Celebrating a famous son

famous son

By Lisa Williams

This year, a little-known society named after an author buried in a tiny comer of a Rarotonga ceme tery almost 50 years ago, gathers in the Cook Islands to celebrate the centennial of his birth.

Robert Dean Frisbie, the Tusitala (story-teller) of the Cooks, is remem bered more by readers outside the Cook Islands than by the people he wrote about. The centennial is timely, given that the 1990’s have given the Cook Islands and most developing nations in the region, a generation of young islanders preferring piupiu (computer games) to writing.

Those who don’t see his books given prominence in local libraries are missing out on the warmth and unique insight Frisbie passed on through his work - as well as his contributions through being a keen observer of island life and culture and a serious student of island history, traditional canoe building, fishing and

celestial navigation.

Robert Dean Frisbie was just 28 when he first sighted Pukapuka in 1924.

The remote atolls were known as the “Danger Islands” and whites visiting the people there were few and far between.

In his own words, as he drifted to shore he saw; “Islets dozing in the morn ing sunlight, with only two or three lan guid columns of smoke rising above the trees to tell of the life ashore - I thought of my long search in the Pacific for an island where I could be law to myself and beyond the reach of even the faintest echo of the noisy clamour of civilisa tion”, and promptly made up his mind that this was to be his last stop.

It was through the writings of the

Ohio-bom Calvary officer-tumed-jour

nalist that a fascination was bom within

readers worldwide for a tiny knoll in the South Seas.

In the 1920’5, Pukapuka came to symbolise the Cook Islands for readers still travelling through travelogues and written accounts of the exotic Pacific Ocean. From his shopkeepers perch and later as a husband to a Pukapukan woman who gave him five children, Frisbie breathed a rare warm insight into the characters he wrote of as he kept a record of a style of life which only lives on in memory.

As well as being a fan of Robert Louis Stevenson, who was already an established writer out of his Vailima estate in Western Samoa, Frisbie had his own reasons for living out a compulsion to seek fortune in the South Seas.

He was suffering from Tuberculosis and his doctor advised a complete change of climate. First stop on his South Seas journey was Tahiti where he lived for four years before heading on to the Cooks where he was to commit the rest of his life and work.

Anecdotes of life in the islands run through all his prolific articles, short sto ries and novels - as well as a collabora tion with daughter Florence (Johnny) on her first book when she was 13.

Now based in Ngatangiia, within viewing distance of the area where her father raised his family after his wife died in 1939, Johnny remembers with gratitude her bicultural childhood.

She remembers a father who soaked up Pukapukan lore from its island elders and managed to “be right in there learn

ing everything he could without trying

to be a native and looking silly - he leamt because he had to survive there as the Pukapukans did, and he leamt to value it”, she says. ■