lands in the Pacific

Adjusting to alien lands in the Pacific

South Pacific Stories. Edited by Chris and Helen Tiffin. Pub lished by South Pacific Associ ation for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies, Department of English, University of Queens land, Australia 4067. ISBN 909892 77 6 (Hard cover), 909892 78 4 (Soft cover). 5A9.75. or $5.50.

Perhaps one of the hardest personal adjustments to make is that of learning to live in a country not one’s own, to adapt happily to an alien cultural milieu. Sometimes a lifetime is not sufficient to render painless the absence of one's own national heritage, and even second and third generation settlers find it difficult to come to terms with the social and cultural mores of their adopted country.

The theme of acculturation which characterises many of the tales in this volume of South Pacific Stories is a recur rent one in the literature of the southern hemisphere. Martin Boyd, in his Langton novels, treats with insight and under standing the motif of separation from one’s homeland. The Langton family, British mi grants to Melbourne in the 19th century, shuttle back and forth between their physical home in Australia and what they regard as their spiritual and cultural heritage in Europe. Neither seems totally satisfactory.

Each story in this collection originates from the South Pacific region, but the writers are all from races in some sense alien to this part of the world.

Indians taken to Fiji during the indenture system of the 19th century, and British trans planted to Australia and New

Zealand during the last 200 years, have struggled to come to terms with the utterly different environment in which they found themselves.

These stories reflect some thing of that struggle. In the introduction, Chris and Helen Tiffin give a sympathetic ac count of the pain and fear experienced by ‘new arrivals’, as the breakdown of their

cultural identity slowly takes

place, and the search begins for a new self more in tune with the adopted homeland.

Fiji is the background for two stories by the same author in which the country is seen through the eyes of an Indian woman and a New Zealand girl.

Though separated in time, the predominant feeling in both stories is that the main charac ters are mislocated. ‘Gamalian’s Woman’, writ ten by Fiji Indian, Subramani, is an amalgam of obscure epi sodes, hazy memories and visions, in which an old Indian woman remembers the hard ships of a life spent working in the sugarcane fields. As she nears death she drifts away from the ‘reality’ of a world which perhaps had never seemed real to her, and seeks release in her dreams of an Indian heaven.

The young New Zealand girl, Elaine, in ‘Dear Primitive’, was born in Fiji and lived all her life there, but still feels isolated and torn by conflicting loyalties.

After an unhappy affair with a tourist, she seems to slip into madness ‘. . . the dark waters flowed into her head. She knew she was drowned’. Isolation from one’s own people can indeed become insupportable.

The best story to my mind is ‘The Well-Bred Thief’ by

Elizabeth Jolley. Written in sparse epistolary style, it docu ments the fate of a manuscript sent by an Englishwoman in Western Australia to a pub lisher friend in the UK.

Mabel and Barbara are starkly contrasted through their letters; the understated loneli ness of the woman in Medulla - ‘l’m living all alone in the country waiting for the jarrah to grow . . . there’s no one to talk to except the fowls’ draws down a complete ava lanche of incomprehension from the indifferent and preda tory friend in Kent. Her main concern is for a new colour scheme in the bathroom - ‘Matching towels are such a problem aren’t they?’ rather than the fate of the precious manuscript.

This is an interesting collec tion of stories, well worth read ing, and has a part to play in

promoting understanding

among the people of various races who make up the popu lation of the contemporary

South Pacific.

Jo Rudd.