulders of the figure so that the reader was forced to lurk invisible behind the late bishop’s mitred head uttering oracles like a priest with a bull-roarer at a heathen shrine. The whole thing proved too much . . . and the good bishop was ultimately banished to the doorway where he stands, rather a sinister figure, especially at night when the false teeth grin out at the passers-by and the finger nails take on the aspect of claws, gleaming in the casual illu mination from nearby shops. It is all a million miles from the bishop as I remember him on the one occasion we met, a rather conventional per son with a slightly plummy, but very public school voice, an ex-sea cap tain and very, very British”.

Mrs Jones is in her best form when describing the contemporary social habits of BSIP, which is still a bit of an anachronism in spite of the political progress of the last few years. Missionary wife disappears entirely and she becomes all sophisticated observer, and great fun. —Judy Tudor. (DOCTOR IN PAPUA, by Berkeley Vaughan. Published by Rigby Limited, 30 North Terrace, Kent Town, South Aust ralia. $6.95, and MARRIED TO MELA NESIA, by Muriel Jones. Published by George Allen & Unwin Ltd, Ruskin House, 40 Museum Street. London, WCIA ILU. £3.50.)