Joske's Thumb

For those of us homesick for home, there is a single image that always makes us go "Awwww!" in the most plaintive and poignant of tones.

It's this:

 Jon's photo of Suva Harbour.

Can you see it there?  That mighty thumbs-up in the sky?

Awwwww!

Yup, nothing says "Suva" like that twisted mountain we call Joske's Thumb.

Want another look?

 Awwwww! 

Yes, I know I've shown you these photos before, but they're just so beautiful I know you don't mind seeing them again.




"Who was Joske?" I asked my mother when I was about four years old.

"He was a tailor in the early days of Suva who had the most enormous thumb." my mother replied.

I never had reason to doubt it. That was indeed the official story, and that's what we all believed.

However it's all a lie.

Even Wikipedia doesn't tell the real story:  JOSKE'S THUMB

I don't know what the Fijian name for this mountain was, but in the earliest days of Suva it was called "The Devil's Thumb" ... but then the scandal broke and Fiji discovered local wealthy mill and store-owner Paul Joske's secret life.  It was all so sordid and twisted and vile everyone in Suva started calling him "The Devil Incarnate" and almost as a joke The Devil's Thumb was nicknamed Joske's Thumb ... and it stuck.

Thus, this joking nickname has been in common usage ever since and I think it may even, in default of the real story being known, have devolved into the official name and hence Suva remembers a bad bad bad man who would have been better off forgotten.

How I know this? Well, it's an interesting story.

In Townsville in North Queensland of all places, a bunch of us from Fiji were sitting around the kava bowl on the veranda at Tui's place having a deep talenoa (that's Fijian for 'chat') about a wonderful old house in Suva that had just been pulled down to make way for high-rise.

It was a granite Greek-style courtyard house on the corner of Toorak Road and Suva Street that had long been on my radar because for most of my life it had been a run-down relic, sub-divided into housing for the poorest of the poor, and looked so very sad I'd always wanted to own and restore it.

Too late.

But what made this wonderful house so intensely curious was that all around the eaves were luscious carvings that you'd have expected, given the style, to be of that Greek key-pattern design but were instead ... swastikas.  Yup, long rows of Nazi-style swastikas.

Odd, right?

"Who on earth would have built it?" I said to the group.

"I know." said Tui and he vanished into his house.

Minutes later he came out again carrying an old old manuscript.  "Be careful with it," said Tui as he handed it to me.  "It's my greatest treasure."

I was entirely blown me away.  It was a history of Suva written, at a guess, in the 1930s.  There was no name on it anywhere so who knows who wrote it.

 "The story is in here." said Tui.

And it was too. An entire chapter containing the story of how the house came to be built and what everything meant and why the swastikas were there (they were Hindu, only done the wrong way round, and not Nazi at all) and all about the man who built the house and his affection for Fiji's Girmitji (Indian indentured labourers) and how, as a kindness, he used to bring out unmarried women from India to be auctioned off as wives for the Indian labourers.

Say wot?

And that was only one of perhaps thirty stories in this old type-written manuscript.

 "Where did you find this?" I asked Tui. 

"It was just lying there in a cupboard in an old empty house we were once playing in."

Greatest treasure indeed; beautifully written and full stories about Suva life from the 1880s onwards to the 1930s.  "Can I borrow it to photocopy?" I asked.

"No." said Tui.  "I've never even shown it to anybody before and I'm certainly not letting it out of my hands. I'm even now sorry I showed it to you."

So there you go.  I only read about five of those stories, with my fingers in my ears to block out the talenoa, before Tui said I was being rude and demanded it back, but I couldn't help myself because every one of those stories was a gem.

And one of those stories was about how Joske's Thumb got its name.

I keep telling old friend and alumni Jon Apted that his gorgeous photos of Suva MUST to be used in a coffee table book called, appropriately, "Suva" ... and wouldn't it be just amazing if Tui's wonderful manuscript provided the text.