AN IRISHMAN SEES THE ISLANDS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 16, Issue 409, 24 April 1947, Page 16

AN IRISHMAN SEES THE ISLANDS

(And 2YA Plays Him a Trick)

Se A "Listener" Interview

OBERT GIBBINGS, the Irish author and engraver of "Lovely is the Lee," "Sweet Thames, Flow Softly,’ "Coming Down the Wye," and other books, has just come back to New Zealand after 18 months in the Pacific Islands. For the next few months he means to stay here with his secretary, Patience Empson, and a great bulk of. notes, to be sorted and cross-referenced and transcribed. The product will be, in due course, another Gibbings book, of narrative and story and engraving. It will not be his first Pacific Islands book-he was in Tahiti 18 years ago and published an illustrated folk story afterwards. But he means it to be "a fairly solid kind of book," and after 18 months in Samoa, Fiji, Tonga, the Cook Islands, and Tahiti, he has the material to make it so. We renewed our acquaintance with this 20-stone bearded Irishman in Auckland when he arrived from Tahiti, and he was ready for us with a story that goes back to March of last year-to the

evening before his birthday, which is on March 23. It was a story he had reminded himself to tell The Listener when he got back: On that Friday even-. ing, a party was being given for Gibbings on the lawn outside the boardinghouse where he had been staying in

Tonga. Native boys were assembled on the lawn with guitars, and the singing was just about to begin, when the woman who ran the boarding-house came on the verandah. "Be quiet, everybody," she says, "Mr. Gibbings is going to speak." "The devil I am," says Gibbings. "But you are," says the landlady. And then sure enough he does. The native boys are all, thoroughly mystified-Gib-bings sits on the lawn, but Gibbings’s voice is coming from inside the House. We looked up our files to check the date-2YA broadcast one of the recorded readings from "Lovely is the Lee" at 8.30 p.m. on Friday, March 22.

"It couldn’t have been better timed," Gibbings told us. "A friend of hers had heard the announcement that it was going to be on, and knew we were staying there. So she rang up and told her to switch it on.’ Pearls and Perils We began to ask in. a general way about the whole Polynesian venture, and Gibbings produced a sheet of notes Miss Empson had typed out for such as our-selves-which informed us that out of 18 months in the Islands he had spent nine in Samoa, several weeks each in Fiji, Tonga, and Tahiti, and four months in the Cook Islands. He fished for shark in Tonga, with a lure and a noose-to slip over their heads when the sharks came alongside; and for the octopus in Samoa, with a lure made of cowrie shell to resemble a rat, the traditional enemy of the octopus. And while he was watching men fishing for pearl shell in Penrhyn (an atoll near the equator) a diver gave him a shell to open. It contained a pearla thousand-to-one chance.

At some of the islands he visited, the only way to land was over the reef in a boat or canoe, waiting sometimes for half an hour or more for the right wave to lift it over. Gibbings himself was never upset, but he saw other boats capsized at various times, and people badly hurt by being — against live coral, (continued® on next page)

(continued from previous page) For one particular landing he was advised to have his papers and drawings soldered up in a tin because the chances were about 50-50. This precaution having been taken, all was well. But the same boat was smashed up later in the same day, and one of the occupants was six weeks in hospital with a broken head. Samoa Still Lives The proportion of his time which ‘he gave to Samoa is an indication of what he feels about -the place. The Samoans, he says, retain their virility, because they still believe in their own traditions and culture. Elsewhere, Polynesians have accepted the white man’s ways to a greater or lesser degree. The Samoans have great matural dignity; they still wear the lava-lava, and frown severely on white women who appear in stintop and shorts; and the men still have a marvellous physique. They still go barefoot, and therefore retain their regal walk, In Tahiti, on the other hand, the native life has completely given way before the introduced cultures of the French and Chinese. There has ‘been a good deal of change even jn the 18 years since he was last there, Gibbings says, and the Tahitians are now a completely trousered race. You don’t see a single pareu (the garment of red and white printed material which was worn when Gauguin was painting there), except perhaps on a tourist. If the Tahitians wear that kind of material, they make dresses of it, or the suntops and: shorts, despised by Samoans as. cheaply provocative. The life is, charming-a mixture of French and Chinese customs, and foods and wines-but it js no longer Tahitian. Away From It All On smaller islands, Gibbings and Miss Empson received the elaborate and generous hospitality of a people who have only a vague idea of what has been happening in the rest of the world: who ask after Queen Victoria, or the Prince of Wales (meaning Edward VII), or, if they are more up to date, what that Hitler fellow is up to now; who think of the journey from Apia as the greatest and most perilous voyage @ man can make, and offer thanks to God when he makes it safely; and for whom the journey from England is only a journey from somewhere beyond their own world (Samoa means "Sacred Centre," just as Cuzco meant "navel" in the Incas’ world), and not to be compared in perils with the journey from Apia. They found that the natives liked to be warned in advance of a visitation, and the more followers you had the better they liked your coming. A man of Gibbings’s dignity and magnificence must not even be allowed to carry his own sketchbook; so there were always a handful of carriers and an interpreter, and in addition jt was necessary to have an orator, who would make the speeches for his party while Gibbings rested his imposing bulk jn comfort after the journey. The natives use poles to carry everything, and small boys have’ calloused shoulders from carrying loads that Gibbings himself could barely lift. : This method of carrying was presumably their own, and not learnt from the Chinese, for the Samoan name for the constellation Orion’s Belt is Amonga, which means "burden." The giving and receiving of presents is a most elaborate business for the

traveller. The highest quality of present you can take is tinned corned beef — known as pisupo, presumably because of some early association with tinned soup, and the native chief in accepting it will exaggerate its importance enormously, and then make his own gift, referring to it as some mean trifle only fit to be thrown on the ground in front of you. Miss Empson, however, was once given a belt, and her open hand was brushed aside-it had to be put round her waist; and Gibbings was given a hatband. He had no hat on, so he held out his hand too. But that was not. good enough-he had to be crowned with the band. In small villages, they stayed in the guest houses kept for the purpose of receiving such visitors-usually the best house in the village, and usually festooned for the arrival. On one island, they had a tremendous reception because they were believed to be members of the family of Wyatt Gill, an early Protestant missionary, and a telative of the English sculptor and engraver Eric Gill. Gibbings had been told about Wyatt Gill’s connection with the place (an island in the Cook Group), and he went there with a letter from a missionary on another island. The natives, who held the memory of Wyatt Gill in great veneration, treated Gibbings and Miss Empson as his relatives, and received them with honours befitting deities-they lined up along the way, and afterwards at a feast made a procession past them, every one of them shaking hands with a powerful grip. . Only One Regret All this life and colour has given Robert Gibbings material for a book that may be more substantial than anything he has done yet, and he has a great quantity of drawings to make engravings from. He seems to have only one regret-that his ignorance of the languages has made it-impossible for him to record the subtleties of speech and thought that are the natural material of his English and Irish books. He will be able to put down what people told him, but not the way they told it, because he had to rely on interpreters. All the same, it’ sounds like a book Mr. Gibbings’s readers will look forward to, a book New Zealanders will watch for, if they are beginning to learn that the Pacific Islands are a part of their own world. And the publishers have seen a few chapters. They consider them "the best yet."