MORE READINGS BY ROBERT GIBBINGS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 17, Issue 432, 3 October 1947, Page 14

MORE READINGS BY ROBERT GIBBINGS

bearded 20-stone figure of Robert Gibbings, the Irish author and engraver of Lovely is the Lee, Sweet Thames Run Softly, and Coming Down theWye, has been a familiar sight in the streets of Wellington again during the last few days. Although he has been back from the South Sea Islands for some months few people have seen him, because, with his secretary, he had locked himself up in‘ a house at Eastbourne, writing his new travel book Over the Reefs and Far Away. "I admit I have been most unsocjable, but that’s the only way to write a book," he said when The Listener called in to see him making recordings of extracts from his book at the NZBS Production studios. The day we called was a redletter day for Gibbings, for that morning he had written the 80,000th and final word of his latest book, The Listener had met him beforewhen he arrived in New Zealand, and six months ago when he returned to this country to start putting on paper what he had seen in Polynesia. He had recounted for us some of his exploits 4s a marine diver and an explerer of rivers by boat, and on the last of these occasions we had asked him if there was any likelihood of his making a study of our rivers by the pleasant method of drifting down in a canoe. "I’m afraid that seems to be impossible," he says now. "There are too many difficulties in the way of transport, and in getting meals and accommodation at odd. hours. But I may come back to New Zealand some day; I would very much like to, for there is plenty to write about-Maori history, the birds and so on. But there are not the facilities for a bloke like myself who likes to mooch. Hy 20 on back, the

"In France, now, it’s much easier. There is always somebody ready to knock you up an omelette, no matter what the hour. You see, I may be busy watching some particular bird late in the evening, and not thinking for a moment about dinner. And I might be out till midnight. In Ireland, too, the old fisherfolk will rustle up a meal at any odd hour." Home for Six Months What were his plans for the immediate . future? : . He would probably go to England for about six months, follow that with a spell in his native Ireland and then to France or Portugal. We asked about the new book. "It contains," he said, "about 100 engravings in addition to the letterpress, and it will be published about September next by Dents. It is a series of illustrated impressions of the people of the Polynesian Islands and their cus‘toms." He spent six weeks in Tonga, eight months in Samoa, four months each at the Cook Islands and Tahiti, and visited other groups, including the Tokelaus and the Tuamotus-about 30 islands altogether. Sometimes he travelled by mail boat, sometimes by cargo. boat, sometimes by plane, sometimes by schooner. "If I saw something I couldy’t write about, I drew it; and if there was,something that I couldn’t draw, I wrote about it. Sometimes a subject was too difficult for either so I let it go," he said. Did he do any under-water work with his special diving helmet, to record undersea life? Not this time. How did he choose his book titles? For his latest he adapted a line from John Gay’s The Beggar's Opera-"If with me you'll fondly stray over the hills (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) and far away" substituting "reefs" for "hills." Coming Down the Wye was obvious-a play on "Coming through the rye." Recordings from New Book Robert Gibbings made two recordings from his new book the other day, but these will not be broadcast by the NZBS till the book is published. His immediate plans were to visit the South Island for a fortnight, spending some days in Christchurch and giving a lecture on his travels at the Otago University, Dunedin. _ Then, he said, he would put in a day or so in Wellington before catching the Athenic for England, which he saw last on VJ Day. Gibbings thinks his new book will be more substantial than anything he has done yet. But he has one regret, and that is that his unfamiliarity with the Polynesian languages made it impossible for him to record in print the subtleties of speech and thought that are found in -his Irish and English books.