SHEPHERD OF A BLACK FLOCK

New Zealand Listener, Volume 9, Issue 230, 19 November 1943, Page 10

SHEPHERD OF A BLACK FLOCK

The Bishop Of Melanesia Discusses War And Missions In The Solomons

stations on Monday evening, November 22, will hear a talk by a bishop whose diocese consists of dozens of tropical islands; he ministers to the spiritual welfare of a group of peoples who speak 31 different languages, and whose characters and customs are almost as varied as the islands they live on. He is the Rt. Rev. W. H. Baddeley, Bishop of Melanesia, who is paying one of his occasional visits to New Zealand. Bishop Baddeley has seen the natives of the Solomon islands develop over recent years under the care of the Christian churches, until three or four thousand out of 92,000 can read and write, and since Japan entered the war he has seen the missionary teachings bear fruit in an unforeseen way when educated natives have brought in valuable intelligence reports. The Listener had a brief interview with Bishop Baddeley at short notice the other day. There weré some questions still unasked at the end of it, but we did get some interesting information from him about the peoples whose quiet ways have been so rudely disturbed by the warfare of other nations. Two years ago it nfight have been necessary, in printing an interview with the Bishop of Melanesia, to mention the names of places and islands as if our readers had never heard of them. Today we can safely say that he has his headquarters near a place called Tulagi and leave it at that. "How does the Bishop of Melanesia spend his time?" we asked. "How does a week go by at Tulagi, for instance?" "I’m never at Tulagi for a week," said the Bishop, as if that closed the question. "You’re on the ‘Southern Cross’ then?" "No, I have the ‘Paterson,’ and I’m on the move most of the time, but we have to give notice of all our movements now, because American patrols are on the lookout all the time, and they ‘have their instructions,’ as they might say. We travel from island to island and land at one point with stores, go inland to mission stations or along the coast, and supplement our stores with pigeon or king mackerel, and then join the vessel somewhere else along the coast. We’re never sitting still for very long." i Better Melanesians In a sermon he gave in Wellington, Bishop Baddeley referred to the .ad- vanced schooling of Melanesian natives who have been educated continuously since childhood, and to the possibilities that could arise when they returned to their own people, acquainted with all the customs and superstitions of the past but having educated minds of their own. : "Is it possible," we asked, "to take a young Melanesian and detach his mind from all his custom and taboo so that | ISTENERS to seven National

he can go back with an objective attitude, as it were, and help his own people in the same way as a white man can help them?" "No, no, that’s not our object at all. We've always avoided running schools that breed something that’s neither fish nor fowl. In our central schools, using the English language as a medium, we try to give the Melanesian a wider outlook altogether-not in order to use him as a teacher of religious knowledge, but to enable him to become a good citizen, with more faculties at his command than he had before. We do not try to detach him from his people-we try to make him a better and more useful Melanesian, "In Fiji to-day there is a native Fijian who has recently been appointed to an important government post, and he is a great man; but he is no less a Fijian than his primitive cousins are. "There are fifteen of our boys at school in Fiji now. Four are taking courses in agriculture, four in medicine, and four in wireless-the rest are on preparatory studies. We put the small boy to school for two years in his own village, and after about 7 more years at larger schools he can read, and write a letter in English, and work out such problems of arithmetic as are likely to be any use to him-the right price for sO many pounds of copra at so much a pound, and so on." "Who pays for it all then-the education, not the copra?" Profit and Philanthropy "Well, there are no Government grants for education; the only income in the Solomons is from the Poll Tax and import and export duties, so after the administration is provided for, there is very little money left for social services, because the system under which the islands are governed demands that the local governments must be self-support-ing." "Do you get any help from the companies that trade with the natives? Or are they not inclined to philanthropy?" "Yes, there’s one company-Levers-with a very high reputation. Their plantations are well run, and their native (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) labourers are all well cared for, and very happy. Men who have worked for them for a long time are pensioned when they returned to their villages, and annual grants are made to the missions." "Tt would be.a pretty stupid company that couldn’t see the usefulness of mission schools?" "Quite." One Printer-31 Languages The Mission printing press at Marovovo was one of the worst material losses the Melanesian Mission had suffered from the Japanese war, the Bishop told us. It had been run under the care of Freddie Isom for 28 years, and under his supervision, books and leaflets were printed in 31 languages. Since all words are spelt phonetically with English letters, after the manner of Maori, there is no difficulty with type-fonts, except that a few diphthongs appear in some _languages and not in others. "Isom trains his boys there and they do first class work-printing and binding of course." "But how do you get over the proofreading difficulty when there are 31 different languages in use?" "Oh well, a teacher from this or that island says he wants to print a book, so it’s’ written out, and I approve of it, and then he comes to the press, or someone. who reads his language, and works with the printer until the job is done. But our press is one of the things that we don’t know about any more-it got a terrific biffing because it was right in the centre of things." Vegetables the Year Round . "You mentioned that some boys were studying agriculture. Can they grow any great variety of things?" "Yes, as a matter of fact in the last three years of peace there was a big advance, and they were growing all sorts of things that no one had thought would grow in the Solomons-tomatoes, and various kinds of vegetables. "You have a short season when it’s possible to get crops in and out, then?" "Oh no, we can grow things all the year round-it’s not: the same with us as it is, for instance, in Fiji. We have only two seasons, the South East and the

North West, and the rainfall and temperature are very constant. In 11 years .(1_ think I have it right) the thermometer has never been below 72 degrees or about 95 in the daytime, and the rainfall is about 145 inches-fairly evenly distributed. But the greatest trouble for vegetable-growers is fiot the season, or the temperature, or the rain, but bugs-you’ve’ got to have all sorts of sprays and powders. Since the war, there have been many more vegetable gardens of course. At one casualty clearing station I visited only a few weeks ago, New Zealanders were growing themselves onions, and of course the Americans go mad for sweet corn-corn on the cob-so there’ll be plenty of that. I suppose. But I imagine that someone else may reap what men are sowing now! "What about your native people and their new acquaintances? Do they accept Americans and New Zealanders readily?" "I think that in times to come the Solomon islanders will look back to these days as days when there were inconveniences, but when money was made easily, and their attitude is naturally affected by such things as easymoney for laundering and so on." "Can they, make good use of more money, or is it likely to be a nuisance to them in the end?" "There are quite a number of things the native needs that he has to DOF. Sooner or later, for instance, he’ll want. an axe, or a knife, or a camphor-wood box for his belongings, his clothes of course, and pipes and tobacco. Tinned meat has always been a great treat, but lately they’ve almost had a surfeit of it; in spite of the regulations forbidding the use of army stores for trading purposes, things always seem to find their way into the natives’ hands somehownaturally enough. Oh, and soap; soap is a great treasure. Now that there’s all the American washing to do, soap has to be provided with the washing. I think some owners of garments would be rather surprised if they saw how they are washed. It’s done down at the stream of course, with great enthusiasm. The things are either pounded with rocks or else scrubbed with a very fierce brush." Solomons Humour "It sounds like good fun. What is their idea of fun, by the way?" "It varies. Just as there are many different languages, so there are many different temperaments. Some are dour, some are very gay; in some islands they are just surly. On the outlying islands there are quite a number of Polynesians and groups of those are as different from each other as they all are from our Melanesians. There are varying stages of backwardness too, just as there are varying temperaments, but in most of our natives there’s a lot of humour, once they know how they stand with you. They have their jokes, and when there’s a good one, there are roars of laughter." "By a joke, do you mean what we call a joke?" "More or less, depending on your taste. If a boy on a dinghy falls off backwards, then that’s a great joke, Any sort of minor mishap is turned into a comical incident if it’s at all possible." "Presumably they’d enjoy film slapstick. Do they see many films?" "Nowadays, many more. We had a very limited.number on the mission vessels, but natives near camps often see new American films now; their humour is as different from the American’s as the American’s is from ours. A Charlie Chaplin film, for instance, leaves them cold, in the main. If he’s walking along

with that funny walk of his, they'll ask what he’s doing, but if he has a bag of soot and another man has a bag of flour and they start hitting each other, that’s funny; and they know when you're pulling their legs. If they feel inclined, they’ll sometimes try to get their own back. They know how to stretch the long-bow these days." There was a pause, and then the Bishop sat forward in his chair. "Well, do you think you’ve got enough now?" he asked. He wanted to go; so things that might have interested our readers had to remain unasked. We could have asked for instance, apropos of the islanders’ idea of humour, whether he dressed as a Bishop in his own diocese. But that, perhaps, would have been too personal.