Dame Mary Edwell-Burke

This is really quite sad.  I'm currently trying to find out what happened to that wonderful old oil painting of Ratu Sir Lala Sukuna done by Dame Mary Edwell-Burke, which used to hang in the lobby of Fiji's Grand Pacific Hotel, back in the days before this elegant and luxurious hotel - the Pacific's version of Raffles - was acquired by the island of Nauru and slowly turned into a sad wreck of itself, until today it stands on the edge of Suva as a mould-covered Art Deco ruin; a heartbreaking shadow of past glory.

Photo by Jon Apted.
Although his version isn't all 
weirdly pixilated like this!

Now, you will have noticed that I have no link for Dame Mary Edwell-Burke and have to tell you the shocking news that this is because SHE DOESN'T HAVE ANYTHING TO LINK TO!

OK, maybe that isn't so because I've only used one search engine: Fast Browser! Let me try to test the different search engines to see what they come up with:

Nothing on any of them except ... GOOGLE!!!!

Yup, once again Google has proved itself the best of all the search engines because it has five entries including this one of her paintings, and four more about her paintings being in various auctions.  However, all it says about her in any of these sites is that she was born in Australia in 1894 and died in Fiji in 1988. 

This needs to be rectified.  I don't know enough about her to attempt a Wikipedia biographical entry so I can't really do more than put her name out there in cyberspace ...

DAME MARY EDWELL-BURKE

(b. Australia 1894, d. Fiji 1988)

 ... and hope that someone sees it and thinks "Yup, I will have to do something about this!"

It has to be done because it's so wrong that she's gone! She was such an incredible character and such a great painter, I am really sad that she isn't still out there as some HUGE Feminist Icon.  She certainly deserves it, this wacky dignified old Dame, wandering - al-la Paul Gauguin - throughout the Pacific practically from the turn of the century - the 20th century - onwards, never updating her clothes so always dressed like some latterday Gibson Girl, always in white, and just painting, painting, painting, capturing our Oceanic world and putting it out there for all the world to see.

Seriously, she was so amazing WHY isn't she being remembered!  I mean even Queen Elizabeth recognised her wonderfulness back in the day by honouring her with a Dame-hood!  And now she's ... just GONE!!!

We can't just let her go. Can someone out there in the Art World or the Feminist World or the Pacific or even her family PLEASE give this mighty lady a cyber-presence, even if it's just her own Wikipedia entry?  We cannot forget her contribution to our lives, and she really did contribute to ALL our lives, you know, and in such a big way too, because even as the Suffragettes were doing what they did to ensure women everywhere could do what they wanted to do, Dame Mary was "walking the talk" and out there in the world doing exactly what she wanted to do; taking slow boats and local transport, traveling alone through the most obscure and unknown parts of the world and PAINTING it!

So please start the ball rolling on remembering her contribution to the modern world and thus all our lives.  And I'll start by putting my personal memories of her out there:

The first memory I have of her was when I was about four or five.  We were somewhere ... I can't remember where it was - although it would have definitely been in Fiji - because I only recall a single image, which wasn't too far removed from this one:

Let me tease a little more out of this memory. OK, I'm getting something: blue-bottles! mangroves! 

Right, it's not much past dawn, and I'd woken early and had gone for a walk alone down to the beach.  But which beach? Were we camping on an island someplace? Or was it the health officers cottages at Nukulau? Or those cottages down in Lomeri? 

Wherever and whenever it was, it was blue-bottle season - November? - when all these beautiful azure jellyfish invade our Pacific waters, and so I was running along the shoreline jumping on them because they always made such a delicious squelchy pop! And I continued popping and squelching right into a mangrove swamp  ... 

... when suddenly, looming up right in front of me, I saw ... 

 Give this Gibson Girl totally white hair

and entirely white clothing, 

and that's almost exactly what I saw. 

 Yup, deep in a mangrove swamp in some unrecalled wilderness that's what I saw. The light hit strangely and the image was luminous and the figure frozen, looking hard at the painting in front of her!  It was so surreal and astonishing, but then it moved and I gasped and backed away slowly ... then  a mad dash back to wherever it was we were staying ... the cottages at Rukuruku on the island of Ovalau? 

"There's a ghost!" I told my mother, pointing down towards the mangroves.  "Down there! In the mangroves!  It's a ghost!"

"Don't be silly, dear." my mother said fondly.

"No!  It's a real ghost.  Down there."

"What's it doing?"

"It's painting a picture of mangrove roots."

"Is this a very old fashioned looking ghost?" my mother asked calmly.

"Yes.  It's like a ghost from last century and it's painting mangroves."

I hated being laughed at as a child, and, yeah, yeah, here my mother laughed uproariously and it made me very cross.

"That would be Dame Mary Edwell-Burke." my mother said eventually.  "She's a famous artist.  And she's very definitely still alive and staying just along there in that village. She likes painting in the early morning because the light is so good, so what you saw was obviously her simply looking like a ghost."

Since that actually made a lot more sense, I now accept this as my very first glimpse of Dame Mary Edwell-Burke. And since my first glimpse of her was when I thought she was a ghost, it's a strange co-incidence that I also mistook her for a ghost the last time I saw her too.

In between these two strange ghostly encounters, I met her several times over the years, at the odd exhibition mostly or a couple of times at her Fiji studio, which was, as I vaguely recall, a bure (Fijian hut) atop a hill that may or may not have been just along from the Naboro Prison Farm, on the land once part of Bailey's rubber plantation, a memory I'm willing to surrender in a heartbeat because I'm not at all sure if we occasionally dropped by on our way to Deuba or if we made deliberate journeys out to some other place to see her whenever she was in Fiji.

And my main memory of meeting her on these occasions is that she was an old grump who didn't like kids.

But my last memory of her?  It was in about ... gosh, 1983?  When Kele was here in HK last month, we talked about this and I was very sad that, although he remembers "The Kele and Denise Big Official Levuka Ghost Hunt", he has no recollection of 'the ghost' because it should have been a BIGGIE for him ... as it was for me!

Whatever year it was, I'd come home to Fiji for a holiday from university in Australia to discover that Kele, then about six or seven, was going through his ghost phase. He was fascinated by them and always wanted to talk about them and was cynical enough to want to see one with his own eyes.  And no! He didn't want to see a Tau - the Fijian faceless spirit - because he wanted this ghost to be a good old fashioned European-style ghost, all white and drifting with his/her feet off the ground.  

I remembered that I too had gone through a ghost phase when I was about his age and, like him, was desperate for proof one way or the other. I even had fond memories of sneaking out of my bedroom on moonlit nights during our holidays in Levuka, to spend long hours sitting on the "out of bounds because it's too dangerous" widow's walk on the roof of The Royal Hotel in Levuka ...

Not my photo of the Royal Hotel in Levuka, 

but you can see the widow's walk in this one.

... watching out for The White Lady, the ghost of the wife of a missionary who had somehow fallen from grace - one of my first ever short stories when I was about ten was based around my imaginings of what she'd done to fall from grace, whatever that meant -  who was reputed to haunt Levuka's Cricket Fields below.

Since this was the only ghost in Fiji I'd ever heard about that matched Kele's description, and because I wanted to give Kele happy ghost-hunt memories like my own, so, being very indulgent, I took him on a jaunt to the island of Ovalau for "The Kele and Denise Big Official Levuka Ghost Hunt" with the off-chance of seeing The White Lady with our own eyes.

Oh boy, thinking about this now, I have to say that entire jaunt was an adventure par-excellence, and well worth recording in here one day, however the only part of it that belongs in this story is our arrival at Levuka's  Royal Hotel. 

We arrived and were checked in by the Pattersons - dear sweet people I've known my whole life - and taken up to our room, where were told that the Hotel's regular afternoon High Tea was in progress downstairs.  Kele went off to explore the century-old hotel - after being told to stay away from The Widow's Walk because it was too dangerous - but I was dying for a cuppa so made my way to the dining room.

I'd just hit the dark lobby and looked in towards the dining room when I saw an apparition dressed like an elegant lady from the Belle Epoch in Paris ...

Imagine this lady all in white 

and very much older.

... who was sitting in the dining room with scones, little cakes and a pot of tea in front of her.  The was a row of stained glass windows beside her and the light hit the figure with these unearthly colours and she was frozen in a reverie. I too froze on the spot, then frantically looked around for Kele, wanting to tell him the exciting news that The White Lady was actually sitting in the Royal Hotel dining room having High Tea.

Couldn't see Kele around so I raced upstairs to find him, but he was nowhere around, though I checked every place I could think of before I realised "Of course!" Since Kele was the same type of naughty imp we'd all been at his age, there was only one place where he'd be. And yes, there he was, coming down the stairs from the widow's walk, so I gestured frantically for him to come right away.

However, when we got downstairs again, she wasn't there; the ghost was gone!  Kele was very cross with me for trying to fool him, so, wanting proof, I asked the Fijian waitress if she'd seen a ghost sitting at the table right there!  And, yeah, yeah, the woman burst out laughing - I hate that - and said that it had been Dame Mary Edwell-Burke at that table, and that she always came in for High Tea whenever she was in town.

Gosh, didn't I feel such a burke!

So those are my memories of this great lady.  And I do hope it's only the start of a great many from everyone else, because we genuinely cannot forget her!  And we can't all have forever mistaken her for ghosts, so hopefully other people will have stories that are far more ... substantial.


Later:  This is very very sad!   I've just found out that Dame Mary Edwell-Burke is buried at Nasinu Cemetery (grave no. ND 236) and has no headstone!

An unmarked grave for such a Great Lady and such a Great Artist!  This is a great wrong and something needs to be done to put that right!  But how?