South Sea Journey: A

‘Painless’ Island Tour

If my heart sinks at the thought of reviewing yet another outsider’s book on the Pacific Islands, once read the least that can be said about George Woodcock’s South Sea Journey is that he obviously did his homework.

He also manages to make the reading painless, even for a reviewer who cut teeth on the Islands 30 years before he saw them.

Woodcock is a Canadian who, in the literary sense, has specialised on “journeys” into such places as Tibet, the Amazon, Andes, etc. The Pacific therefore must have been something of a pushover. He went there (with his wife) as part of a Canadian TV ex pedition which occupied some months in 1972, visiting Samoa, Tonga, the Gilberts, Fiji, New Caledonia, New Hebrides and the Solomons. This itinerary, while it had some notable omissions, covered the three varieties of Islanders Polynesian, Microne sian and Melanesian and it is people rather than places who interest this author.

As a latter-day visitor, perhaps as a

Canadian with no emotional involve ment in the past or present of the area, he tends to be more sym pathetically receptive in the territories now free of European administration.

Nor does he dwell on the ludicrous and one gets the distinct impression that he doesn’t see any of these islands as fun places, as they were, and at times, still are. He is, like all right minded outsiders, deadly serious about and disapproving of the governmental goulash in the New Hebrides one of the few aspects of life in the Pacific in these times that makes me feel that all is not lost, although it is heading that way. But then I’ve never considered the Islanders have done much for themselves by swopping dolce far niente in the sun for the boring business of universal suffrage.

In Samoa, the Woodcocks stayed at Aggie’s, ranged widely over Upolu, paid a hair-raising visit to Apolima and experienced less dolce than far niente on Savaii.

All arrangements had been made by an official for their reception on the big island; they set off in a “ramshackle” plane (with no seat belt) on schedule and landed at a deserted bush strip. The promised car did not eventuate, there was no place to go, the plane took off and they were left to fry in the heat. They took the first available flight back to Apia.

Someone had blundered.

Woodcock found the Tongans always impeccably friendly to strangers but believed that there was a relationship between their walled-in fales (in contradistinction to the open sided Samoan ditto) and their general attitude. They seemed, he thought, always to be on guard which was un derstandable “since such guardedness was what had saved them from being submerged by alien influences”.

Due to the usual Island difficulty of getting transport to any given point just when required, they never got off Tongatapu to the other Tongan Islands but made the most of what was available, including an audience with King Taufa’ahau. For this they went first to the palace office largely in order, Woodcock suspected, that the King’s secretary could assure himself that he was wearing a tie, the

principal requirement for a foreign visitor.

They were then issued into the King’s massive presence. “He welcomed us,” says Woodcock, “in the breathless drowned voice of the obese, shook our hands and motioned us to two armchairs whose legs had been trimmed so that when he sat on the sofa, which he filled as if it were an ordinary armchair, we were three inches below him. It was important that we should sit first so that at no moment were our heads higher than his. At first one was almost obsessed by the King's mere physical presence and there are some people who never gel beyond this stage.”

In the Gilberts, the Woodcocks saw more of the watery colony than most casual visitors, took off from Tarawa in one of the local small ships for visits to, or hanging off, Maiana, Abemama, Beru, Nukunau and Tabileua.

Journeys to New Caledonia, New Hebrides and the Solomons followed, passing back and forth through Nadi or Suva but having used 300-odd pages on the other islands, Fiji leaves Woodcock fairly mute. Perhaps this is not surprising. Fiji now has diminish ed curiosity value —no Big Nambas, recalcitrant Malaitamen, atoll dwellers or obese Polynesian monarchs. It has, therefore fewer angles for a free-wheeling writer to develop.

South Sea Journey is informative and never dull on any of its 340 pages.

An excellent introduction to the Pacific of the 19705, its only draw back the fad that not many who would enjoy it or find it useful will be able to afford to buy it and thereon hangs an anomaly.

Pacific Publications received two copies of this book, one direct from the publishers, Faber and Faber, in London, with a price-tag of £7.50; the other from the Oxford University Press in Australia who are the local distributors, with a “suggested price” of $21.50. Now we all know that the British quid had fallen on evil times so that £7.50 does not convert to 5A21.50 and hasn’t for a very long lime SAII would be nearer the mark. South Pacific book buyers, therefore will take a lot of convincing that it costs $9 per book to get it to Sydney, even in these days of run away freighting costs.

This sort of cost-plussing is tough on the author, as well as on the

reader.

Judy Tudor.