I Remember .... by Inez Hames (1972)
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I Remember .... by Inez Hames (1972)
Contents
Foreward
1 Early Days
2 Teaching at Nailaga in Ba, Fiji
3 Davuilevu, the head mission station
4 More about Davuilevu
5 Dilkusha
6 The "Southern Cross" crossed the Pacific, and some Meditations on Money
7 A Hurricane
8 Inland Journeys
9 Two Centenaries
10 Various Holidays
11 Life in Kadavu
12 Matavelo Girls' School
13 New Zealand Interlude
14 Back to Fiji
15 Last Teaching Years
16 Independent Fiji
Appendices
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FOREWORD
The first "marama sisita" I met on arriving in Fiji in 1938, was "Miss Ames" - her
father had met me at the boat in Suva, and I spent my first few days at Davuilevu in
her cottage. I recall being somewhat overwhelmed by her effortless identification with
the Fijian people, her knowledge of their way of life, and her fluency in the language.
After eighteen years' service, Miss Hames had already made a substantial contribution
in the field of education. Those years were, however, but a beginning - the thirty
which followed were to be a period of far-reaching change for the peoples of Fiji, and
were to bring to the fore one of Miss Hames' most endearing qualities - her readiness
to accept new ways and ideas. Not for her the backward looking nostalgia for the "old
days". She finds the present exciting, is delighted to see so many of her former pupils
realising their full potential as leaders in the community, and must surely rejoice in the
knowledge that she has contributed so much towards this. These memoirs are
fascinating. They are completely lacking in sentimentality, and, spiced with her
delightfully astringent sense of humour, they reveal her great affection for Fiji and its
people. This is indeed Volunteer Service Abroad writ large.
May McIntosh
Lower Hutt
22 May 1972
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Chapter 1
Early Days
There was no telephone in the house where I was born in 1892 in Paparoa, ninety
miles north of Auckland. Nor of course were there motor cars. My father took a bridle
from the saddle shed, and walked out into the fields, or paddocks, as we call them in
New Zealand, and, catching one of his horses, led it to the front gate, saddled it, and
rode six miles on unmetalled roads to get a doctor for me. This was in 1893. I had a
bad cold, and there was heavy breathing. When Dr Montaigne came, he diagnosed
congestion of the lungs, and nothing could be done. The child would last a few hours.
To the young couple with their first child this seemed intolerable. My father had heard
that there was a man visiting the district who used homoeopathic cures, and that he
would be riding that day on horseback from Paparoa to Maungaturoto. So he rode out
across his farm a mile and a half to the government road. He reached the road, and,
dismounting, saw hoof-marks going to Maungaturoto. He followed, overtook Mr
Rimmer, explained his trouble, and they returned together to our home, where my
mother was anxiously watching over me. Hot and cold wet pack treatment was the
remedy. Firewood was burnt in the kitchen stove all night. Kettle after kettle of hot
water kept blankets hot as fomentations. A crisis passed, and I recovered.
This incident shows the utter isolation of early settlers in North Auckland. To me,
growing up in beautiful Paparoa valley, it all seemed so normal that, even now, in the
1970s, I find it quite an effort to realise how far from normal it was. We led pleasant
lives. There was an abundance of eggs, and milk and butter; mutton when a sheep was
killed; bacon and pork of our own curing; more than abundance of fruit; vegetables
from our own garden. There were acres of beautiful playing grounds; in winter long
evenings by big log fires, and plenty of well-selected books. There were horses to ride,
when we went to church or to visit friends. What did it matter to a child that there was
a serious economic depression, and that the farm income was very small? I was well
into my teens before I tasted an ice cream. Occasionally my father brought home a
few boiled lollies. He had built up his library by foregoing mid-day meals on holidays
in Auckland and purchasing from second-hand book shops. Our mother made our
bread. We made butter in a treadle-barrel churn. My father ran sheep on his 500 acre
farm and kept cows for home use. Life was free. We could ride out visiting and come
home when we liked. The few cows could wait for milking.
But indeed the whole story of the Albertland settlement is so far from normal as to
seem, when considered now, fantastically unusual. We must picture England, where,
halfway through the nineteenth century, the non-established churches were unfairly
treated. In Herefordshire Lord Somers, disturbed that daughters only were born to
him, was seriously advised that God might be punishing him for allowing Methodists
to live on his estate. Consequently he ejected them all. A Methodist church committee,
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with my Great-grandfather Maddox as convenor, arranged refuge for them. My
Grandparents were married in Ledbury Anglican church. Their own 'chapel' and
minister were prevented by law from providing marriage facilities. Village schools
were Anglican institutions. Land also was closely held by the gentry. Enterprising
people in the beginning and middle of the nineteenth century wished it were possible
to improve their lot. Socialist laws were far away in the future. It was not until 1834
that there were government education grants, not until 1836 that a law was passed
allowing civil marriage.
The Wakefield settlements in Wellington and Nelson districts in New Zealand had
catered for both moneyed people and labourers. Canterbury had been settled by
Church of England, Otago by Scottish people. When the idea of a Nonconformist
settlement in North Auckland reached the chapels in England, many people received
the suggestion with joy. Rev. William Gittos, missionary to Kaipara Maoris, heard
about it, and suggested his district for the project. Decent, moral, industrious people
would be good for the Kaipara. So it was arranged. These people, who called
themselves Albertlanders, full of hope, were allotted sections of land in the forest.
Their hardships were severe. Isolation in the heavy, unroaded forest, brought its perils.
My Grandfather, a brainy, delicate schoolteacher, with a brave, severely practical
wife, because he was suddenly afflicted with deafness, took his wife and four little
boys to Paparoa Valley, miles from neighbours, in the midst of forest. Fierce wild pigs
of the stock originally left by Captain Cook roamed among the totara, kahikatea,
kauri, tree ferns and supplejacks. One day the parents, their eleven year old son and
little five year old went out to work or reconnoitre, leaving little Rowland, two years
old, in the care of eight year old Luther. A great pig came in looking for food. Luther
picked Baby Rowland up and climbed with him on to a table, no doubt saving him
from being eaten by the pig.
They were not really suitable people for pioneering. Not physically, and not at all
quick at seizing opportunities of gaining money. Later, others in Paparoa learnt to fell
great Kauri trees and raft them down the flooded Manganui to the Northern Wairoa
River to timber mills. But in other ways the Hames family were very suited to
pioneering. My Grandfather came from a line of gardeners, and he and my
grandmother, and later children and daughters-in-law created a lovely atmosphere of
trees, flowers, fruit and vegetables. They were intensely religious. I remember grace in
my grandparents' home both before and after meals. I remember kneeling by my chair
after breakfast, listening to my grandfather's long prayers. And the Bible teaching
given to me sitting on my grandmother's knee with an illustrated Bible has never been
forgotten. Its influence has remained with me all my life.
They were too far from a school to travel bush tracks for education, but their now
severely deaf father taught the children, his wife supplying the hearing part of the
schooling. Their brains were keen. They could have competed with credit anywhere at
all. But for years they lived lonely lives. My Uncle Luther took up school-teaching
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and went to Auckland. My two aunts, who had been born in the Paparoa Valley home,
became nurses. The others remained farmers. But my father saw to it that his children
had every possible chance of education. My mother, a pretty, artistic woman of
Baptist stock, reared in Melbourne, fell in with his wishes.
One day, when my aunt Priscilla was a child, my grandmother promised her that if she
memorised the whole Wesleyan Methodist hymn book, she would give her €1.
Priscilla memorised it and received her pound. Rowland, who was later my father, and
Priscilla in their young days had been in the habit of reciting 'Paradise Lost' to each
other, as they rode horses along the ridge tracks home from church meetings in
Paparoa township. They would get to the last line of one book when they reached the
gate of the home paddock and lifted the twisted wire or piece of chain that fastened
gate to post, rode through, and turned to replace it; or, if to avoid a deep bog of mud
they followed an alternative track, one of them dismounted to let down the slip-rails.
In his early twenties my father became a lay preacher, or local preacher in Methodist
phraseology. All the travelling was done on horseback. On some Saturday afternoons
he would set out for Mangawai or Hakaru or Waikiekie, twenty miles away. When I
was a school girl, it was my privilege sometimes to go with him to nearer places. We
would ride straight from morning service at Paparoa, eating our sandwiches as we
rode along to Ararua or Mareretu. I see in memory a small, ugly, bare building at the
side of the road, set in the midst of manuka scrub, and a handful of friendly people
arriving on horseback or on foot. Battered Sankey hymn books would be passed
round, and we sang the hymns very badly. My father always preached well.
My parent’s Clara and Rowland Hames – Wedding 1891
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In winter in those days of unmetalled roads, we would perhaps avoid riding through
mud that almost reached the horses' bellies, and take a short-cut from Ararua to
Paparoa. Down a steep incline the horses would slide, almost on their haunches,
perhaps seventy feet, to a valley; then toil up to another ridge, where the downward
sliding would begin again. Our Sabbath observance could not be called humdrum. But
there should be a place in heaven for those church workers, our horses!
Then as children how we loved those occasional Sundays when Father did not have a
preaching appointment. He would let Mother go out for the day for church and
visiting, and he would look after us. He would perhaps take us for a walk, he carrying
baby Edgar, or whoever was the youngest of us. He would show us the old pitsaw,
where he and a teenage boy had sawn all the timber for our home. When in 1890 my
father became engaged to be married, he cut down one of his kauri trees, dug a pit
under the great trunk, and he and Willie Gibbs, one at the top and the other below,
sawed the whole thing into boards. Then they built the house in which my brother
Edgar still lives. Heart of kauri is very sound. I was born in 1892, and Eva in 1894.
She was prettier and cleverer than I was.
"It is better to be good than clever," said Grandma Hames to us two one day.
"It's better to be both," said sharp-witted Eva.
She lived up to this rule, as will be seen as the tale continues. In 1899 and 1900 my
brothers Viv and Edgar were born. I could not attend Wairere School until I was
nearly seven years old, because my parents were afraid I might be attacked by wild
pigs in the bush. But in 1898 my youthful aunt, Amy Hutchinson, came from
Whangarei to live with us, attend school too, and protect me on the bush track. But I
had learned to read at home before this. In 1901 we commenced attending Huarau
School in the building which Father and Mr Andrew Rintoul had to finance, and build
with their own hands.
Great changes took place in New Zealand. Refrigeration transformed farming. Butter
factories sprang up in Taranaki, the Waikato, Bay of Plenty and North Auckland.
Ended was the pleasant life of shearing sheep once a year and milking a few house
cows. People rose at 4 a.m. and toiled at fourteen hand-milkings a week. Money
became a real force in farmers' lives. New rooms were built onto homes, water taps
were installed in kitchens, wash-tubs, sinks and baths with plugs and down-pipes to
drains were added to home comforts. Linoleum replaced white-scrubbed board floors
and home-dressed sheepskin mats. Chests of drawers replaced the usual three packing
cases with a starched vallance edged with deep crochet. Farm machinery was bought;
wire fences supplemented or replaced hawthorn hedges. New kinds of manure were
used. Better stock was introduced. My father sent Viv and Edgar to Lincoln
Agricultural College in Canterbury. They returned home and have farmed in Paparoa
Valley until now.
I took my privileges and duties as big sister rather too seriously. We have always been
bound closely in sentiment and mutual loyalty. When I was eleven, Bernard was born,
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and was my especial pet, they all said. Then in five more years there were two lovely
girls, Mildred and Stella. I had gone to school in Auckland on a scholarship soon after
Mildred came to us. In these days we can travel from Paparoa to Auckland by car in
three hours, but to go there to school in 1906 was a very different matter. At 4 a.m. my
father caught two horses. A wood fire lit in the range cooked our breakfast. My
belongings had been packed in a straw hamper. A rolled-up sack strapped on the front
of Father's saddle provided a rest for the hamper. We mounted and set off. Eight miles
to Whakapirau or Pahi to catch the harbour steamer. Father returned home with the
two horses, and the little steamboat went down the Arapaua River to Batley, through
the "funnel", past Tinopai, then only a Maori village, and out across the Kaipara
Heads, past Shelley Beach, and up the winding Kaipara River to Helensville, where
the passengers boarded the Auckland train, reaching that city at 4 p.m.
I found very serious rivals in Auckland Grammar School in Symonds Street. I never
topped my class. Girls, used to quick city ways, were more alert than I was. I made
friendships that have lasted till now. Mr J.W. Tibbs was headmaster of both sides of
the school. A high wall separated us from the boys. The communicating door was
always locked. In 1908 Miss Annie Whitelaw became our head, and in 1909 we
moved to Howe Street. I matriculated in 1908. By this time I felt that I was not clever,
and I decided against a University education. It was a wrong decision. In Fiji, for fifty
years I have been repeatedly at a disadvantage because of the lack of a degree.
Auckland was a homely little city then. It was compact. It must have been about as
large as Suva is now. I thought Pitt Street Methodist Church a most wonderful place.
Starved for music as we were then in Paparoa, practising for Sunday School
anniversary under young Tom Garland, later Uncle Tom of 1ZB, was a sheer delight. I
am not the slightest bit musical, but I loved it all. There were good preachers there C.H. Garland, James Luxford, William Ready, and they influenced me.
Eva joined me at school, and did very well. She never again lived in Paparoa. Winning
a John Tinline scholarship, she attended Auckland University College. She had
Father's retentive memory, and could quote whole pages of the textbooks to illustrate
anwers to examination questions. She gained her B.A. degree, and later became a
Student Christian Movement secretary, then married Ronald Sinclair Watson,
Presbyterian minister. They led full and useful lives and have both passed on, leaving
behind two sons and six grandchildren. Dr Malcom Hames Watson of Lower Hutt is
one son. Dr Nigel Mott Watson, professor at Ormond College, University of
Melbourne, is another. There will be more about the family in a later chapter.
After two years at home, helping Mother with the children, I entered Auckland
Training College in Wellesley Street East. In 1914 I was appointed to Maromaku
School in the Bay of Islands; then in 1915 to Woodhill, near Helensville; and in 1917
to Huarau, which I had attended as a child. The Public Works Department was putting
the railway through the north. World War I delayed the work, and engineers and
labourers were camped for several years on our farm. Huarau School served their
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children. Both ends of the tunnel near Paparoa Station were on my father's property.
Through increased road transport in these days, Paparoa Station is very unimportant,
and my brother Viv, a grazier of cattle and sheep, lives in and owns what was
originally the stationmaster's house, the site for which he has now bought back for
himself. Edgar has a considerable dairy farm, and he and his wife, Rita, have a lovely
family of three girls and six grandchildren, and have made a gracious home of the
house Father and Willie Gibbs built in 1891. Betty Jarvis, a schoolteacher has three
sons. Audrey Arnold with her husband teaching in Canada has two daughters and a
son. Jennifer, a daughter, is in the New Zealand department of Foreign Affairs
In 1920, feeling an overpowering urge to extend the Kingdom of God overseas, I
offered as a missionary schoolteacher for Fiji.
My Mother about 1930
Inez with family.
shortly before going to Fiji
My Father about 1923
Back Row: Inez (standing), Eva, Vivian, Mildred
Front Row: Bernard, Stella, Edgar, grandfather Hutchinson.
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Our home in Paparoa about 1928
Paparoa Methodist Church about 1928
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Chapter 2.
Teaching at Nailaga in Ba in Fiji
"Don't let's leave this second chair in
my office," said the expatriate
minister. "Some Fijian might sit on
it. Lelean's a fool; he's put seats in
his office for his students. He'll make
them cheeky.”
"You'd better be careful what you
say to Miss A," said Mrs W. "She's
telling people you'll be a dangerous
influence, because you told about
your mother's Maori girl sitting in
the evening by your fire with you
all."
"Don't bother to do what the
Government
Superintendent
of
Schools tells you to do," said the
minister. "Yes, we now take a
government grant, but don't bother, if
he is not pleased. There's too much
English in the syllabus. It makes
Fijians cheeky to learn English.
Inez’ first day in Fiji – July 1920
Now, my boys in my preachertraining school are fine fellows, and
know no English at all. The best of them will be ministers later on. They won't need
English. That boy, Jo, is a fine lad. My wife says he brings the best firewood she's
ever had. And our houseboy, Joni, scrubs a floor beautifully clean. He is always so
respectful. Your boys that you are teaching? The best of them might pass an
examination, that would admit them to Davuilevu for teacher-training or to a medical
course at Suva. Yes, they would need English for that."
Only my pride and a certain stubborness kept me from returning to New Zealand. And
yet, apart from this aloof benevolence to the Fijians, I felt I had everything in common
with these Australian Methodists. I admired their tireless devotion to duty and their
self-sacrificing work. I appreciated their kindness to me, and envied them their
knowledge of language and customs. But I redoubled my efforts to teach English to
my boys at Vunitivi in Nailaga. I did my best to make them cheeky, if it would make
them so. Happily, I met other Australian Methodists, who did not have that fear of too
great friendliness.
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Boys came to the school from as far afield as Ra Province, Nadi and Yasaiva. Circuit
boundaries have since been altered. The Ra-Ba circuit was claimed to be numerically
the largest in the world.
Vunitivi School boys, Ba, 1918
Girls also came from the same districts to Matavelo, which had been the first girls'
boarding-school to be established. I lived at Matavelo with the ladies in charge. One
afternoon each week my boys brought firewood for the girls and us.
"This is because you live here," it was explained to me. "But tell the boys to
leave it at the gate. No boy may come into these grounds. No, nothing could
happen with us watching, but the boys might look lustfully at the girls."
The eighty boys and my Fijian man assistant seemed to me to be models of decorum.
Saimoni Tuai, Etuate Naueukidi and Ropate Varo passed into Davuilevu Teacher
Training Institution, and Peni Bubuta and Joeli Tikolevu into the medical school. On
Friday evenings the Fijian teacher ran a fun night in the school buildings for the bigger
boys, and I played "Drop the handkerchief" out-side with the little fellows. One of
them was the late Rev. Osea Neisau, another Joni Bubuta, school agricultural adviser.
One of the senior girls at Matavelo is now the mother of Mrs Taufa Bole, B.A.
The pupils wrote on slates. They frequently lost their pencils pulled off the wooden
frames, broke off a corner and used that for a pencil. The slates became smaller and
smaller '. Equipment was meagre. The annual fee at Vunitivi Boys' School was £4 for
boarders, but at Matavelo Girls' School no fees were charged. This was for the simple
reason that no Fijian parent would consider it worthwhile to pay fees for girls.
"What is the use of educating girls?" they asked.
Each girl arrived at Matavelo with sleeping mats, a pillow, a slate, a Bible, a hymn
book, a bottle of coconut oil, a large wooden hair comb, a piece of laundry soap, a
white dress for church at least two other dresses, and a mosquito net if possible. As
school equipment we had blackboards, chalk and perhaps a few easy readers we had
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bought ourselves, or managed to acquire by some means. A large map of Fiji was a
useful asset. Spades, grass knives and gardening forks were quite necessary. Both girls
and boys grew all their food. To supplement the monotonous diet of starchy root
vegetables, 'bele' leaves cooked in coconut cream were popular, as were shell-fish
from the river. If tides were unsuited to out-of-school hours, then on those days some
pupils had to miss school. Boarders had only two meals a day; indeed at that time
most Fijians had only one meal per day, though left-over food could often be eaten
without ceremony, just as the opportunity occurred.
Schoolgirls became proficient at washing and ironing and at hand-sewing and crochet.
Some were accepted for nursing training in Suva. Tutoring in the nursing school was
given in the Fijian language. Orderly, sheltered, disciplined life had a tremendous
influence for good. They learnt much of hygienic living. Indeed, a set written
examination paper including the question, "What are three things necessary for the
body?" brought from one girl the startling answer, "Pants, petticoat and dress."
A few years previously a Fijian Minister's daughter had been sent from Matavelo to
Sydney, where she took a course with credit in Kindergarten teaching. In 1920 she had
been back in Fiji only a few years and was teaching in Davuilevu. Her name is famous
now; Lolohea Ratu, later Wagairawal. She lived an outstandingly useful life, and was
loved and honoured by everyone. A few years before her death she attended a PanPacific Conference in Tokyo and quite stole the show and was the most popular
delegate there. Her deep spiritual qualities were what impressed people most.
Mary Ballantine had died in 1918 after eighteen years in Fiji, most of the years at
Matavelo. The mission house for the superintendent minister of Ba-Ra Fijian circuit
was then in Nailaga. It was later moved to Lautoka. It was in that mission house, just
across the Colonial Sugar Refining Company's railway line that Rev. C.O. Lelean had
drawn up Miss Ballantine's famous will, by which she left almost all her savings, just
£100 "for Fijian girls' education." This became the nucleus of the fund with which
Ballantine Memorial School in Suva was made possible.
We attended church in the village of Nailaga. Singing was not in the least like it is
now. One man led it, singing the soprano notes. He started, then everybody else took it
up on the second syllable, women an octave higher than his soprano, the other men
harmonising with him. The result could be appalling. A flagellator with a long stock
stood behind the children. He would poke at them even at prayer-time, and quite often
move a whole school of eighty people several inches up the floor. There were only
two long seats in the church. We sat on them facing the people who sat on the floor. A
chief sat in a chair. Mothers used to quieten small children by telling them we would
get them, if they were restless. How mercifully our relations with small Fijian children
have changed. And how good it is that, though Fijian churches are still now, as in
1920, the people's own for them to decide their own details of methods of worship,
unseemly aspects have quite gone. Women class leaders still intone the catechism
before church, but it is dignified, reverent and melodious.
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I enjoyed making friends of Australian and New Zealand mission staff on Indian
mission stations. There were two distinct branches of the Methodist Mission, Fijian
and Indian.
"You, at Vunitivi, can't expect to get the scholastic results that we get with
Indians," some said.
I had somehow a strangely protective, possessive attitude to the Fijian people. I expect
that it was a good thing that I had. It made me try harder and harder to help them.
"You'll see something this afternoon that you don't see in your Fijian mission
station at Nailaga," said Rev. J.L. "We'll ask some Indian people in to afternoon
tea, as we did in India."
At that time, except for the work of Roman Catholic and Methodist missionaries,
Indians had had very little done to help them. Sixty two thousand of them had been
brought to work in Fiji.
In 1879, when the first four hundred and eighty one had been brought on the
'Leonidas', they were sent to cotton, coconut and sugar plantations. Fiji's first
governor. Sir Arthur Gordon, in his determination to preserve Fijian chiefly
organisation, custom, discipline and control, but harassed by demands of Europeans
for labourers, devised this plan to solve the difficulty. The Colonial Sugar Refining
Company, commencing work in Fiji so soon after Cession, liked the Indians for their
diligence. Indenture conditions were hard, but in 1918, when indenture ended, not
many wanted to return to India. Through hard work and thrift the people have
progressed amazingly to their present state of prosperity.
In 1920 there were very few schools for Indian children, and as for girls, just small
groups were being taught in Methodist schools at Suva, Lautoka, Navua, Dilkusha,
and Ba, and some in Catholic schools. It was considered necessary for their safety to
escort girls along the roads to school. A few had become Christian, but most Indian
pupils remained true to the religion to which they had been born.
In 1919 an agitator had come from India to stir the people up against the Europeans,
and there were riots. In 1920 there was a little aftermath of unrest, and a strike of
Colonial Sugar Refining Company workers. We were alerted with packed suitcases at
hand, and arrangements were made for our protection, but nothing happened. The
powerful Colonial Sugar Refining Company soon settled the strike.
We in Ba at that time did not often visit Suva. It took several days to get there. This is
a contrast to the forty five minutes it now takes to travel by Air Pacific from Nadi to
Nausori. The procedure was this: First we enquired about the probable day on which
the SS Adi Keva would arrive, and we consulted tides. Packed and ready, we awaited a
steamer whistle, and a runner from the riverbank.
"The Keva is on her way up to Rarawai," we were told.
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Quickly the horse was caught and harnessed into the gig, and we went three miles to
Rarawai to enquire from the captain whether he would be going out on the same tide
or the next. Sometimes he had already been to Lautoka, sometimes had still to go
there. At Tavua Bay there was always a wait of several hours, while mail, passengers
and goods were rowed to Tavua landing, and the dinghy returned.
We always tied up for the night at Ellington wharf. The following evening at Levuka
was more interesting. If we had friends ashore we could spend the evening with them,
but sleep aboard to get away for Suva with dawning light. Sometimes, depending on
the tide, it was necessary to spend the next night anchored off shore not far from
Cautata. Going through the river past Wainibokasi to avoid rough seas off the shore
reef of Naselai, was dramatic. Two river bends were too sharp for the 'Keva' to get
round in her own steam. A man swam ashore with a rope, threw a loop over a post,
waited while the boat, on the pull of the rope rounded the point, released it, then
plunged into the river, catching up with the boat round the bend. The present road
from Suva to the western side was completed ten years later.
To get away sometimes from hot, flat Nailaga amongst its mango trees was a thrill to
me. In 1922 a party of us went with a committee of local European ministers and
members of the Australian Mission Board to Nadarivatu, while they chose the site for
the Robert Beckett Memorial Rest House. The journey to Nadarivatu was very
different from the present short car ride. We went by motor car to Waikubukubu at the
foot of the range. Then we hired horses and rode five miles up the zigzag road with its
hairpin bends - 2700 feet up to cool
air. After the Rest House was built,
and we had frequent holidays there,
for some years we still used horses to
ride up the hill, and our goods were
taken up by mule cart.
While at Nailaga I had occasional
other horseback rides, and, using a
village horse, I unwittingly collected
my first legend.
Suna was greedy, and kept stopping to
eat grass. I was told the legend of
Suna, the greedy giant. I thought it
quaint, and little dreamt that it would
become one of the most popular of
my published legends.
In 1923 my father came for a holiday
to Ba, and was most interested in all
that he saw.
Inez with staff at Vunitivi Boys’ School, Nailaga, Ba.
About 1924
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Chapter 3
Davuilevu, the head mission station
In 1926, when Olive Morrissey left her work in Davuilevu to marry Benjamin Meek,
principal of Navuso Agricultural School, I was appointed to take her place. I became
head of Davuilevu Primary School, which served all the children who lived in that
school town. It was one of five schools under the principalship of Rev. C.O. Lelean.
The others were theological, pastor training and technical schools, and a Teacher
Training Institution.
When in 1835, five years after Tahitian missionaries arrived at Oneata, the first
Wesleyan Methodist missionaries came to Fiji, landing at Lakeba in Lau, as soon as
they had reduced Lau dialect to writing and made a few converts, they begun to gather
a few young men together and teach them the art of writing and reading. They then
sent some of them out as teachers to villages needing instruction. When in 1838 more
reinforcements arrived from England and Tongans came too to help them, they
extended their work to Rewa, Viwa, Somosomo and later to other places. By 1862, six
years after Cakobau's conversion and five years after the battle of Kaba had made
Christianity the official religion, it was realised that more efficient training of Fijians
was necessary. Hundreds of villages were asking for teachers. So a Central Training
Institution for the whole of Fiji and Rotuma was established at Richmond in Kadavu.
In 1864 it was transferred to Navuloa and in 1908 to Davuilevu. Pastor-trainees were
selected from small circuit pastor-training schools. Of these some, when older,
returned to take a theological course. Davuilevu is a property of 950 acres of freehold
land on the western bank of the Rewa, opposite Nausori.
Since 1926 many changes have taken place. Theological training is now given in the
English language. Men become Licentiates of Theology. From them some are chosen
to go on to more advanced training in the interdenominational Pacific Theological
College at Veiuto. The largest part of Davuilevu at this time is the LeLean Memorial
School, a secondary school of good standard. Within the Davuilevu grounds there are
also a Bible School and a Leadership Training Centre.
In 1926 there were greater numbers, and living conditions approximated more to
village life. All the six to seven hundred people - Fijian staff, their wives and families,
students and their wives and families, over a period of many years, used to walk for
their daily bath all the way to the Rewa River across the King's Road. Gardens were
extensive. Many hours were spent in planting. Technical School boys and unmarried
pastor students lived in dormitories, but each circuit of Fiji and Rotuma had its own
area. A married theological student was in charge of each section with oversight of
married pastor trainees, their wives and families, and also other children who had
crowded into their houses in order to attend the Primary School.
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Houses had thatch walls and corrugated iron roofs. These areas extended back on the
property to a ridge wall behind the present limits of the town. Grass was cut with
cane-knives. There were no motor-mowers, but the standard of neatness and beauty of
surroundings was high.
The Primary School, including girls up to about the age of fourteen, provided the
main practising school for teacher-trainees. Others were Nausori district primary
school, and, for Indian trainees, Dilkusha Boys' and Girls' Schools.
I was privileged to live in the home of Rev. C.O. LeLean. Because I lived there, the
children every Tuesday afternoon worked for him, cutting his grass, and carrying his
firewood up the hill. They used to sing lustily as they worked, parodying a hymn:
"Na koro ni Kalou,
Koro savasava,
Sega na duka,
Sega na duka,
Sa curu kikea."
"No unclean can enter."
But they sang:
"Sega na nuka,
Sega na nuka,
"No firewood can enter."
Then some wag sang:
"Sega na luka,
Sega na luka."
"No mucous can enter."
Davuilevu had an official school song;
"Davuilevu, na koro dredre,"
"Davuilevu, the different town."
Miss Morrissey thought they meant that lessons were advanced. But I thought it meant
that conditions were hard.
"Davuilevu, na koro dredre,
Ti drau ni moli, kaua tavioka."
"Lemon leaf tea and casava."
Only the teachers in training had bread or meat and onions. They received a
government grant and therefore had funds. It was small wonder that there was
jealousy.
"Cheeky young fellows," the others said.
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But of course they were nothing of the sort. They were especially bright adolescent
boys from all parts of Fiji and Rotuma. They had entered by passing our Qualifying
Examination. In those days birth certificates were not required. I remember the
consternation when they were first needed. One boy was assured in the Department of
Vital Statistics that he had never been born. There was no record of him. A Lomaiviti
boy wrote to Levuka for his birth certificate. As it was slow in coming, he wrote
again. Then a reply came to his first letter, then the second request was answered. But
they were different.
"Which shall I use?" he asked me.
"Let's look at them," I said, "and see which one will suit you best."
I quote from a paper read in 1964 by Rev. A.G. Adamson at the inaugural celebrations
of the Methodist Church in Fiji:
"At the beginning of the T.T.I, the government gave grants on the principle that
these would be paid according to the number of successful students who, passing
examinations, qualified for certificates. This was very soon changed to a fairer
system - namely, giving an annual grant for each year's training. The candidates,
Fijian and Indian, were selected by the mission. The government planned for five
grades of certificates."
When Nasinu Training College was opened in 1946, the old T.T.I. ceased to function.
I knew all the T.T.I, students so well, not only because they did their teaching practice
in my school, nor because I planned all their catechism lessons, but also because I was
one of a small band of teachers who, after teaching another school from 8 a.m. to 1
p.m., tutored them daily in classes in Baker Hall from 2.30 to 4.30p.m. Of that time,
Chrissie Weston of Dilkusha, now in New Zealand, shares many memories. Other
teachers came and went, but we remained for fifteen years. There were no secondary
schools for brighter students, nor in all Fiji, except Cawaci for Roman Catholics, any
other teacher training.
Students came to my office for preparation of day and Sunday school lessons, and for
talk on many subjects. Some went with me on Sundays to Tonga Island in the Rewa
River. We found that the children there could neither read nor write, and we gave both
secular and religious instruction.
Before birth certificates were required, one very clever, attractive little fourteen-year
old slipped into the Teacher Training Institution. The nineteen year olds teased him,
and he was sometimes lonely, so he often came to my office to talk. Those nineteen
year olds are not now as likely to tease him as they then were. I am sure Semesa
Sikivou, formerly Assistant-Director of Education for Fiji and Rotuma, now Fiji's
representative to the United Nations, will pardon my being personal. He told me about
his mother, who, having been taught by Miss Hammatt at Rewa Mission School, never
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let her children stay away from school without good reason. He talked to me, too, of
superstition.
"You don't believe in devils. Miss Hames? If you lived in my village you
would."
From Lau came a tall, serious, well-mannered youth. Setareki Tuilovoni became in
1964 the first president of the independent Methodist Church of Fiji. Now he is
secretary of the Pacific Council of Churches, and he has been acceptable as Pacific
representative at conferences in United States of America, Europe, Africa and
Australia. Another student was George Nakaora. He followed Setareki as president,
but has now passed on.
There was Josua Rabukawaqa, now High Commissioner to the United Kingdom, who,
until his last week in Fiji, in his busy life, spared time to help with great distinction in
the musical life of the church he loves. There is Senator Livai Volavola, ex-Deputy
Mayor of Suva, but also Methodist local preacher. There are Ram Harakh and Eliki
Seru in the Education Department, Mahendra Vinod, principal of Fiji school of
Agriculture, and Rev Mikaele Driu of Nabua. Indeed, very many of today's prominent
citizens are our old teacher-trainees.
"Is it interesting to you. Miss Hames, to see us in important positions?" they ask
me.
"It certainly is," I say. "We never in our wildest dreams imagined such things.
All we hoped for was that you would become good teachers to help us in the
schools, of which we were head."
So much for our arrogance. But how good it is that we have now to go to them for
permission for this and that.
Not all remained teachers. Lawyers, secretaries, and administrators are among their
number. Many are principals and headmasters of schools. Several are education
officers. They treat me kindly when they pay inspectorial visits to the schools in which
I am teaching.
Women students from Ballantine Memorial School at Muanikau were admitted for
training from 1939. There was at first some opposition to this from some Fijian
members of synod.
"In my time no girls past childhood were allowed inside the gate," said a senior
Fijian minister, "and Davuilevu was a clean town."
I have appended at the back of this book a few names of Fijian and Indian men and
women students in Davuilevu, some in teacher-training, others in both Primary School
and T.T.I., others in Primary School only. Those I have omitted must please forgive
me.
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Chapter 4.
More About Davuilevu
I quote from R.A. Derrick's book, "Vocational Training in The South Pacific:"
"All of the Pacific Island peoples have, or have had, a long tradition of individual
craftmanship. Some of their most primitive implements were fashioned in a
manner that might well bring shame to the modern workman."
At Davuilevu I enjoyed the friendship of Ron and Ruby Derrick. The latter had been a
missionary sister. She came younger to the mission field than I did, and, though we
are about the same age, she had had longer service. She had worked as a teacher first
in Tonga, then Fiji at Suva, Tavuini, Matavelo, Dilkusha, Davuilevu and Bau. She
married Ron Derrick, who had been sent from Victoria to be head of Davuilevu Boys'
High School. Though she had an exceptionally busy life with her family of seven
children, she longed to do more to help the women of Fiji. With the help of her
husband and of Lolohea Waqairawai and Sera Matam, a Fiji-wide women's
organisation was established, which did a tremendous amount towards raising the
status of village women. It was called the Qele ni Ruve, but is now known as the
Soqosoqo Vaka-Marama. Its excellent handcraft centre at Nabua is well known.
Both Mr and Mrs Derrick were very strongly convinced that the way of development
and uplift for the Fijian race lay largely through training in skills with their hands.
Almost no technical training was being given in Fijian schools. With the arrogance of
the English, we have imposed on these Pacific peoples a system of education devised
for British people in the United Kingdom, Australia or New Zealand. We teach them
poems about daffodils and snow in winter, though we live in a country rich in beauty
of nature, in folklore and in handicrafts. This peculiar bias was anathema to Ronald
Derrick. He refused to use the word "High" in the name of his school. It was not 'high';
it was elementary. So he cut out the word 'high'. Davuilevu Boys' School was situated
where LeLean Memorial School now stands.
Right down on the road frontage, where there is now a lawn and a flower-bed, there
stood a two-storey building, in which indeed there had some years earlier commenced
technical training for a few. Before Davuilevu students had moved up from Navuloa,
and while hill-tops were still being levelled, roads made and buildings erected. Rev
J.W. Burton at Dilkusha and Rev W. Chambers of Rewa had oversight of Davuilevu
Industrial Institute for Fijians and Indians. Mr Whau, who built Baker Memorial Hall
before he commenced his own business in Suva, together with Mr Ben Sutherland of
New Zealand, trained a few young Fijian men. The Indian students soon dropped out.
After Davuilevu was officially opened in 1908, the workshop became part of the
mission station or school town under Rev W.E. Bennett, principal of Davuilevu. A
few Fijian men became proficient under Mr Sutherland's guidance at making furniture
of various kinds. But Mr Derrick asked that his schoolboys might also receive some
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woodwork training. Eventually the Davuilevu Industrial Institute lost its identity, and
the Boys' School became Davuilevu Technical School. To all the Fijians living in
Davuilevu at that time it was 'Na sukulu'.
Again I quote from "Vocational Training in the South Pacific:"
"A technical school was in operation at Davuilevu during the pre-war period.
The focus round which the course was built was the building industry, although
sections of the school were concerned also with commercial work and
engineering. The liberal element was provided by English, social studies (related
to Fiji and the Pacific region), art and singing (taught as a regular subject, with
attention to sight-reading). Training for citizenship permeated the whole course;
ethical standards and personal hygiene were dealt with in daily talks at assembly.
Practical subjects occupied a high place and included workshop training in
woodwork and metalwork and handcrafts such as weaving on looms (built in the
school), lino block cutting and its application to the production of text-books
printed in the school, and book-binding. All other subjects were specifically
related to the central theme.”
For each year's work a type of building needed and used by the Fijian people, was
selected, progressing from the simple to the complex. Classes in technical drawing
prepared the plans and details; those in geometry worked out the problems involved in
setting out walls, roof and architectural features. Others combined technical English
with the theory of building construction, the pupils learning the scientific basis of
established practice and construction. The senior year studied applied mechanics in
relation to structures. Classes in mathematics analysed the plans, prepared bills of
quantities, worked out costs, and calculated wages.
In the workshop basic training led to the making of useful articles and the construction
of furniture and buildings, and when there was no actual construction work in hand,
pupils built their own houses to scale, working from their own plans and applying at
the bench the geometry and theory they had learnt in the class.
It is significant that, although many of the pupils of this school did in fact later enter
the building trade, where many occupied posts of responsibility as foremen and even
as contractors, others entered administrative work as magistrates or officials, others
again became technical teachers, while many returned to their villages to apply what
they had learnt. In two cases villages were re-built under their influence and
leadership."
Mr Derrick's work was so good that the Education Department asked him to establish
their technical education scheme, which he did. Technical work in Davuilevu
languished, but it had played its part, and was no longer so desperately needed.
Though no needlewoman, I did what I could for women and girls, and added sewing
classes to my other duties. I taught beginners' work, that was within my scope, and
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enlisted help of others for more difficult work. Mrs Sharp, Mrs LeLean and Mrs
Sutherland all helped in this way. We had both girls' and women's classes in
Davuilevu and in Nausori.
Miss Maud Griffin, then of Dudley Memorial School, a great educationist who after
retirement died in Auckland, was not skilled at sewing, but she and Miss Elsabe
Smith, at that time matron of Dilkusha Girls' Home, and I, often talked together of the
need for homecraft and needlework to be regarded as school subjects with syllabus,
time-table and examination status. After years of struggle, we at last got our voices
really heard on the matter in synod. We had a course in our mission schools in these
subjects, with instruction and examination in Hindi and Fijian. It served its purpose as
a forerunner of the fine homecraft and needlework scheme of the Education
Department today.
Mr Derrick was the first authoritative historian of Fiji, and, after his retirement from
the Education Department, he established the Fiji Museum in its present building.
When, after his death, the president of the Fijian Teachers' Association, Sokiasi
Sovanivolu, suggested that the new government technical college be named the
Derrick Technical Institute, the idea met with universal approval.
Just as Primary and T.T.I, boys of former days do, the old boys of Davuilevu Boys'
School, and of course the old theologues, give me handshakes and kind smiles
whenever I meet them in Suva streets, buses, or in villages.
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Chapter 5.
Dilkusha
Dilkusha, adjacent to Davuilevu, has been for more than half a century like a second
home to me. Friendships formed there have been deep and lasting. In 1921, on holiday
from Nailaga in Ba, I was a guest of that grand woman, Hester Clark, who explained
many things about the Indian mission, took me walking miles visiting Indian homes,
and revealed to me her great love and concern for the Indian people. She brought help
to them when they were ill, or in distress. Her dispensary at Dalkusha and her
maternity ward in her home were needed then. Now the government health centre at
Nausori has quite altered the situation. She loved all the boys she had mothered in
Dilkusha Boys' Orphanage. I am told that to this day in the 1970s there are Indian
homes where only one Christian missionary name is known; that to some the name
"Miss Clark" and "Christianity" are almost synonymous terms.
Christian work amongst the Indian people had been begun by Miss Hannah Dudley,
who had been a missionary in India, and there heard of Indians in Fiji and their need.
She came to Fiji in 1897, and began work in Toorak in Suva. She began a little school
there. She lived in an unpretentious house on a hill, where Dudley School biology
room and library now stand. She walked the tracks of Toorak, giving help where it
was so sorely needed. She took waifs into her home and nurtured them. She paid
weekly visits to the gaol to see Indian prisoners, and preached to them. Some of the
missionaries to the Fijians had been alarmed at the increasing numbers of Indian
people in Fiji with no one working amongst them, and made representatives to the
mission board.
The first missionary appointed was Rev J.W. Burton of New Zealand. He was
stationed at Dilkusha. One end of Davuilevu property was marked off for an Indian
mission station. That end of the property had not been used since 1867, when after the
murder of Rev Thomas Baker, the station was abandoned. There will be more about
this in a later chapter.
Dilkusha was the name given to the station. Mr Burton's house was built on the site of
Mr Baker's thatch house so many years before. This was on the top of the hill above
the western end of Rewa Bridge. He and his wife took orphans into their own home.
In 1900 conditions in the coolie "lines" were appalling. These were quarters provided
for workers in the mill. Nausori mill was across the river from Dilkusha. Sometimes
Indian mothers died, and children were left with no .one properly to care for them. It
was such children that Mr Burton rescued and took home.
In 1901 Miss Alice Watson came from Australia, and was appointed as district worker
near the lines. She gathered women and girls around her, and taught them. When Miss
Austin arrived in 1906 she took charge of the orphans. In 1910 Miss May Graham of
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New Zealand came and did district work, and taught school. Miss Watson then lived
in Dilkusha, and for awhile had charge of the orphanage. Rev C. Bavin succeeded Rev
J.W. Burton.
Pitiful stories are told of the evils of indenture. Women tied to trees and flogged;
women two days after childbirth kicked by overseers and told to work harder; girls in
India waylaid by agents on city streets and forced on to the 'Leonidas' and other ships,
and taken to Fiji, having no idea where they were going and unable to contact their
relatives again. Some of these came from good homes in India, but were forced to
work in Fiji cane-fields. Rev J.W. Burton by his books and Rev C.F. Andrews from
India brought such pressure to bear on the governments of Britain, Fiji and India that
indenture ended in 1918.
In 1926, when I was transferred from Ba to Davuilevu, with Dilkusha only fifteen
minutes walk away, I found frequent, rest, refreshment, companionship and
inspiration in the homes of my friends there. Maud Griffin was there. It was later that
noble woman went to Suva, and threw the whole force of her cleverness, devotion and
energy into building up Dudley School. In 1926 she was in charge of Dilkusha Boys'
Orphanage, and also taught the T.T.I, in Davuilevu. She had formerly been head of
Dilkusha Indian Boys' School. We were fellow New Zealanders. Our fathers had been
friends.
Indian Girls Bible Camp, 1930.
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Then in 1929 Chrissie Weston, another New Zealander, who had taught in Indian
mission schools in Suva and Ba, came
to Dilkusha Girls' School, and also
taught every afternoon in the T.T.I, in
Davuilevu. We had been friends from
1920, and after fifteen more years of
close association in the Teacher
Training Institution, she is one of my
dearest friends. She now graces her
retirement
in
Raumati
South,
Wellington, so happy amongst her
relations. But what a work she did for
forty years. In 1929 Dilkusha Girls'
School roll was thirty five girls. They
were almost all girls of the "Home".
Only four others attended, daughters
of members of the mission station
staff. When she left Dilkusha and Fiji
in 1959, there were over four hundred
in the school, most being day pupils
from the immediate surrounding
Teachers at Dilkusha Girls’ School, 1954
district.
Dilkusha Methodist Indian Girls School
Elsabe Smith, another whom I count among my few very greatest friends, commenced
her missionary career at Dilkusha in 1927. With experience of deaconess and
orphanage work in Melbourne, she brought her outstanding abilities to work at
Dilkusha Girls' Home, transforming it. So many needy little girls have been nurtured
in Dilkusha Girls'Home, guided through their formative years, until their feet were
firmly established in ways of good, happy and useful living. In 1946 Gwen Davey
carried it on and is still there, giving love and the peace of orderly living to her big
"family". Elsabe Smith transferred to deaconess work in that circuit, then retired to her
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mountain home in Colo in Suva, where she continued her ministry of hospitality,
friendship and help to us all - to Fijian, Indian and European friends.
In 1926 there was a hostel for the male Indian students attending Teacher Training
classes in Davuilevu. Rev L.M. Thompson was superintendent minister. Some of the
T.T.I, students accepted Christianity. In those early years those who did so, did it with
great opposition from their relatives and friends, and were sometimes persecuted for
years; but many were very loyal to their new faith which they had accepted after deep
spiritual experience, and have become preachers, pastors, and ministers, and have
brought up their children in the Christian faith.
Miss Weston, who devotedly guided old pupils in their difficulties, and kept in touch
with them over the years, told me that sometimes a man, who was the only Christian
in his family would be the one on whom parents and brothers and sisters would rely in
time of trouble or difficulty, and whose advice would be sought and followed. Though
perhaps even after years no other member of the family would become Christian, he
would have a tremendous influence on their way of living.
Though even today only a comparatively few Indians have accepted Christianity, their
influence extends far beyond their numbers in all walks of life in Fiji. Christian
thought and practice is permeating the whole Indian community.
* Appended at the back of the book are some names of people, well known in Fiji, who
have become Christian through the influence of Indian mission stations.
Teachers at Dilkusha Girls’ School, 1954
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Chapter 6.
The 'Southern Cross' crossed the Pacific, and some
meditations on money
All our journeys to and fro from Australia or New Zealand to Fiji were by ship. Our
mails, too, were all surface mails. There were sometimes one a month, sometimes two.
But news came one morning into Davuilevu by telephone that a man named Charles
Kingsford Smith was attempting a flight across the wide stretches of the Pacific, in an
FVLI Fokker aeroplane. He planned one hop from California to Hawaii, one from
Hawaii to Fiji, then the last hop across to Queensland. He was hoping to arrive at Suva
at 2 p.m. that day. So we obtained permission to close all Davuilevu and Dilkusha
schools at 12 noon. It was explained to students what the reason was. Four of us hired
a Nausori taxi.
"Do you think any students will try to get to Suva?" we asked one another.
"They might be able to walk it in two hours," we said.
We knew they couldn't afford taxis. About halfway to Suva we saw one energetic
youth walking steadily along.
Suva in 1928 was much smaller then than it is now. Indeed the whole population of
Fiji was one third of what it is now. We saw a small crowd of people in Albert Park,
and others coming along Victoria Parade.
Christopher Sharp, principal of the Teachers' Training Institution said, "I'm going
to ask permission for us to go on the roof of the Grand Pacific Hotel. There'd be
a good view there."
So there we were, sitting on the roof.
"Doesn't this seem mad?" I said. "Sitting here watching for an aeroplane to come
down out of the skies. It's like a fairy tale."
"There it is.'" someone shouted.
And sure enough there it was, a tiny speck up in the clouds.
It came nearer and nearer. Suva birds were alarmed; they really panicked. The
'Southern Cross', the little Fokker FVII, hovered just over the entrance to Albert Park.
It alighted. Would the park be long enough? That is what the four men, Kingsford
Smith, Lieutenant Ulm, Warner and Lyon, were all wondering. They steered
successfully round a weeping-fig or 'baka' tree, and came to a stop.
We left our vantage point on the roof to join the cheering crowd. In the foyer we came
face to face with four tired men.
"Shake hands," said Mr Sharp.
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We all followed suit and shook hands with all four men. We then went to look at the
plane. A Fijian policeman had been put on guard.
"Don't let anyone touch it," Kingsford Smith had said to him.
We heard later that after a refreshing sleep Kingsford Smith had waked about
midnight and, feeling like a stroll, walked into the park to see how his plane looked.
"Keep away," said the policeman. "No one is allowed to touch it."
So Kingsford Smith went back to the hotel to get some more sleep.
The next day he consulted with prominent Suva citizens on how he was going to take
off from a short runway. It couldn't be done with a load of fuel adequate in quantity
for a flight to Queensland.
The problem was solved this way. At Naselai at low tide the beach would provide a
good runway. Benzine could be taken there by launch. So there were two take-offs;
one from Albert Park with a light load; another from Naselai with a full load. And the
'Southern Cross' reached its destination on the Australian coast. A flight across the
wide Pacific! It could be done!
I think back to that one Davuilevu student who walked that day into Suva, then home
again. Never mind about money. Just do things. In 1928 Fijians had very little money.
In villages, if they worked in their gardens, they had food to eat. If they fished, they
had some good protein. If they had no money for kerosene, they went to bed at sunset.
Soap was a necessary expenditure. Money for annual taxes and for annual church gift
(Vakamisaneri) had to be found. Clothes, too, had to be bought. Lemon leaf tea was
drunk.
No wonder they thought us so wealthy. They should not be blamed or criticised for
thinking so. But it used to hurt, and it still does even today. We were all alike in their
eyes. We had unlimited financial resources. Observe how we just whipped cheque
books out and wrote in them. In 1920 we mission sisters received £7.10.0d a month.
By 1949 my salary had risen to £15 a month. It seemed and still seems to the Fijians
incredible that anyone would do such a silly thing as to live voluntarily on such a
salary. I think they still think we are lying when we tell them that highly qualified
principals of large schools, working ten hours or more a day, receive about half the
salary that some of their staff receive.
"Why do you travel on a bus. Miss Hames? Why don't you hire a taxi? You're
rich. You're a European."
But how could the Fijians understand, when they had so little cash, and when we held
our own separate meetings about church money derived from Australia? They did not
know what we discussed behind those closed doors.
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"Another man gone home to Australia with his pockets full", they said about
some Australian minister, counting out his coins to see if he and his family could
live until he got his stipend from an Australian church.
Of course the solution to the problem of resentment by the have-nots, is to enable
them to have more. Then there will be no resentment. Rev C.O. LeLean , for many
years principal of Davuilevu, loving the people, concerned about their lack of thrift,
preached one Sunday morning about the feeding of the five thousand.
"They gathered up seven baskets full. They didn't throw away what was left," he
said.
He said this because a Fijian boast about a successful feast was that, after all were
satisfied, so much had been thrown away.
In 'modern' times in 1930 the leftovers, thrown into the sea, might have been large tins
of biscuits. Then, pride satisfied, the people would go hungry for days. It was a
powerful sermon.
But next day an honoured, senior, Fijian minister said to Mr LeLean , "Your
sermon really touched me, sir; it spoke to my conscience. Would you please lend
me £10 to pay my bill at the Chinese store?"
Mr LeLean told me about another knock-back that he got in his younger days, round
the turn of the century. It was before the days of trained Fijian doctors. Young and
zealous, Mr LeLean was distressed at a man's blood-shot eyes.
"Come to my house every morning, and I will treat your eyes," he said.
So the man came daily for a week or so, and the eyes were cured.
"You need not come any more," said young Charlie LeLean .
"What about payment?" said the man.
"No, no. I don't want any payment. I am just pleased you are better."
"I don't mean that," said the man. "What are you going to pay me? You told me
to come every day, and I have done so. Where are my wages?"
Mr LeLean told me that he dejectedly gave him a piece of soap and the man went
away quite satisfied.
Years later, when Mr LeLean had given a Bible as a present, "Thank you," said
the recipient. "But where is the hymn book to go with it?"
Even today there is a tendency in Fijian institutions to ask a European staff member to
provide an envelope, if one is needed. And in these days all wage-earning Fijians meet
exactly this same problem. Their relations continually expect monetary help. Land,
not bank accounts, is the Fijians' wealth. If only they could make more use of their
land!
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Chapter 7.
A Hurricane
"I'll leave a lighted lantern in the mosquito room window all night," said Bob
Meek to his wife. Olive. "You'll be able to see that from the Commissioner's
house, and you'll know we are still here and safe. The boys are ready now with
the boat to take you and the children across the river."
It was 1931. A hurricane was travelling southward across the middle of Viti Levu.
Nine feet of rain had been measured in one day In the District Commissioner's rainguage at Nadarivatu. Rain fell and wind blew at hurricane force for days over all Viti
Levu.
In Davuilevu we moved all furniture, books and clothing from rooms on the north-east
side of our houses. Rain came horizontally, penetrating under window-sashes and
doors. Rooms were awash. Telephone wires were down. Shutters and boards were
nailed over all windows and doors except one door on the lee-ward side of the house.
From our hilltop house we watched the angry Rewa River rising.
"I wonder how they're getting on at Navuso," we said.
Enquiries or communication of any kind were impossible. All trees that we could see
were waving like mad things. Coconut palms were bending their heads to the ground
without snapping, and coming up again.
This was before the days of transistors and radios. Somehow we heard the news that
the centre of the hurricane was passing through the inland country of Viti Levu. We
were on the outer edge of it.
Navuso Agricultural School, three miles up the river, was a mission property, and we
at Davuilevu were closely associated with the principal, Ben Meek, and his wife,
formerly Miss Morrissey, whom I had succeeded in the work at Davuilevu. At
Navuso, then recently established, an attempt was being made to help young men to
learn to use their land to advantage. Sugarcane was grown for crushing at Nausori
mill. Subsistence crops were grown to feed the students. Poultry-farming and milking
of cows was included in the course. The whole project was severely hampered for
want of funds. All buildings were on the flat near the river, just opposite Naduruloulou
government station, where the District Commissioner then lived.
When a cloud-burst fell on the hill country, all Viti Levu rivers suddenly rose. The
Sigatoka, Ba, Wainimala and Wainibuka all rampaged down the valleys. In Ba several
people of Rarawai sugar town were drowned.
At Vunidawa the raging Wainimala and Wainihuka met, and they rushed on joined by
Waidina flood waters. As the rivers passed Navuso, all there realised that, with such
rapid increase in force and volume of water, the whole flat area of Navuso, on a bend
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in the river, would soon be part of the river bed. The width of the river would go right
over them. So Mr Meek put his wife and two small children into a boat with boys to
row, and told the boys to take them across for refuge in the Commissioner's house.
When night came on, he put the promised lantern in his front window.
Mrs Meek had a terrifying trip across the river. The rowers fought the current, and in
one and a half hours reached the other bank. All night she was comforted by the sight
of the lantern in the window.
There was a tree just above Mr Meek's house. Fortunately it divided the current into
two streams, one on each side of the house. All night relays of students stood on the
roof poling debris away from the house, thus reducing the pressure. The students spent
the night in Mr Meek's house, as their dormitories were near the point of land opposite
Drekenikelo, where there was more danger. Ram Sunda, Mrs Meek's house-boy,
cooked pumpkin all night to succour them all. Pumpkin was the only food in the house
in any quantity. Water was two feet deep all through the house. Dozens of boys sat on
the floor to keep it from bursting up from the force of the wind.
In the morning the swollen river a mile wide was still roaring over the flat part of
Navuso property. Mr Meek told his students to try to get to any land anywhere they
could, so with suitcases and clothing they had salvaged, they swam to the higher
ground where the present buildings stand. It was undeveloped and covered in trees.
The second night these boys slept resting on branches of trees, with rain still falling
and a gale still blowing. But the wind had turned round, first to the south, then to the
south-west.
In Davuilevu we moved furniture from rooms on the south-west to the north-west side
of the house. Previously the front verandah, lounge and two corner rooms had been
awash. Now it was another corner room and the dining-room. We wondered very
much how other people were getting on. Then, to our surprise, twenty Navuso boys
appeared at the kitchen door, the one we had kept unbearded and unshuttered all the
time. These were the students who had slept up trees the previous night. At that time
there was no approach to Navuso on the western bank of the river, no pontoon as at
present over the Waimanu tributary. The only access to Navuso was along the King's
Road through Nausori, past Verata and Kasavu, then across the river just below
Drekenikelo. So it seemed strange to us that these students had been able to escape the
flood waters by following the western bank of the river. We got the news of how
Navuso had fared through them.
The rain had now ceased and the wind dropped. We watched from our windows as
dead cows, trees, islands, houses, shops, swept past us to be washed right out to sea.
The river came right into Davuilevu. Baker Hall was one island. Primary School (now
Bible School) another island. We were able to go by boat to the Technical School
(now LeLean ) ridge. We saw luggage of a passenger on the 'Monterey' in one such
boat. The 'Monterey' had gone through the Fiji group days previously. Colonial Sugar
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Refining Company's barges were stranded as far as two miles inland from the river.
Tonga Island people had all been evac-uated to Davuilevu, and were camped in Baker
Hall and then in the Primary School. There was a goat tied to the pulpit in Baker Hall.
About four acres of land was added to Navuso by the flood, but none taken away.
There have been many other changes in Navuso Agricultural School. They didn't
happen just at first. When World War II came, there was both staff and student
shortage. Funds were very low. It was even considered that it might be a good idea to
sell the property. But wise counsels prevailed, and it was retained.
Then God sent young Douglas Walkden-Brown to be its Principal and in the course of
time, by good management and business acumen, he gained suxstantial government
support.
When he left to run a farm of his own at Lakena, Mr G. Bamford took charge, and
developed the project also with brilliant leadership.
The work done there in training young Fijians to crop, run cows, pigs and fowls, and
manage small holdings, is magnificent. There has of course been no sugar-cane since
in the early sixties the Nausori mill was closed, but there is other cropping.
When I visited my friends there, ghosts walk for me, especially on the old sites on the
lower ground. I spent many holidays there in the years after 1926.
The plan for the students to return home and farm their own land was not as obviously
successful as was first hoped for. Fijian traditional ideas and procedures caused many
difficulties. But many overcame these difficulties. Others became useful citizens in
various walks of life.
One former student whose father was one of the first students, did a course at Gatton
College in Queensland and is now Vice-principal of Navuso School. His old father is
very proud of his son, Tanlela. He sometimes comes from Bua to stay with his son, in
the Vice-principal's home. His daughter-in-law invited Mrs Bamford and me to
morning tea. When he saw me, he gazed solemnly at me, and did not speak.
"Don't you remember me?" I asked. "I used often to visit here in the days of Mr
and Mrs Meek."
"I thought you were dead," he said.
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Chapter 8.
Inland Journeys
In these days Indians and Fijians are urged to limit their families. In the 1920s such a
thing was never mentioned. But we were worried, when we heard of families of ten,
only one of whom lived past the age of two years; or when we found from statistics
that one out of five Fijian babies born, died before it reached the end of its first year.
The Medical Department was very disturbed about it, but found it difficult to prevent
this sad waste of life. The Methodist Mission was pleased to be asked to co-operate
with the Medical Department in an effort to right the matter.
Rural Indians kept goats and used milk for their children at the dangerous weaning
age. Indians also had a greater tenacity of life. Therefore the Indian population was
increasing more rapidly than the Fijian. Diarrhoea was slaughtering the Fijian
children, who went straight from mother's milk to solid taro.
Clearly the Fijian mothers needed to be taught. We have become so used to the
present efficiency of Fijian Health sisters and the capability of the great team of
uniformed women and good Fijian doctors who look after us when we are ill, that it is
hard to imagine, or even to remember, the pitiful ignorance of earlier times.
Mrs Suckling, Miss Brewer, Miss Mabel Ricketts and Miss Geeves, enlisted through
the Mission but supported by the Medical Department, tackled the problem. Dr
Roberts, wife of an American Consul, gave honorary service. Suva-trained obstetric
Fijian nurses accompanied them, helping where they could.
I sometimes spent school holidays with one or another of these brave people. Miss
Ricketts took Miss Frances Tolley, principal of Ballantine Memorial School, and me
with her up the Waidina on a two-week visit of inspection. We used a boat with an
outboard motor, but had to walk while the boat went up the rapids; then we left the
boat and walked the last few miles to Namosi. We saw every baby, even the very sick,
that the people tried to hide from us. I remember babies covered in sores from the
crown of their heads to the soles of their feet. I remember seeing babies with hundreds
of flies sitting on them.
There were lighter moments. One evening when we were sitting relaxed on the mats in
a house, the women felt relaxed too.
"What is that gold tooth you have?" one asked Frances Tolley.
"It replaces one that was knocked out," she said;
but, before she had finished her sentence she wondered how she would explain hockey
to them. But quick as a flash the woman was ready with her next question:
"Did your husband knock it out?"
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At another time on a holiday tramp across Viti Levu, five of us were resting in the
village of Nubumakita, and, as the women were too shy, two senior men were politely
entertaining us with conversation. Several topics seeming to be exhausted, one of the
men sat up straight on the floor mats and said for our interest, "They are trying
something new now in this village, I don't know how it will work. It's completely new.
They are bathing the babies every day."
"Good," we answered. "Where did the idea come from? From Mrs Suckling or
Miss Ricketts on the Suva side, or from the western side?"
They didn't know, but we later found that the new idea had come in from Nadarivatu,
where Lolohea and her husband Timoci Waqairawai, then young, were teaching
school. She was teaching mothercraft to women in her spare time.
Four years later, again on the overland journey, we paused for a mid-day meal at
Nubumakita. A women's committee told us of their work with the children, and
showed us a shelf of medicines and first-aid equipment. Fijian women are still
advancing at a very rapid rate.
Rev C.O. LeLean , with his long experience and sympathetic knowledge of Fijian
village life, was able and ready to help us plan holiday trips and enlist students to
carry our loads. I have lovely memories of holidays with Chrissie Weston, Maud
Griffin and Frances Tolley on the Wainimala and the Wainibuka and down the
Sigatoka valley from Nadarivatu to Nadrau and Nabatautau.
Mr LeLean got in touch with a retired Fijian minister, who had once been his student,
and asked him to show us round his own village of Nadrau, and to take us on to
Nabutautau to the place where Rev. Thomas Baker was killed in 1867. Two popular
stories about Mr Baker's murder were not believed by Mr LeLean . I trust his account.
He worked that area only thirty or so years after the tragedy, he was painstaking and
meticulously thorough, and he knew his people.
Thomas Baker was stationed at Davuilevu, opposite Nausori. The property was in
jungle, but the part now known as Dilkusha near the end of the large bridge of today
was cleared, and native-type buildings were constructed - a house right on the hill-top
for Mr Baker and his family; a church, a schoolroom, a young men's dormitory, and a
house for a Fijian assistant minister and his family. Quite near, further up the river,
were unevangelised villages. This was despite the fact that it was thirteen years after
Cakobau's conversion, and twelve after the battle of Kaba, when Cakobau ordered all
Rewa territory to forsake paganism.
In the course of his village visitation, he incurred the resentment of Navuso's chief,
who felt slighted at what he considered an affront to his dignity. A lesser man had
been honoured more, he thought. So he planned revenge. The Fijian assistant minister,
Setareki Seileka, heard rumours of this. He warned Mr Baker.
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"There's danger ahead," he said, "if you go that proposed trip across Viti Levu."
"If you're too frightened to go, I'll go without you," said Mr Baker.
"No," said the Fijian, "I'll go, too."
They took eight students with them. Two days later Jiutasa was sent home, because he
had a sore foot. Unknown to them, the Navuso chief's messenger with whales' teeth
for diplomatic use, preceded them along the track. His message to chiefs, as they
travelled, was "Kill the white man who follows."
Chief after chief declined the whales' teeth, thereby refusing. Up the Rewa, the
Wainimala, over the range, down into the Sigatoka Valley near where Nabutautau
now stands. Chief Wawabalavu did not know much about white men. News travelled
slowly. He was conservative. He accepted the tooth. Mr Baker and his party came
tired to Wawabalavu's village.
"What have you come for?" said Wawabalavu.
"To bring the lotu," said Setareki.
"Lotu. What's Lotu?" said Wawabalavu. "Do you see that salt?" It was brown
sea-evaporated salt neatly parcelled in fibre. "That's the salt we're going to eat
with you tomorrow."
Mr Baker wrote a letter to his wife, telling her they planned to finish their journey to
Ba the next day.
"Go back the way we have come," he said to Aisea, "and give the marama this
letter."
They rose early. But this is where one of the discredited parts of the account comes in.
That the chief used Mr Baker's hair comb, and that Mr Baker, disgusted, irritably
snatched it -an unpardonable offence to touch hair. It seems unlikely that Mr Baker
would take such a risk.
The party set off on the track from the village. The villagers followed.
"Ai valu," they shouted. "War."
And struck Thomas Baker, Setareki and five young men on their heads with clubs,
killing them outright. Aisea, with the letter for Mrs Baker, hid in the long grass and
reeds, and undetected wriggled his way down to the coast, and reached Davuilevu and
gave the letter to Mrs Baker.
"But he's dead, the Vatusila people killed him," he said.
Another young man escaped in a different direction, reaching Ba to the westward.
In 1927, just sixty years later, we five mission sisters traversed the track from
Nadarivatu to Nabutautau through Koroboya and Nadrau. Miss Brokenshire also was
with us four New Zealand sisters mentioned earlier in this chapter. We were most
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kindly and courteously shown round by Ratu Josefa. When he had been a student
under Mr LeLean , other students teased him with the other popular story about the
tragedy.
"Your people tried to cook Mr Baker's boots," they said. "They thought they
were his feet."
But Josefa, patient until then, could stand no more.
"They did no such thing," he said. "It's true they were dark-minded, but they
were not as dark-minded as that."
When in 1867 Wawabalavu and his helpers had killed their victims, they began to
worry, lest they be blamed, discredited or punished, and they decided to let Nadrau
district, eight miles up the Sigatoka valley, share the loss or gain from the happening.
They carried the bodies up a rocky track and paid a visit to Nadrau. There the flesh
was cooked and eaten.
On our trip in 1927, Ratu Josefa told us that he could remember the occasion. He had
been a small child and had been carried to the feast on his mother's back. He showed
us a flat stone amongst boulders on the river bank. It was the stone on which the
bodies had been prepared for cooking. He showed us also the spot nearby, where the
earth oven had been dug.
As we sat and rested in Tui Nadrau's clean hospitable home, the two chiefs explained
to us that we would not be able to use horses the next day. The stony track to
Nabutautau would not be possible for our horses. The next day we walked the eight
miles along which the human bodies had been carried sixty years earlier.
Wawabalavu's grandson received us most courteously.
Nabutautau on a hill has replaced Cagadelavatu as the chiefly village of Vatusila. We
were shown the site of Cagadelavatu just above the river, and a few chains from it "the
grave". Of course it is no grave. No bones lie in it. But they call it "the grave" (nai
bulubulu), and it looks just like one. We took a photo of it. Croton shrubs grow on it,
and stones border its edges.
When Rev. A.J. Small had done his pastoral visitation to Vatusila, before the days of
Mr LeLean , not long after Cakobau's punitive visit to Nadrau, he was given one arm
bone of Mr Baker. It had been left in the fork of a tree. Mr Small took it home and
later gave it to Mr LeLean , who lodged it after a quiet funeral ceremony under the
floor of the pulpit platform in Baker Memorial Hall in Davuilevu.
After the Vatusila and Nadrau chiefs had shown us round, and we had eaten a nice
meal in the Vatusila chief's house and rested awhile on his clean mats, we walked
back the eight miles to Nadrau, rested there that night, and set off on the return
journey to Nadarivatum crossing the turbulent Signatoka over slippery boulders and
climbing a steep hill to Old Nadrau, and returning to Nadarivatu by following a
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different route through beautiful indigenous forest down the Navai tributary of the
Sigatoka River.
I remember that Buli Nadrau did us the honour of going all the way back with us to
Nadarivatu, explaining everything of interest to us on the way, answering my
questions as to the names of the trees, very different from coastal tropical vegetation. I
wish I could remember them all.
Buli Nadrau’s house, 1928.
Misses Brokenshire, Tolley, Griffin, Wallace
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Chapter 9
Two Centenaries
In 1930 a small centenary celebration was held. I did not go. I was too busy with
school. But Chairman of the District R.L. McDonald, Rev L.N. Deller, Fijian
ministers, and Rev A.W. McMillan, a former London Missionary Society missionary
in India, a Congregationalist, serving Fiji as a school inspector, attended the centenary
celebrations of the arrival of the first Christian missionaries to Fiji.
These were three native Tahitians. In the far-off days of 1796 the London Missionary
Society sent the first missionaries to the Pacific, and a few brave young English
people, on the ship "Duff", were landed in Tahiti, Tonga and the Marquesas. Only in
Tahiti were they at all successful, tragedy befalling the others.
But in Tahiti the success was outstanding. In course of time they did what all Pacific
Island groups have been doing during the last nearly two hundred years. They sent
some of their number westward to help others who were less enlightened than
themselves. This westward movement still goes on in the 1970s. Fijians go to Papua to
teach agriculture; Solomon Islanders go to New Guinea Highlands.
In 1830 Arue, Atai and Jacaro went to Tonga to convert the Tongans, but when they
arrived there they were unwelcome. In 1826 Wesleyan Methodist missionaries, also
based on London, had come there.
"We don't need you to teach us to be Christian," said the Tongans. "It's finished.
We are all Christian."
At that same time there was another visitor at Nukualofa. He was a Fijian named
Takai. For centuries they had been coming and going between Fiji and Tonga. Great
outrigger canoes plied between the Lau Archipelago in Fiji and the Tongan group of
islands. Some of the voyages were intended, others not. Tonga needed Fiji's large trees
for canoe-building. Sometimes gales carried fishing-boats to the north-west, and the
south-east trade winds led straight to Lakeba and other places in the Fiji group. There
are traces of Tongan physique, language, customs, genealogies and legends in several
districts of Fiji, but most particularly in Lau. Many did not return home, but some did,
tacking in their outrigger canoes against the trade winds; and some Fijian also went to
Tonga.
In 1830 Takai of Oneata in Fiji, in talking at Nukualofa in Tonga to the Tahitian
strangers, learned their reason for being there, and their dilemma.
"Come back to Fiji with me," he said, "My people need you. They would benefit
greatly by Christianity."
So they went with Takai to Lakeba, the home of the paramount chief. But Tui Nayau
was in 1830 not at all pleased to see them. Fearing for their safety Takai took them to
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his own island. He knew his own authority would protect them there. On Oneata they
lived worthy lives and remained there till they died. They could not pronounce Fijian
correctly, and never preached a sermon in Fijian. Their Christian services were
conducted at first in their home or in Takai's home in Tongan or Tahitian; later in a
coral lime church they taught the people to construct.
When Wesleyan Methodist missionaries, stationed in Lakeba, a few years later visited
Oneata, they were interested and pleased to find Oneata's little Christian community.
They had memorised the ten commandments and some Tahitian hymns. The Tahitians
had lost their Bibles and hymn books in shipwreck, but words they carried in their
memory they had passed on.
The visitors from Suva in 1930 saw the graves of the three men, and the disintegrated
coral lime church. They unveiled a monument to the three missionaries of 1830. Mr
McMillan, returning to Suva, named his home in Holland Street, "Oneata".
The Oneata Christian community had become part of the Wesleyan Methodist
mission. When Mr Cross and Mr Cargill of Lakeba had in the 1830s reported to their
London headquarters that they had found this small outpost of Congregationalism, it
was amicably decided between the two missionary societies that the small Oneata
church should be Wesleyan Methodist.
Those small centenary celebrations at Oneata in 1930 did not create much stir. But our
second centenary in 1935 was much larger. We were all involved. Plans were made
months ahead. A ship full of Australian Methodists came from Sydney. Fiji had long
ceased to belong to the British Methodist Missionary Society. We were part of the
Methodist Mission of Australasia.
A souvenir booklet was prepared. Spoons with appropriate wording and design were
made ready for sale. School children's displays and choir singing were rehearsed for
months. Viseisei of Vuda, on the western side of Viti Levu, was to open a new church.
Vuda is historical, because it is the legendary place of the arrival of Lutunasobasoba
two thousand years ago from some place to the westward of Fiji.
The 'Katoomba' anchored first at Lautoka, and the four hundred Methodists from
Australia went to Vuda to all the dignified, colourful ceremonies there. The new
church was opened.
Next port of call was Suva, then away to Lakeba in Lau. What an event for Lau. They
held a service on the beach at the spot where in 1835 James Cross and Mrs Cross,
David Cargill and Mrs Cargill had landed. Queen Salote of Tonga honoured the
occasion with her presence. The late Ratu Sir Lala Sukuna, Rev Robert Green and Mrs
Green, and the Late Rev Mataiasi Vave were the principal organisers of the
celebrations at Lakeba. A new church was opened; choirs sang; mekes were
performed; Fijian handicrafts were demonstrated. All four hundred people slept ashore
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in temporary erections. It is a long journey in small boats from the anchorage to
Lakeba shores.
As a fairly senior missionary sister, I had been invited to attend Lakeba celebrations.
But I couldn't think of going. 'Davuilevu' was to be the next day, after they returned to
Suva. Mr McDonald had asked us to let them see mission schools at work. A difficult
thing to do. Schools at work with four hundred visitors!
On Dilkusha station, adjacent to Davuilevu, visitors saw 'home' (orphanage) girls
cooking Indian food, and performing other home duties. In the schools they were
entertained with schoolwork and Indian dances. They saw the historic sites of the
homes from which Thomas Baker and his Fijian colleagues left in 186 on their fatal
prilgrimage.
In 1935 Rev A.H. Blackett was superintendent minister of Dilkusha Indian Mission
station. Rev Harold Chambers was principal of Davuilevu. He prepared an historical
drama to be shown in Baker Memorial Hall. It depicted a scene in 1875 at Navuloa,
the former location of the pastor and minister-train school later at Davuilevu.
The combined schools at that time had numbered one hundred men. Dr George
Brown, intrepid pioneer missionary to New Britain (now New Guinea) had come to
recruit helpers. He put his appeal to the assembled congregation. Who would
volunteer? All the one hundred men stood to their feet. They all wished to go. Best
ones were selected. They had to run the gauntlet of government opposition.
Authorities tried to protect them from the zeal of these white men. But, permission
reluctantly granted, they left for dangerous, savage New Britain. Some suffered
martyrs deaths there.
This story was dramatised for the 'Katoomba' visitors in Baker Hall on the afternoon
of 'Davuilevu day'.
In the morning they came to see our Primary school and Mr Derrick's Technical
School. It was quite impossible to have lessons as usual. During the morning relays of
visitors were coming in and out. In the Primary School we put on two 'shows one in
each room. We repeated these over and over. The lower classes sang a few hymns,
and then did some handwork. They ma small canoes of coconut leaves; then gave
them to some of the visitors. The senior classes sang hymns, then drew maps of Fiji
which also were given away. But when Miss Baker, daughter of Rev Thomas Baker,
an old lady from Sydney, came in, the senior classes sang the old dirge for Mr Baker.
She was very appreciative.
At about 5 p.m. most of the visitors returned to their ship but there were quite a
number of ex-missionaries who had come from Australia on the 'Katoomba'. In the
evening we had a special meeting in Baker Memorial Hall, at which they spoke to us.
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The next day I felt very carefree. 'Davuilevu day' was successfully over. Next day was
'Bau day'. Rev and Mrs C.O.LeLean were among the cruise passengers, and they had
brought Miss Baker with them as their guest. But as on Bau day Mr LeLean was ill,
they did me the honour of entrusting Miss Baker to me for the day. It was a great
pleasure taking her to Bau.
She told me that she remembered the day when Aisea brought the news to her mother
that their father had been killed. All day the three little girls watched from the window
for the boat that would take them down to Rewa mission house, to wait there for a
ship to Australia.
Bau put on an excellent show. Village schools were then under mission control. It was
a little later that Fiji Education Department undertook care of general primary
education. Children of Cautata and other villages with the Bau pupils put on a display
with the figures "1835" of living children dressed in leaves and fibre 'meke' clothes;
then in a twinkling of an eye changed to "1935", all dressed in spotless white. It was
well done.
Suva had a day, too. Rewa circuit contributed some of the items. In Albert Park
mission scholars were a living map of Viti Levu with India's outline inside it.
One ex-missionary who had been absent fifty years, said he considered as much
progress had been made in those fifty years as in the years from 1835 to 1885. But
how long ago 1935 seems now.
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Chapter 10
Various Holidays
I had many lovely holidays. Five times I walked the track between Nadarivatu and
Vunidawa. It was the same track that the carrier of the weekly overland mail from Ba
to Suva used.
I was made welcome in the home of Adi Litiama Maopa and Ratu Apenisa of
Waimaro on the Waidiha. Visiting the mission house at Bau, I enjoyed the gracious
friendship of Adi Cakobau, Adi Maopa, Adi Litia her sister, and Adi Torika, Ratu
George Cakobau's mother. The Davuilevu launch, the 'Davui', captained by Jeremaia,
Sam Domoni's father, threaded its way through the river from Walnibokasi to Bau.
In 1930 Daisy Lucas and I spent three weeks as guests of Miss Geeves and Miss
Montier, child welfare nursing sisters in Bua province. At a picnic for our
entertainment, the local headmaster, Eapi Nabou, and his wife brought their baby,
Lusiana, and the commissioner, Ratu George Toganivalu and Adi Walesi brought
Tom and Will. I was at Tom's funeral at Nailaga a quarter of a century later. Julian,
Josua, Maraia, and David were born at Bau.
In 1942, at the end of a holiday in Jiona in Naoeva in Kadavu, a fishing picnic was
held as a farewell to me. Ten outrigger canoes took us down a small river and out to a
sandbank. There I was left, with two women to look after me. We rested in a small hut
on clean mats, while all the men of Jioma village went to the reef and caught hundreds
of fish. This is the reef, that twenty years later Tongan Tevita Fifita had to negotiate
when he came to Fiji for help for his companions, wrecked on Minerva Reef four
hundred miles to the south-east.
When my kind hosts returned from the reef, all the fish were formally presented to me.
There were red fish, black fish, spotted fish - all kinds imaginable. The canoes then
raced home, by courtesy the canoe I was in winning. One canoe submerged for a few
minutes.
On the previous day I had asked what I should do in return for the picnic, and was told
that if I bought some flour, baking powder and tea, honour would be satisfied.
Messengers had walked miles to Soso to a store to purchase these articles, and a team
of women worked all night making scones in the village's one camp oven. A camp
oven is a round vessel with a lid. Embers both under and on it provide the heat
necessary for baking. Three small stones are placed under the enamel plate, which
serves as oven shelf. This prevents burning the bottom of the scones. In these modern
days (sixties and seventies) Fijian women have become so skilful that they can use
large saucepans in the same way, and I have eaten scones, buns and excellent sponge
cakes baked in saucepans.
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In Jioma that evening the whole village had fish to eat at 6 or 7 or 8 p.m. Then at
about 9 p.m. all the men came refreshed and in spotless clothes to the house where my
hosts looked after me so exceedingly kindly. They entered and sat in correct order on
the mats. In a village every man knows his place to the inch. Yaqona was brought in.
Because native ministers spoke against yaqona so strongly in synods, in those days,
rightly or wrongly, I always refused it, and they accepted my refusal with courtesy. It
was easy to refuse because I was a woman, and because a Fijian member of my party
would accept the first cup offered, thus deputising for me. Now days I would accept it.
It is so much better for Fijians to drink yaqona than alcoholic drinks.
Conversation was as much as possible an effort to interest and I was asked to
contribute my share.
"Who do you think will win the war?"
"Tell us stories of your country."
"Tell us what you know of the Japanese."
It was in that village that an old man asked me if I could explain to him why Rev A.T.
had requested church authorities to permit him to devote all his time to educational
work.
"Why would he do that?" he asked. "Why would he choose the hard work of
schoolteaching, when he could be a minister and have a really easy time? Would
it be for more money?"
How we teachers later teased the minister about that story!
"You are to travel to Vunisea by outrigger canoe," my hosts said to me one day.
"We've put a small sail on the canoe, because we thought you might be
frightened with a big sail. It would be quicker with the big sail, but the canoe
would be under the surface of the water more."
So I sat on an empty banana case close against the mast and was told not to move. It
was a pleasant experience on a calm sea in the lagoon.
In Jioma I collected five of the legends I later published. An old man of Niudua
village could not speak Bauan, but in Kadavan dialect he told these stories to Isikeli
Daveta, who passed them on to me. These stories, "The Octopus and the Shark", "The
Vine That Stooped over Tonga", "The Flood that Carried a Feast," "Tanovo and
Molau", and "Bulai" are among the most popular of my collections of old legends.
But the best holidays of all were to New Zealand. Over the years many changes had
taken place in our family. I got to know new nieces and nephews. Bernard went to
Australia, taught at Swinburne College of Technology, became its director, and
remained in the position till his retirement in 1970.
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Mildred and her husband, Harold Dare, schoolteacher and distinguished sportsman,
have four children. Harold has passed on. How we miss him. Their children are Anne
Holden, teacher, novelist, and mother of four; Patricia Watkins, teacher, and mother of
three; Peter, of the Forest Research Institute; and Priscilla, hospital sister.
Stella Fenwick, also now a widow, has a daughter and three sons - Judith Brown,
teacher and mother of five children; Charles, bridge-building contractor, with four
children; John who fishes with profit over all the waters of the Kaipara Harbour; and
Graham, farm advisor in the Agricultural Department. How kind and generous they
and wives and husbands are to me, welcoming me into their homes, driving me in
their cars and piloting me by aeroplane about New Zealand.
In 1937 and 1938 my mother and father spent two years with me in Davuilevu, fitting
in very well to local conditions and helping in many ways. Numbers of my relations
have visited Fiji to see me. It is a great pleasure to show them places of interest.
Mother and father at Danilevu - 1937
I remained fifteen years in Davuilevu. Nearly all my work was with boys and young
men. There were always some little girls in the Primary School, and I had sewing
classes for them, also for Nausori girls and women from other villages and for
Davuilevu women. I had charge too for two years of the girls' hostel of the Teacher
Training Institution. But most of my work had been with boys. I began to feel that I
should like to do more for girls. All my mission sister contemporaries in Fijian work
were in girls' schools.
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There were big changes looming. The Education Department was probably going to
establish a training college at Nasinu, and take their grants away from other teacher
training.
In 1939 World War II commenced, and just what that might mean to us, we did not
know. The training school for nurses was demanding a higher standard of English for
its trainees. Miss Foulcher had asked to be moved from Richmond in Kadavu. It was a
challenge. I asked synod to appoint me there. My colleagues were old friends: Rev
and Mrs A.C. Cato, Isikeli Daveta and Torika Toroca of Bau and Muanikau. The
scenery was in world class. The climate was cooler than Suva. Support and
encouragement from Kadavan people was cheering. I loved the children. Vasiti
Nawadradra (now Raiwalue) was my brightest pupil. Mereseini (now Vulaca),
Vasemaca Robarobalevu and Ravucake were clever girls too,and many others. There
was charm and interest in living in an entirely Fijian community; 1941 was a very
happy year.
Travelling to and fro from Suva was not so delightful. The little cutters were very
crude. The little cabin was too evil-smelling for use. It was usually full of goods.
Latrines were non-existent. Most of the passengers lay about on their mats on any
available space. I was always given one of two bunks in the stern, one on each side of
the steering-wheel. It was quite convenient for being sea-sick. One just sat up on an
elbow and vomited over the side of the boat. It was not so convenient for other
activities.
"Could I have the stern of the boat, please?" one asked the man at the steeringwheel. He promptly dealt with the situation.
"You people on the stern get forward. Drop the tarpaulin down for a screen. You
(naming any woman passenger) help Miss Hames. She wants the back of the
boat. Hold her. I say hold her. She might fall off. Hold her."
Fijians are very clean-minded people. One learnt by necessity not to be embarrassed.
The journey sometimes took three or four days. We anchored every night off shore at
Kadavu coastal villages, and were treated ashore with the utmost kindness. I would be
taken to the house of a pastor, minister or catechist, or to a chief's house. In one
village one evening the local Chinese store-keeper brought in my evening meal. This
was because I taught his little daughter. She lives in Suva now, happily married to a
Chinese, but herself a loyal member of Wesley Church. On the maternal side of her
ancestry she is Methodist and Fijian. I remember the Chinese man coming into the
Fijian catechist's house, crouching at the eating-mat, and unpacking numerous
delicacies from his shop. I ate leg of chicken, yam, tomato sauce, tea with condensed
milk, biscuits and bananas.
The progress up the coast would be slow, because we would almost always be a
banana boat. First the cutter would go down the coast dropping empty cases. The
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amount the growers sold depended on the number of cases dropped. Very
disappointed growers would be left with hundreds of bunches on the beach. On the
return journey up the coast of Kadavu, filled cases were picked up.
Some villages were near the cutter's anchorage. Others were reached by rowing boat.
The buyers' agent had a suitcase full of silver coins. Into the rowing boat he would go
with the rowers, pay for the bananas with silver coins, and return to the anchored
cutter with more and more full cases to stack in the bow, stern, midships - everywhere
a case could be placed.
I remember being given permission, just for fun, to help pack a case at one village
where I had spent a night. I remember that in that village on the previous evening my
kind hostess, the catechist's wife, had listened to my chatter, that I was going home to
New Zealand to see my father, who was getting old, and felt the cold of Auckland's
winter.
"Is there no one else there to carry his firewood in from the bush, that you have
to go all that way to carry it?" she asked.
It was always imperative that bananas must be picked at just the right stage of
maturity, so that they would ripen after arrival in New Zealand, and that the cutter
reach Suva before the 'Matua' left Suva for Auckland. I remember the anxiety of the
buyer on one trip, a European that time. The cutter's engine had broken down, and
there was no wind for sailing. But the wind came up, and all was well. The journey
across to Suva could be very quick with a following wind.
I remember another time a wind blowing us quickly across from Nakasaleka to Suva.
In the early hours just before dawn we reached the channel through the reef at the
entrance to Suva Harbour. The man at the steering-wheel found he could not move the
wheel. I was lying on one of the two bunks on each side of him. He called out to the
captain, who was watching for the channel. In a moment the cutter would have
crashed on to the reef. He called for a hammer and a light. I handed down my electric
torch. In a flash crew, banana buyer and passengers were lifting cases of bananas off
the floor on to the other bunk, further out on to the stern - anywhere except on me.
With the hammer the steersman lifted floor-boards. There was the bilge water with
little bits of rubbish in it, odd floating green bananas and a wedge of wood clogging
the steering chain. Quickly he threw it out, stood with his feet on the joists among the
bilge water, and set the steering wheel going again.
Then the men said, "Well, that was a near go."
"I thought we were going to be punished for someone's sins,"
"I thought it was for my sins," one crew member said.
We had reached the gap or channel, and were steered safely through it into Suva
Harbour.
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Holiday at Tovu Island 1947
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Chapter 11.
Life in Kadavu
It was war-time all the three years I was at Richmond in Kadavu. My father visited me
there after my mother's death. It was a very brave thing for a man of seventy-nine
years to do.
In front of house at Richmond Mission Station, Kadavu, 1942
1941 was a pleasant year. 1942 was grimmer. Rev and Mrs Cato had to leave to work
in Davuilevu. For awhile I was the only European in Richmond. Then Mrs Cowled,
whose husband was at that time a chaplain to the Fijian troops in the Solomons, stayed
with me; then Miss Knight and Miss Tall came for awhile.
Japan was in the war. Shipping was erratic. Cutters were needed to carry food to the
seventy thousand American soldiers camped in Samabula, Toorak, Nausori, Nadi and
Sabeto. For six weeks no boat came to Richmond - no mail, newspapers, groceries;
nor news other than that heard on our mission station battery-run radio, which my
father had presented.
One morning we saw a Japanese submarine in our bay, just anchored for the night. On
our radio we heard of Singapore's fall, of Tarawa's occupation by Japanese, of Mr
Sadd's execution at Tarawa because he had refused to trample on the British Flag. We
heard that native Gilbertise had been treated well, and that Chinese and Europeans
were dealt with severely.
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We teased our Rotuman teacher. "When the time comes, they will think you are a
Chinese," we said.
"As for Miss Hames," the students said, "What can we do to help her?"
They came to see me about it. "If you darken your skin with coco-tinted oil, we'd
still have to do something to your hair. Let us frizz it for you. It would look so
nice."
They were disappointed that I declined the offer.
We had our difficulties, but my friends on Viti Levu were having worse times. Whole
boarding-schools and teachers' living quarters were evacuated at a few hours' notice to
make room for troops. Pupils were disbanded and sent home; or a few sitting for
important examinations were taught in private homes, church vestibules or sheds.
A heavy programme of entertaining was embarked on to help American and New
Zealand young men so far from home. The home of the Chairman of the Methodist
Mission, Rev W. Green, was altered to provide a large room for a weekly happy singsong, devotional and social gathering. A few romances occurred.
Thousands of New Zealand soldiers had been moved out of Fiji to make room for
70,000 Americans. En route for the scene of battle at Guadalcanal, they had had one
night together with Americans in Papakura Military Camp, and spent their hours
together telling them what a fearful place Fiji was. Cannibals and snakes were terrible,
they said.
When the Americans arrived in Fiji they kept very watchful eyes, ready to shoot the
cannibals. Those who were camped on Davuilevu mission station, when invited to
attend church, walked in apprehensively.
Another New Zealand humourist camped on the western side of Viti Levu, travelling
with other soldiers on the Colonial Sugar Refining Company train, noticed at a stop
that the Indian engine-driver had gone to his home to get his lunch. He was an enginedriver himself in New Zealand. He boarded the engine and drove the train up and
down, backwards and forwards, while the Indian driver ran frantically after it, trying
to catch it.
But New Zealand soldiers did other things besides playing jokes. Len Dennison of
Auckland showed his sympathy for us at remote Richmond by arranging with a pilot
to drop a parcel for me. So that they would not be frightened, I told the boarders a
letter for me might be dropped. One afternoon after school a girl came to my house.
"There's a plane circling round and round us," she said "It's gone over Tavuki,
but it keeps going round over us and round to Yawe."
With the girls I watched it, and we saw it drop something down the hill below us.
Teacher Ruth Vunakece ran to get it.
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"Your letter," she said laughing, hugging a large parcel and a parachute.
The girls were squealing, shouting, hugging one another, jumping up and down, and
laughing. In the parcel were lollies, Fiji Times copies. New Zealand Herald papers,
letters, and fresh bread.
My contemporary mission sisters in Dilkusha and Suva, like me sedate and middleaged, did their entertainment of soldiers so well that some wives in New Zealand were
a little uneasy about so much mention of them in letters.
"I'd like you to see my wife in Christchurch," said one of the soldiers to me,
when I was on my way to New Zealand for furlough. "If she saw you, she'd stop
being worried about my letters about mission sisters."
In Richmond, with infrequent and uncertain contact with Suva, it was quite a problem
keeping our radio batteries charged. But, when the sea was not too rough, our little
outboard motor could take our flat-bottomed boat, the 'Leslie', out through the reef
into the open ocean, then along the coast to a village from which the battery could be
carried to Nabukelevu lighthouse; two New Zealand men were stationed there with
orders that, if the enemy came, they were to keep communications going as long as
possible; then destroy the wireless apparatus. These men charged our battery for us.
When there was no soap in our Chinese stores, we made some for a school project.
"Grate one hundred coconuts," our recipe said. We did that, and made household soap,
toilet soap and sandsoap. "Uci" flowers from the bush near Yawe scented the toilet
soap, and an art class drew drawings on the wrappers.
Then we boiled up some of the sea and got salt. We put the boat out of the boat shed,
filled a laundry copper with sea-water, kept relays stoking up with firewood and
coconut husks for three days and two nights, refilling the copper when necessary,
We finally dried it out in pie-dishes in my range. It was lovely white salt, not brown
like that made in iron cooking pots, which other people in Kadavu were making.
"You taught me to sew," said Homecraft teacher Mereseini to me one day in
Suva in 1969.
"Don't be silly, Mereseini," I said. "I hardly know how to sew."
"Oh yes, you did," she said. "You made me unpick the seams in a petticoat every
time I did them wrongly."
I have memory of charging up and down a class of sixty pupils, insisting on double
seams in hand-sewn garments.
But my biggest battle was with V.R. over multiplication tables. I was puzzled why she
could not answer oral arithmetic questions, though her written work was always
correct. Until I found that a girl of no chiefly rank, sitting behind her, did all her sums
for her. I caned chiefly V.R. and caned the obliging little girl, and made V.R. sit on the
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floor for a week, until she knew every table. I know her well now in Suva in the
sixties and seventies and we are great friends.
When our European arrogant confidence clashed with an equally determined
resistance, we Europeans used to employ a cliche: "Fijians always get their way in the
end."
There was an example of it with Christian Endeavour classes at Richmond. Mr Cato
had both senior and junior classes. One Sunday he announced in church that the senior
class would meet, not on an evening as usual, but after school on a certain day, and the
theme would be thanks to God for beautiful scenery and for His lovely world; that we
would walk along the beach to a rocky point, hold the service of worship there, then
return; that it was not a picnic, but a service of worship. No food might be taken. He
asked me to conduct the service. It was easy to do so in such surroundings. But the
audience was clearly disappointed that we had not been allowed to include a little
eating in the outing. Fijians are extremely clever at pre-paring and distributing very
good food for a large number.
The following week the Junior Christian Endeavour invited us to a picnic on the
beach. The leaders were some of the same people who had attended our service of
thanksgiving. Several pupils missed school, as they were sent to their own villages to
get fowls for the picnic. We graciously sat down to the eating-mat spread with an
elaborate meal, and enjoyed it.
It was necessary to keep very steadily at our school-work. Standards of entrance to
nursing training and teacher training and therefore also to Ballantine Memorial School
were rising, but some of our pupils passed examinations and went to schools in Veti
Levu and into useful careers.
Richmond station has an interesting history. It was the first Central Training School
for pastors and ministers, the forerunner of Navuloa and Davuilevu, and there have
been schools there all the time from 1862 till now.
In 1963, one year late, they celebrated its centennial. I was a guest. I very much
enjoyed myself, both at Tavuki and at Richmond. That very friendly couple. Sir
Kenneth and Lady Maddocks, Governor of Fiji and his lady, travelled by sea-plane to
spend a day at Richmond, and Lady Maddocks opened their beautiful new church. We
all admired the excellence of arrangements made by Fijian ministers, Fijian people,
and particularly by Headmaster Watisoni Isaia. Everything was carried out with
punctuality, and distinction.
"You used to be thin, Watisoni," I said. "Otherwise you look just the same."
"It's your fault. Miss Hames," he said. "You started my getting fatter by giving
me a bottle of cod-liver oil when I had a cough in the old Davuilevu days."
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In 1944 the Mission Education Committee appointed me to Matavelo Girls' School,
back again to Nailaga in Ba.
Centennial Group photo-1964
Rowland, Gene, Inez and Ben junior, February 1971
Paulini, Miss Hames, Waniketi
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Chapter 12.
Matavelo Girls' School
My eighteen years' absence from Nailaga and Matavelo had of course brought
changes. Since I again left in 1949 there have also been changes. Now the school is
called Ba Mission High School, and is a co-educational, multi-racial secondary
school.
In 1944 all the Nailaga boys and girls from Class one to Class eight were still
attending it, except that boys over fourteen had to go elsewhere, usually to Ratu
Kadavulevu School at London! in Tailevu. Ratu Rusiate Memorial School had not
been established. Peceli and Mereseini Neisua were a tremendous help to me, because
they were old friends.
Girl boarders still came in from Nadi, Ra, Yasawa and Lautoka with low scholastic
qualifications. While I was there we raised the entrance standard by joining the
LeIean-Ballantine entrance examination arrangement. This was necessary, as
standards of entrance to Ballantine Memorial, and to nursing and teacher training were
continuing to rise.
Ratu Penaia Dimuri was the Fijian minister; and his wife, Adi Alisi, gave us help with
native handcraft teaching. Their daughters and son are well-known people in Fiji
today. We joked that there were three Alices. Adi Walesi Toganivalu and Ratu George
were doing a wonderful work as leaders of the province. And my first name is Alice.
Adi Walesi had her handicraft school in the provincial compound, and we at Matavelo
turned out good mats and baskets too. I found that it did not please my pupils to have
mat or basket making as an alternative to needlework. Fingers moved slowly. I
changed it to gardening time. The part of the school doing native craftwork, while
others weeded cassava, accomplished a reasonable amount of work.
"We can't understand why our parents say Miss Hames is a kind woman," they
said one day.
I had been charging up and down the grounds, insisting that every piece of white
chewed-up cane fibre be picked up.
Our good neighbour, Mr Victor Clark, used to say that he allowed for a
hundredweight or so of loss of his sugar-cane off the trucks as they were taken
between his estate and the Rarawai mill, because that amount was always stolen in
Nailaga. He was a good friend. He advised Receli at every point about the cultivation
of a patch of cane Matavelo grew each season. One year we cleared € 100 to help our
school funds. His nephew. Bill, was another old friend, whom I had known from
babyhood. It was later that he and Kathleen moved to Korolevu.
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In Rarawai I had old friends, Laurie and Lucy Wallace, and Ellen Montier at the
C.S.R. dispensary and hospital. Also there were Les and Ethel Brown. The latter
helped with Matavelo sewing classes for years. Nailaga people gave her a whale's
tooth in gratitude.
And an old Indian Mohammedan woman, with her cane-growing husband, who lived
behind Matavelo was a loyal and true friend.
Joyce James, my assistant, I knew well, as she had been in Suva and Rewa schools,
and we worked very happily together. She was an accomplished pianist, and was
competent in teaching, needlework, and housecraft. We introduced dressmaking and
had mannequin parades. I wrote Fijian words to the hymn 'Angels from the realms of
glory', and she taught the girls to sing it beautifully. When I was ill, she cared for me
like a daughter.
Rev and Mrs Harry Bock were in the old mission house just across the railway line.
Mr Bock told me the story about a conversation he had had with one of his Fijian
ministers.
"You and I are two people who don't beat our wives," said the Fijian.
"But our wives don't need beating," said Mr Bock.
"Oh, you evidently don't know my wife very well," said the Fijian cleric.
Rev and Mrs Wesley Pidgeon succeeded Mr and Mrs Bock, and had the gigantic task
of getting the old mission house, built by the Rev W. Slade, pulled down and reerected in more convenient form in Lautoka.
So we were then left alone on the Nailaga mission station, with only visits from the
head minister of Ba-Nadi-Yasawa Nadroga division, and with Rev Apisai Bavadra as
minister in charge. He was another old friend of mine. I had known him well in
Davuilevu. We loved his temperance addresses there, and the story of how he had
been a drinker, and gave it all up, and reformed, after a night in a lock-up. We got him
to give that address in Nailaga. It was needed; but not nearly as badly as such advice is
needed now. Apisai was a very good minister, alive to the needs of young people, and
vigorous and cheerful.
Ruth Pook came to help me, and then for a short while Phoebe Mills. When Ruth
Pook was there, we planned our co-operative effort in producing "Legends of Fiji and
Rotuma". She did all the drawings. I remember her beautiful violin playing, which
greatly improved the quality of the girls' singing.
When Miss Mills was with me, we taught the girls to knit, and made scores of
garments for European refugee relief, using wool supplied by the Suva branch of the
Red Cross Society. The girls made all their knitting needles from bamboo. All we had
to buy for the whole project was sandpaper to smooth the needles.
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We also ran a Band of Hope with meetings in the church, to try to do our little bit to
stem the threatening dangers of alcohol.
Rev Harlan and Dr Dorothy Delbridge and all the hospital staff at the Ba Methodist
Hospital were my close friends. Dr Delbridge gave me medical treatment in illness
too. I enjoyed their friendship very much.
I commenced a 'model flat' unit in Matavelo, with two girls at a time housekeeping for
a month, marks being given by a committee and a meal for staff and committee
members. Miss Charlton of Adi Cakobau School came to Nailaga to observe Adi
Walesi Toganivalu's handcraft school, and Matavelo too; and paid us the compliment
of establishing a model flat unit at Adi Cakobau School. But she had more money than
we had to spend on her 'model flat'.
Being head of a school in the 1940s was difficult. Fees were charged, but it was not
easy to decide on priorities for the use of money. I tried to improve the girls' diet, but
it was impossible to improve it enough. This worried me very much. In 1972 it still
worries me that Fijian children do not get enough protein in their diet.
Girls training as teachers, Danuilevu, 1940
Francis Tolley, who had been living in New Zealand for years, had a great interest still
in the schools of which she had been head. She donated a silver cup for competition in
performance of Fijian mekes. She was concerned that there was a trend among young
people towards scorning them. The only schools within practicable reach of us were
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under provincial control. So I went to District Commissioner McAlpine, whom I had
known well in Kadavu, and asked if I might circularise his schools. He was very
pleased.
Part of Danuilevu Mission Station
The annual meke competitions meant a lot of hard work in organising, but were a
success. Their publicity seemed to achieve quite a change in public opinion amongst
Fijian school girls. When I returned to Fiji in 1962 and we were viewing mekes at a
function at Ballantine Memorial School, Miss Mills generously said to me, "See what"
you accomplished."
"What are you talking about?" I asked.
"It was your meke competitions that changed the attitude," she said. "Before that,
whenever I asked girls about mekes, they said they didn't know any."
"Don't give me all the credit," I said. "Frankie Tolley gave the cup."
Rev A.C. Cato succeeded Mr Pidgeon at Lautoka. We had been together before in
both Davuilevu and Kadavu. He asked me to arrange Sunday School demonstrations
to be shown at the church annual meetings. So we did this at Nailaga, Vuda and Cuvu.
We had flannelgraph and drama, and it was great fun, playing to audiences of several
hundreds on the village 'Raras' (marae to New Zealanders.)
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In 1945 when Germany surrendered I was holidaying at that favourite spot of mine,
Nadarivatu, and we listened on the Commissioner's radio. Miss Reay was acting as
Commissioner, and she sent a message to us to come to her office to listen. I
remember that Matavelo girls I had with me had to gather firewood for us to make
scones, as Tavua bakers celebrated by taking a holiday from baking.
With Mrs Andrews, wife of the President of the Fijian Methodist Church, and David, 1948
When Japan surrendered we were at school. I almost regretted telling the boarders that
they could make as much noise as they liked. They beat an old empty tank with sticks
for five hours.
In 1947, when India gained her independence, I remember that in Ba all Indian bus
drivers gave free rides all that day.
In 1949 we celebrated the Jubilee of Matavelo School. I remember it included a
marathon of a morning service in Nailaga church, that lasted from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m.
Merewalesi, Lolohea's sister, came from Rakiraki to speak. The Chairman of the
Methodist Mission, Rev. Maurice Wilmhurst, came from Suva to preside. It was a
lovely occasion.
One of the effects of the European superintendent minister's transferring to Lautoka,
was that on ordinary Sundays, I was expected to pronounce the benediction. But the
habit in Nailaga Church was for the points of the sermon to be gathered up in a prayer
before the benediction. It certainly made me listen well to the sermon.
"The 'marama sisita mat Matavelo' will now close our service."
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I would stand, pray, then remain standing while the choir led a glorious valedictory.
At the right moment, as the singing stopped, I would pronounce the 'A loloma ni
Kalou' (the love of God'). That is the only place where I have been expected to do that.
I did it for some years, and I appreciated the honour.
How different that choir and congregational singing was from the singing in that same
building twenty years earlier. Today in hundreds of village congregations, up and
down the land, on remote islands and in coastal and mountain districts, there is good,
balanced, harmonious singing of hymns and anthems at every service when the people
assemble for worship.
In 1949 I was worried all the year. My father, aged eighty-seven, was not at all well.
Receiving his weekly letters had always been such a pleasure to me. I began to put
them away and keep them instead of destroying them. I have them by me now.
In July 1947 he wrote, "I am still acting the invalid, or perhaps rather the
valetudinarian. I am taking great care of myself. I don't want to make a worse nuisance
of myself than I am at present".
His sister, my Aunt Olive, was caring for him very expertly and devotedly. But when
in 1949 he was too weak to write to me at all that year, and I received only normally
infrequent letters from others, I decided to leave Fiji. It was not really to help him and
Aunt Olive. It was more to help myself. I was tired, and I thought New Zealand would
do me good. An Auckland headmaster friend, Charlie Shepherd, offered to get me
relieving teaching appointments in Auckland.
So I slipped quietly out of Fiji, and wrote back to Mr Wilmshurst that I would not
return.
Inez and father - 1948
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Chapter 13.
New Zealand Interlude
My father was not at all pleased that I had decided to give up my work. He said he
would have to die quickly, so that I could go back. But when he found that, after a
short telephone conversation, a teaching appointment at Pakuranga Health Camp
School was arranged, he was happier.
I was really in need of a holiday, but I sent my aunt off on a holiday, and father and I
stayed some weeks together.
Then I commenced my new job. I had much to learn. I met 'social promotion' for the
first time.
"How is it that a boy is in Standard four and can't read?" I asked.
"Oh, social promotion," was the answer.
I was amazed. We had so carefully built up a promotion system in Fiji. We had so
painstakingly worked at tests for merit. And over the thirty years I had kept on
thinking and saying that New Zealand education system and standard was something
for us to strive to emulate.
I was shocked to find that there were neglected children, under-nourished children,
problem children.
During the twelve years from 1950 to 1961 I held fourteen relieving positions. Most of
these were with afflicted children. The longest time was in the old temporary quarters
at Titirangi, with deaf pupils. I learnt a great deal there. I learnt from the experts to
coax and encourage the hesitant and timid. For two of the five years there I had a
small group of doubly-handicapped children - blind and deaf, intellectually
handicapped and deaf, spastic and deaf.
School for Deaf - 1950
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Other short jobs were with intellectually handicapped, mal-adjusted and backward
pupils. There were incredibly sad case histories.
At Napier Street School I saw a hand-picked team sympathetically leading Maori and
Island children through the mysteries of the English language. In Richmond Road I
saw the care with which pupils were introduced to new vocabulary, and I realised how
dreadfully we were tackling that problem in Fiji.
I was envious of the affluence of the schools (by comparison with Fiji). The books,
drawing materials, and above all, the free milk made me think of my little Fijian
friends. Every time milk was deliberately thrown on the floor or carelessly spilt, I
pictured protein-starved Fijian children.
I learnt too about class participation and about group work in classes.
One cold, wet day in July I arrived at a school to supply for the head infant mistress
who had gone down with pneumonia. "This is the room," said the headmaster. I
looked at the equipment, group placing of desks, wendy-house and all, and my heart
quailed.
"I am afraid I am very old-fashioned," I said.
"That's good," he said. "So am I. I'm retiring next year."
So there I was. I looked at the time-table. "Activities", it said. I had no idea what that
might mean. The children came in. They were dear little five-year-olds. I saw a mat,
and spread it on the floor, and we had a happy half-hour with counting, looking at
flash cards of new words.
"Aren't we going to have activities?" a child asked.
"Yes," I said. "We'll have activities now."
But I need not have worried. They knew what to do. Soon they were all happily busy taking dolls temperatures, building the harbour bridge with blocks. I had a happy
month with that class.
Then I had a short job at Corran School for girls. This was something quite different.
"Girls, put your gloves on before you leave the classrooms," said the head
mistress.
I hastily pulled mine out of my bag.
In 1950 there were quite a large number of Islanders, as everyone called them, in
Auckland schools. Numbers of them were also in some of the churches. Some of the
Methodist people from Tonga, Samoa and Fiji worshipped in St John's church on
Ponsonby Road, where I attended. People from the London Missionary Society 'fields'
- Cook Islands, and a section of Samoa -went to Newton Congregational church. The
late Harris Whitfield was always the Island people's friend.
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St John's people have been magnificent in the way they have welcomed these people
into their midst, but at first the transition had some growing pains.
"Why can't these people go to Newton Congregational church?" some asked.
"Because they are Methodist," I would reply.
It was not till fourteen years later, when I attended Pan-Pacific and South-east Asia
Women's Association Conference in Tonga, that I found that in the case of some of
the Tongans I had been mistaken. They were members of the Free Church of Tonga,
which had seceded many years earlier from the Free Wesleyan church of Tonga.
Queen Salote of Tonga, a loyal Wesleyan Methodist, when in residence at 'Atalaga' in
Epsom, one morning attended a service in St John's. I believe every Tongan in
Auckland was there that morning. They filled the left-hand block of seats, sang two
Tongan hymns and the Tongan national anthem.
The Samoan people were over on the right-hand side of the church, and I was in the
middle block.
A lady with me said to me, "Why are those over on the right-hand side?" Why
don't they sit with those on the left side?"
"Because they are not Tongans," I replied, "They're Samoans."
"Don't they know one another?" she asked.
To get away from Islanders, one family left St John's and joined up with St Stephen's
Presbyterian in Jervois Road. I remember that my comment was "Good riddance."
After my Aunt Olive and my Father died and I was left alone in our house in Rose
Road in Grey Lynn, I did quite a good deal of church work. I taught Sunday School
and then they made me one of the two circuit stewards. I seemed to be constantly
explaining the 'Islanders' point of view.
There was loud laughter in a church meeting when lists of Samoan names were read
out. "I can't see the joke," I would say.
Then in 1955 fourteen-year-old Litia Daveta, daughter of my friends Ratu Isikeli and
Bulou Ema, came from Fiji to live with me, and attend Auckland Girls' Grammar
School. She was a friendly, eager child, and everyone like her. She longed to learn to
play a musical instrument, so I arranged for her to be taught piano - playing. In a few
weeks she was able to play for St John's Sunday School. Two years later she was
pianist at her school. Then came the day when St John's organist asked her to take the
organ on Sunday evenings.
Her seat was hidden from the congregation, but the choir members felt panicky when,
during the singing of a hymn, Litia knocked the tune-book off its stand. But it did not
matter at all. She continued the playing of the hymn without the book.
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Another panic they felt was when she lost the key of the book cupboard. All the
voluntaries were in it. Litia improvised a very good voluntary.
She used to go after school to the church to practise on the pipe organ. For some days
she played pop music on the organ after her hymn practise was finished. It boomed
along Ponsonby Road; but tolerant Rev Jack Penman only said, "That sounds very
good." But when I heard about it, I gave a quite different verdict, and it stopped.
After one term examination in Auckland Girls' Grammar School, the girls were told to
practise for a singing competition. Litia was song-leader in Form Five Modern. She
composed a song, and her Maori form-mates and others excelled themselves in the
competition. She asked me if she could have it recorded.
"After your school certificate examination is over," I said.
So there I was, with a promise to be kept. She went to a well-known Tongan
broadcaster. Bill Wolf gram, a member of St John's church, to ask his advice. When he
heard the song, he realised that it was a remarkably good composition for a schoolgirl. So Astor Recording Company made a record of it, and it was on sale in shops for
some years.
Music became a very important thing in Litia's life. She was pianist for Methodist allAuckland concerts and balls. She trained a band of young Samoan men. She obtained
a very high mark in music for University Entrance examination. Her vocational
training had to be decided upon. There was considerable correspondence with Fiji
Education Department. No, they said, there was no opening for musical education for
Fiji schools! They would give her a scholarship for homecraft training.
She was a good girl, and, though very disappointed indeed, she applied herself to the
homecraft course at Auckland Teachers' Training College, qualified, and was
appointed to Ballantine Memorial School, her own old school. She loved New
Zealand, and missed it very much.
A short time after Litia returned to Fiji, Miss Mills, principal of Ballantine Memorial
School, offered me a job there as part-time teacher of English. Though I had had very
little experience in secondary schools, the Fiji Education Department said that "on
account of my long experience and continued interest in Fijians", they would agree to
the appointment.
In February 1962 I commenced work at Ballantine Memorial School.
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Chapter 14.
Back to Fiji.
"What do you think of Form 3A?" Miss Mills asked me.
"Well," I said, "they are no better than our old Primary Class eights used to be."
"Mr Donnelly says they are worse," she said.
"Well," I said, "that was what I really meant."
They were making all those same errors in composition; 'used to' for frequentative
present tense; 'every times' 'I live from Suva' 'one of my friend' 'I wanted to went' 'I
thought I can did it' and so on.
Very much more equipment was used than in the old days, and higher fees were
charged. At the end of each lesson we had to count the books we had given out, or
they would carelessly fall on the floor, or perhaps even go into the girls' bags.
"Forty books, please" I said one day. "There are only thirty-nine here. No, I did
not give out only thirty-nine Come on. Find the fortieth book. No recess until
you do."
I turned my work-book over on my table, and there was the fortieth book. "I'm
sorry, girls," I said.
But a girl in the front row stood up and turned round.
"Don't laugh. Be Christians," she said. And no one laughed.
There had been so many changes in the twelve years I had been absent. Many Fijians
and Indians were in responsible positions. It was good to see that the races mixed
more freely socially; that we could sit in church among the people, not as before
always on a front seat; that we could comfortably live in their homes with them.
"I expect you see a lot of changes," people said.
I sometimes answered, "Yes, a change in the Europeans; they are behaving
better."
I liked Ballantine Memorial School. It educates. It does not only cram for
examinations. I love the view of Korobaba Mountain; and the way breezes blow
through the buildings all along the hilltop ridge. I like the range of activities and
hobbies - the stress on Biblical knowledge; on devotional exercises; on sport; singing;
games; drama; crochet; debates; native handicrafts; service to the community;
cooking; needle-work; reading library books; flower gardening; life saving; swimming
- many activities to occupy minds.
The origin of the school has been touched on in Chapter Two, and in Chapter three
mention has been made of Ballantine Memorial girls. Then again in Chapter eleven I
have referred to rising educational standards there.
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March of Witness 1960
The bequest of £100, referred to in Chapter two, lay idle for years. Then Australian
and Fijian Methodists responded to a plea to add to the fund. Still people were
timorous about starting a school. There was always anxiety over church finances.
Some thought it best to concentrate on existing schools rather than to divert
enthusiasm and resources to a new project.
The Fijians felt it should be started. I claim the honour of being the person who, in a
Davuilevu circuit annual meeting, moved that Ballantine Memorial School be
established. I remember that a Fijian seconded it, and that it was carried on the Fijians'
votes, was remitted to synod, and again carried on the Fijians' votes.
I claim the honour too of asking Frances Tolley to leave New Zealand to come to Fiji
and help us. She did an outstanding job at Muanikau, the first location of Ballantine
Memorial School. All her old girls love her. She has twice returned on holiday, and
they treat her like a queen. Her humility, her friendliness, her deep spirituality and her
love for her girls left a great mark on Fiji.
In 1939 defence authorities said they needed Muanikau hill for a gun station. They
could see the ocean in three directions. The girls were dispersed, all except Class
eight, who would be sitting for "Qualifying."
Miss Tolley and Miss Russell left respectively for New Zealand and Australia. Miss
Mills took Class eight to Matavelo.
The following year the Delainavesi property was given in exchange. I remember that I
was one of a synod committee who went out in cars and a bus to view the site.
"It's better than Muanikau," we said. "There's more room for expansion."
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We went back into committee in the old Butt Street Hall, and passed that B.M.S. be
re-erected at Delainavesi. Miss Brokenshire became principal, and gave a very
valuable contribution of integrity, dignity, diligence and ordered discipline.
In 1942, when thousands of American soldiers had to be housed, at one day's notice
the girls were again disbanded.
"I'll lock this room," said Miss Brokenshire. "All important school records and
papers are there."
She went into Suva to stay in the home of friends, and the next day, trying to manage
school correspondence and needing to look at some records, she went back to the
school. The office door was wide open, and office papers flying about in the wind.
She took Class eight to Matavelo, and taught them there.
When the war ended. Miss Brokenshire managed to gather her school together again
and continue. Soon after that, under Miss Mills, secondary work was commenced and
homecraft classes were introduced. New buildings were erected.
Some illustrious women are old Ballantine girls. Adi Losalini Dovi, member of
Parliament; and the late Adi Laisa Ganilau are two I think of.
For some years fourth forms were the highest forms. Some passed the Fiji Junior
examination, and went to Teacher Training at Nasinu or to nursing training at
Tamavua and Colonial War Memorial Hospital, or to Lautoka or Ba hospitals. Others
went on to Form five in other schools. Those who were less skilled or lucky at
examinations were encouraged to be good,useful village women. But many found
work as "recognised teachers", or learnt to type, and became office girls. With
increasing urbanisation there was more and more need for girls to obtain qualifications
for employment.
In 1966 a Form five was commenced, and the school still continues to hold its own
academically. It takes a heavy toll of the health of its principals. Miss Mills, my dear
friend Phoebe, having done, I should think, the work of ten or so normal people, asked
to be transferred to an easier position. Miss Marke wore herself out, and went to
Australia.
Now, in 1972, a wonderful thing has happened. Emele Wiliame, a lotuman lady of
many gifts, is principal of Ballantine Memorial School, presiding over a staff of
fourteen teachers, half of them Europeans. We wish for her strength, courage and
grace to keep going.
While I was still a part-time teacher at Ballantine Memorial School, in 1964, the Fijian
and Indian mission districts became an independent church. It is the Methodist Church
of Fiji and Rotuma.
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That outstanding man. Rev Setareki Tuilovoni, beloved by all Fiji, was elected as
president. It was his idea that to ensure the enthusiasm and loyalty of Fijian
Methodists, a week's celebration should be enjoyed immediately prior to the first
conference. Some were surprised, even disapproving, but his advice was taken.
Ninety per cent of the Fijians are Methodist, though there are some who are far from
standards set by John Wesley. It is the national church and the loyalty is there.
Fifty-two committees were formed. They asked me to be convenor of an historical
exhibition committee. Then once a month they had a convenors' committee. I was so
interested to be on it. There were about forty-five leading Fijian laymen with a few
ministers, one Indian, and only two Europeans of whom I was one. Fifty-two of us
reported what we had done in our committees and planned for future preparation.
We decided to hire the Masonic Hall for eight days, and display things of historical
interest. We obtained numerous old photographs from overseas; communion vessels
used in Fiji a hundred years earlier; reports and correspondence of former times; old
minute books; clothing of missionaries' children in the 1850s; needlework done by
mission girls long ago; books published half a century ago and long out of print.
We ransacked old cupboards, and found school records of the 1860s; and fragments
from the Tahitians' church at Oneata. We collected old 'Davui' readers and technical
school books, produced in Davuilevu in the 1920s. We showed needlework done by a
Christian convert in the Suva prison.
We asked the government archivist, Mr Diamond, and the museum curator, Mr
Plainer, for help, and they each lent a very valuable showcase full of interesting
exhibits. We arranged for good lectures, and Ballantine girls sang the dirge for Mr
Baker.
It was all exceedingly stimulating. All the committees were very busy, and everything
went smoothly and well. Non-Methodist residents of Suva were very kind and
accommodating. If house-girls could not do their work because of choir practices, or if
office boys were absent from duty because they were taking part in dramas, people put
up with it all good-humouredly. The police had an easy week. The public behaved
well.
In 1964 I attended the Pan-Pacific and South-east Asia Women's Association
conference at Nukualofa in Tonga. I was a guest of Sa'ani Sione, whom I had taught in
Sunday School in Auckland. It was a wonderful two-weeks' holiday.
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Fiji delegation to Pan-Pacific Conference, Nukua’lofa, 1964
In 1964 also I visited New Zealand, and was one of one hundred and fifty scions of
the Hames family at a centennial held on my brother Edgar's farm at Paparoa. 1964
was a wonderful year.
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Chapter 15.
Last Teaching Years
I have answered to several names in Fiji. They used to say 'Sisita' a good deal in my
early days; but I rather encouraged 'Miss Hames'. It became 'Misemesi'. I have often
turned to respond to 'Semesa', addressed to a boy. It sounded just about the same. As
pronounciation of English improved, I would more often hear 'Miss Ames'.
But for years I was the 'marama sisita mai Vunitivi'; then the 'Marama sisita mai
Davuilevu'; the 'marama sisita mai Rijimodi'; the 'marama sisita mai Matavelo'.
When I returned to Fiji in 1962, some called me the 'marama sisita vakacegu' (retired
mission sister), some 'va qase ni vuli mai Delainavesi' (a teacher at B.M.S.).
Then I got the name 'Bubu', only the small children in two families called me that;
then their mothers and aunts addressed me by that name (Grandma).
But when in 1968 I joined the staff of Nausori Tutorial College, I was of course just
Miss Hames.
This school was established in 1958 by a committee of Indian men in Nausori to
provide opportunity of secondary education for boys and girls who could not gain
admittance to other schools. Many had failed secondary entrance; others had been
over-age and not allowed to sit for it.
In 1968, under Mr Gaya Prasad, the school had quadrupled in numbers. Most of the
students were Fijians. Mr Prasad was a remarkable man. He had gained a University
degree and served as efficient school-teacher, then able education officer, till the age
of retirement. He then undertook to build up Nausori Tutorial College. I was happy to
join his staff. I enjoyed working with him. He was a courteous gentleman. Sad to say,
he became ill, and died.
I continued in that work, and enjoyed also kind co-operation with Mr Vijay Krishna. It
was hard work, because we tried to help the students to pass Fiji Junior, and with
some it was hard work indeed. But we obtained improvement. In 1970 we gained
thirty-four passes, and were very pleased.
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Nausori Tutorial, 1970
STAFF – NAUSORI TUTORIAL 1970
2 American Peace Corps teachers (Christian Scientists), 6 Methodists, 1 Mohammedan, 4 Hindu
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In the Birthday Honours of Queen Elizabeth II in June 1967, my name was included. I
received a Certificate of Honour "for long and faithful service to the community".
This was indeed an honour. I was allowed to invite four guests to go with me to
Government House for the investiture. I took Mrs Ruby Derrick, MBE, Miss Elsabe
Smith, Miss Isobel Marke, and Mrs Litia Kotobalavu.
Governor Sir Derek Jakeway presents medal 1967
In April 1971 I received another honour. Rev Daniel Mustapha of Dilkusha organised
a wonderful thanksgiving service for Miss May Graham, Miss Elsabe Smith and me.
They held the service in Baker Memorial Hall in Davuilevu. Many kind things were
said about us to a hall full of our friends.
Mr Alexander Thakur ably recalled old days in the Teacher Training Institution. Such
good addresses were given also by Rev R. Miller, Rev S.G. Andrews and by the
president of conference, Rev Peter Davis.
They made me feel humbled. I thought of many mistakes I had made. But most of all I
liked what Mr Davis said. He said that just as women were the first to enter the empty
tomb at Jerusalem, so women are able better than men to be received and accepted in
the homes of the people.
This thanksgiving service was a very great honour indeed.
In July 1971, while standing in front of Form Four B at Nausori Tutorial during an
English lesson, I fainted, and fractured a vertebra. So I ended my long teaching
experience.
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When I reached the out-patients' department of the Colonial War Memorial Hospital,
"It's Miss Hames," the nurse on duty said. "You taught me at Matavelo."
"So it is," said the X-ray attendant. "You taught me at Matavelo."
While we waited for the X-ray plate to be developed, the X-ray expert and I discussed
Methodist conference. He was an office-bearer in Dudley Church.
It's the spine," I heard someone say.
When the stretcher went up in the lift to the ward, there the staff nurse who received
me said,
"Oh Miss Hames, do you remember me? You taught me at Ballantine."
And so it went on all the eight weeks I was a patient there. The physiotherapist who
taught me to walk again and the Matron had not been my pupils, but pupils of my
friends, Rita Griffins, Pauline Campbell, and poor Phyllis Furnivall, later murdered in
Davuilevu.
"You don't like chewing-gum, do you. Miss Hames?" said a staff nurse.
"Who told you?" I asked, because I had been having a blitz at Nausori Tutorial.
"I know, because you taught me," she said
Another day she said, "You hit me one day. Miss Hames."
"Did I? How terrible of me: What for?"
"For chewing gum."
She is a splendid staff nurse. I admired them all at their work. They are all such
efficient women. Everytime a change of duty brought in fresh faces, there were more
of my old pupils, And they kept coming to see me from other parts of the hospital.
Scores of ex-Ballantine Memorial School pupils.
When I recovered my health, I was so happy to find that I was still a little useful. The
Education Department, tackling the problem of suitable, easy reading matter for
primary school children, matter relevant to their lives and interests, were kind enough
to appreciate some lessons I prepared, and to value knowledge I have gained in my
experiences in Fiji.
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Chapter 16.
Independent Fiji
Independence week was very happy. All seemed to rejoice together in October 1970.
There was elation in the air. Fijians and Indians together were glad that this great time
had come.
I set an essay the week before independence: "What independence may mean to us."
A nice smiling Fijian boy wrote, "All the Europeans and Indians will away, and we'll
have all the money." I think he must have heard some of his elders make this startling
prognostication.
I fear many of the Fijian men believed that with independence they would be freer to
follow their own wishes. And I fear that with many the wish was for greater ease and
rest and sleep.
It is hard to have to write this, because the Fijian people are to me like my own
children. But in this last chapter of my book I shall write sternly.
I implore Fijian men to be more responsible. Those who are irresponsible, I pray for
them that they shoulder their duties. Those who drink all their pay-packet, leaving
their wives to earn money for their children's food, I pray they may 'snap out of it' and
learn more sense. Those who smash the furniture when they go home on pay-days, I
pray they may behave themselves.
And this whole question of alcbhol? Must moderate drinking Europeans continue to
ignore the truth that many people are unable to be restrained moderate drinkers? Must
the Fijian race deteriorate just because of this "good" old British custom of drinking
alcohol?
I thank God for so much progress in Fiji. But I feel, too, like John Hunt, that early
missionary, did when he was dying at Viwa in 1848.
He prayed, "Lord, bless Fiji. Lord, pity Fiji."
Some Fijians reading this would laugh; others be angry; others shrug their shoulders.
But I claim the privilege of an eighty-year old, and I suggest that they all 'acquit
themselves like men, and be strong'.
Soldiers of Christ arise,
And put your armour on,
Strong in the strength which God supplies,
Through His eternal Son.
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Appendix A.
Some old students of Primary School, Davuilevu:
Semesa Robarobalevu
Inoke Buadromo
Mosese Vitukawalu (Waibuta)
Losalini Masavu
Marica Toma
Naomi Sikivou
Alsake Vula
Taniela Lotu
Wiliame Tila
Jekope Panapasa
Alfred Jack
Aporosa Yaranamua
Kitione Yaranamua
These are only a few among many. I use school-names with no titles. Some went first
through the Primary School, then to the Teacher Training Institution. Of these there
were:
Joni Ledua
Jekope Fateaki
James Tipo
Osea Neisau
Peni Nasavu
Ilaisa Taito
Ilaisa Cavu
Aisake Wiliame
On the Indian side of the Teacher Training Institution were;Daniel Sharan
Tuisi Ram
Abdul Lateef
Bechan Satyanand
Govind
Narayan Prasad
Sukh Deo
Pallan
Alexander Thakur
Kunji Raman
James Madhaven
Ram Prasad
Bedesi
David Robert
Savid Sharan
Tommy Williams
Gutniel Sharan
Faniel Sharan
Indian girls, who were pupil teachers in Dilkusha Girls' School, and also attended
T.T.I, classes, included:
Katie Williams
Rosie Sharan
Shanti Sharan
Suraj Mati
Mariam
Sant Kumari
Jumnabai
Muliya Dhanraji
Daisy Sharan
Other Fijian students in the T.T.I, were:
Inoke Cakautini
Inosi Vatucicila
Samisoni Vagakoto
Aea Tuigaloa
Isikeli Daveta
Watisoni Isaia
Esala Delana
Solomoni Naiduki
Inoke Ratukalou
Peni Waqalevu
Fereti Dumaru
Kaveni Gonewai
Ilimotama Misau
Jone Kurusiga
Anare Raiwalui and many others
Names are written, as they were on school registers, without titles.
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Appendix B.
Well known Indian Christians, who have become Christian through the influence of
Indian mission station life:
Most of these have not been my pupils.
This is appendix to Chapter 5.
Mr George Masih Prakash
Mr Samuel Bharat
Mr A.V. Ram Narayan
Mr Sewak Masih
Mr R.H. Ram Narayan
Mr A.G. Prasad
Mr Ram Padarath
Mr Sanjeu
Mrs Sanjeu
Miss E. Phulquar
Mrs Hamilton Prasad
Mrs Bhanmati Prasad
Mrs Charlotte Cheddy
Miss Satya Ball
Several of these have passed on.
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