Thanks Jack!

For years in here I've been talking about how the Americans took Townsville's beaches and dumped them on Waikiki Beach back in Hawaii.

 Waikiki Beach.  

Taken from WWW

so I have no idea who the photographer is.

Of course, Australia was very pleased to do this for them because it was right in the midst of WWII and a Japanese invasion was suspected to be imminent, what with Japanese warplanes flying overhead and dropping bombs and destroying perfectly innocent palm trees, and these lovely Americans were supplying munitions to the Oz army, off-loading them in the NQ city of Townsville, so when they needed ballast for their return journey to Pearl Harbour, Townsville naturally said "Go ahead.  Take it.  Take whatever you need." and thus they took all the sand from a great many miles around.

Of course it would have been much kinder to take all the sand from beaches outside of the city, but I guess having long stretches of ugly mudflats on your doorstep is much preferable to having armed and dangerous Japanese soldiers there. Yes?

Here's what A$23 million looks like.

Townsville Beach after they replaced the sand.

Anyway, I'm sharing this with you because I'm currently reading my way through Jack London's South Pacific stories and I want to share his description of Waikiki Beach as it was back in 1906:

"The grass grows right down to the water at Waikiki Beach. The trees also grow down to the salty edge of things and one sits in their shade and looks seaward at a majestic surf thundering in on the beach to one's very feet ... One after another they come, a mile long, with smoking crests, the white battalions of the infinite army of the sea." 

 No mention of a beach in there at all, right?

Yes, I'm reading my way through Jack London at present and I really have to share something with you.  Jack London can really write. Normally I find American writers really heavy, portenious and pretentious, but not here.  He's very light and funny but rich with wisdom and insight.  Gosh, I do love him so much ... but I also wish he'd do more describing of places.

Like Fiji, right?  There he is in Fiji back in 1906 and do you think I can find any word he wrote about the place?

OK, I did find a single piece in "The Cruise of the Snark", which is his 1906 account of his adventures sailing through the Pacific - a period of history when the Pacific was practically unknown to the outside world and thus worthy of a massive fill-in-the-blanks - however this is simply a collection of short stories about sailing and hardly at all, on any level, a travel book. Most disappointing. It's like someone traveling to Mars and writing a book about it that simply talks about rocket engines, catering and refueling techniques.

So I would hardly recommend it to anyone after descriptions of the Pacific as it was a century back, and what was most annoying to me is that the only mention of Fiji is how a doctor there took a look at the gaping holes that everyone on board had developed around every cut and wound since they'd stopped off in the Solomon Islands and said they were yaws. Then, only while a short while later, a Missionary took a look and told them that yaws were something completely different and that what they had were tropical ulcers.

It's actually an inexcusable mix-up but I guess the Fiji doctor was a new arrival who hadn't seen either of these icky diseases before.  If he had, he'd never have made that diagnosis:  yaws are these really ugly yellow-crusted sores that appear on the parts of your body that bend, like on your knees and elbow and ankles, while tropical ulcers are these massive white holes that eat out your flesh and expose the bone, which get steadily bigger all the time.  They are both caused by mutations of the leprosy bacilli but are entirely different from each other and not nearly in the same league of harmful as leprosy, and the good news is that letting your body take care of them, helped along with green leafy vegetables and sea bathing, you have a lifelong immunity to both leprosy and another cousin-disease syphillis.

Anyway, it was the Missionary who turned out to be correct, so I guess Missionaries in the early 20th century saw more of the Pacific's real health issues than the doctors did.

But that's it.  Our much loved nation reduced to two nasty diseases!  Would it have killed Jack London to give us a bit more? Maybe a killer description or two of Levuka or Suva or someplace else in our Vanua Loma?  Perhaps an account of what he did, saw and the people he met?  Most disappointing.


Oh, but he does have a short story called "The Whale Tooth" in his collection South Sea Tales which is an account of the real life Reverend Baker - our friend Julie's ancestor - getting himself killed and eaten up in the Central Highlands of Viti Levu.

 All that remained of Reverend Baker 

after his visit to Central Viti Levu.

Our dear friend, the late Father Bransfield, organised

a Reconciliation Ceremony between the village and

Reverend Baker's descendants. 

Only one of his extraordinary acts of kindness.

Photo taken by Renn at Fiji Museum.

It's a beautifully written tale that gets so much right about Fiji. All the atmosphere, attitudes are right and the world view is correct and I couldn't understand how an American writer could have got such a handle on the way we see the world, however "The Cruise of the Snark" reveals that he had ever so many Pacific Island crew members on board, and he'd sit around with them and listen to their stories.  Kudos Jack.


And what is really quite telling about this particular story is that in this story Jack London renames Reverend Baker as Reverend Starburst ... and when you see that in connection with his poem "The Jack London Credo" it becomes particularly poignant.


If you don't know that poem:

THE JACK LONDON CREDO

I would rather be ashes than dust!
I would rather that my spark should burn out

 in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dry-rot.
I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in 

magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.
The function of man is to live, not to exist.
I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them.
I shall use my time.

Poignant, yes?   Calling him Reverend Starburst surely means Jack London sees this Missionary as exactly his type of hero.

Anyway, I was so taken by this story that I asked Julie if she has a copy of South Sea Tales, but she says she unfortunately doesn't.  How shocking is that!  Personally, if I had some big name writer telling a story about one of my ancestors, I would splurge on copies for everyone even marginally related to me, and thus I'm now determined to track down an old copy, leather-bound and preferably signed, as a gift for her so she can share this wonderful ancestral portrait with her own particular brood of Reverend Baker's descendants.