Misfits, magic and mementoes

Literature

Sinners and Sandalwood is a tribute to the strange terrain of inter-racial understanding

By Nicolas

Rothwell

Last testimony from a van ished, near-forgotten world; obscure master piece by an unkown author; sentimental memoir, recpatur ing in age the bloom of youthful romance; tribute to the strange terrain of inter-racial understanding - Sinners and Sandlwood, a slim volume just published in Australia, is all of these things, and more, in 100 concise pages.

Subtitled “Tales of the Old Pacific”, and bearing the unmistakable influence of those master tale-tellers of the ocean - Robert Louis Stevenson and Joseph Conrad - this is the lightly fictionalised record of a young sandalwood trader’s impressions of the New Hebrides archipelago - today’s Vanuatu - in the far off condominium years of the late 20s.

The author, Frederick George Short, bom in Britain in 1910, raised in India and New Zealand, “rebelled against the staid colonial society of the time, and at 17, he took ship for the tropical paradise of his adolescent dreams” - armed with little more than a volume of Shakespeare.

Sinners and Sandalwood consists of six loosely linked short stories, enclosed by a pair of lilting poems. The first, “Coral Colours”, has this lovely line which could stand as epigraph to the whole work; “Read while you may, for even now it van ishes away, that moment bright, and in the end all coral colours turn to white.”

Loss, the anticipation of death, sombre fate, the recollection of a disappearing age - these are the themes of this record, both amateurish and profound, both subtle and colonial in tone. There are passages of short story writing and construction here

that rival the masters of the form; there are moments of profound emotional response to the spell of the Pacific. Sometimes, the old planter’s brand of humour comes to the fore: “One of the delightful things about island people is their endless capacity of negotiation,” declares the narrator of one of these stories.

But what gives Sinners and Sandalwood its peculiar force is the author’s tilt on life - unusual, perhaps, among White men in the New Hebrides, but not as unusual as we may tend retro spectively to imagine. This is a book about the clash of two cultures and value sys tems, and their mutual facination. Short’s central characters are distinctly prone to falling in love with native women. They are prone, also, to adventures in the New :Hebridian supernatural - sorcerers and bird-women and witches stalk these pages, and the magic works. This is the realm of the blue horizon, the Bums Philp steamer and the catalogue from Sydney, where cen tre-stage is held by larger-than-life charac ters, such as the libertine planter Jimmy Ruby, soft-hearted and philosphically curi ous, or the lovelorn English remittance man, Lethbridge. “The island provided a last refuge for many a queer fellow on whom a more sophisticated society would have frowned,” says the teller of one espe cially apocalyptic story, “The Dugong’s Skull”, which explores the intriguing ques tion of the dugong’s emotional conduct, as well as laying out the cerebral Lethbridge’s surprisingly modern theory of reality as composed of vibrations.

Throughout these pages, an open, keen response to native culture is on display, coupled with a consuming love for the nature of the islands: “Oh blessed isles, Oh blessed Melanesia, black, beautiful dream er, living the last umbilical dream,” exclaims one character in the midst of a celebratory feast - hardly a deep comment but, again, not quite what one might expect to find in a record of this particular time.

Here, too, can be found all the ennui and dislocation of plantation life: “When we were drunk enough to think soberly,”

says one offhand narrator. A bluff planter (who appears in several guises through these stories) is moved to offer, in one of the tales, this comment that encapsulates a way of life, “When you’ve lived here as long as as I have, you’ll accept the facts

and forget about explanations.”

The last of the pieces is “The Beachcomber’s Story”, a highly Conradian tale, which suggests both a prior reading of Heart of Darkness and extensive contact with the idealistic, intellectual anthropolo gists who began visiting the New Hebrides at the start of this century.

The Beachcomber, young Stephen Aisles, disembarks at Vila Harbour and heads for a remote plantation posting as company overseer. Intuitive, sensitive, he responds to the world around him by plunging too deeply into it, goes ‘native’, vanishes for an age, and experiences an inevitable psychological crack-up. Living with his adoptive tribe, he witnesses a can nibal feast, is half unhinged and heads back to Vila. There, outcast, shunned by White men, he drifts into mental chaos and succumbs to the siren call of union with the sea, the moon, the sky - he drowns himself in the calm, enticing waters of the harbour. This story is, in some sense, a self-portrait; the author’s memorial to an aspect of his own character, remembered down the decades - a life set in a new per spective in the echoing arcade of time.

Short, after a strikingly adventure-filled career, and several reinventions of himself, lives today on Australia’s Gold Coast, where for some years his main preoccupa tion has been nurturing many hundreds of native trees to create a haven for birds. In the wake of his New Hebridean days as plant manager and sandalwood trader on Santo, there have been episodes of New Zealand farmwork and university, World War II service in Greece and Egypt, tramp ing and camping across Australia, Himalayan treks and tiger-sightings; even a return to Santo and meetings there with old Melanesian friends - but those are other fascinating stories, and ones we can only hope this late-discovered raconteur will, in the fullness of time, tell us. ■

• Published 1997 by Jomaru Press, North Leura 2780, NSW. Australia. $A24.95