Nights are warm & its hard to sleep
Swimming with Sharks Chapter 1.1
These females are passionately fond of dancing, and in the wild grace and spirit of their style excel everything that I have ever seen.
Herman Melville in Typee
It was easy to call Lalomanu paradise. The long sandy white beach, steep tree covered mountains, waves, reef, the clear green and blue sea and no people.
That was Sāmoa of the 70s.
Later I knew Lalomanu had gone wrong. There were people where they should not have been. ‘Resorts’ on that beach offered tourists what they called a Sāmoan experience, except few Sāmoans ever lived on a beach like that. Local families making a living from the foreigners lived nearby.
In 2009, I stood among the tsunami ruins as a pick-up truck raced down the road, lights flashing, horn sounding. On the back, men wearing white surgical masks were waving cars aside. I saw the bare feet of a person sticking out from under a blue tarpaulin on the tray.
‘Why do they do that,’ somebody said, ‘they’re going to be dead a long time.’
That had two sides; risking life and limb to deliver a dead body and doing everything to bring some dignity to the dead.
Two waves, one four storeys high, had hit Lalomanu smashing all the fale.
We found stories as best we could; there is no disaster-reporting manual.
Beside a shattered, splintered coconut, we set up our sat-phone. Coconuts are famed for resilience and toughness. I had never seen a coconut smashed like that. I kept looking at it, more than at all the other craziness.
Truth was I was angry rather than distressed; Lalomanu should not have happened. Greed and political incompetence were to blame.
In covering the Pacific, I knew paradise was a word best left to scurvy-ridden European sailors who happened upon a Pacific Island after months of weevil-ridden salt meat and all male company.
Still, it’s a word that’s easy to use.
Way back, sailing into Suva Harbour on a watery morning, and experiencing the city market with its array of races, the strange stuff on sale and the Indians of Cumming Street, I want to jump ship. I went to the Fiji Times, ‘first newspaper published in the world each day’ to see about a job. The editor was not in and the ship sailed later in the day.
A day or so on, nimble dancers clambered up the gangway as we stood off the volcanic cones of Rarotonga. Herman Melville had written of women coming on his ship for ‘every species of riot and debauchery’. Mine were good Christians, no licentiousness here. They were dancing for passing tourists.
Africa for starters
Eventually, I ended up in the Kalahari Desert and Botswana’s Ministry of Agriculture and writing guides on treating goats for ticks or how to castrate cattle in a modern way. Moreover, watch for rabid hyenas, assorted coloured mambas and scorpions in the boots.
I tried persuading San Bushmen on the usefulness of No. 8 wire and the merits of fencing the Kalahari, but having gone a millennia or two without it, they failed to see the point.
Botswana had come about discovering a cure for persistent wanderlust. Apply to a voluntary organisation and they paid my airfare and gave me a job, house and adventure.
Back in Wellington, Volunteer Service Abroad (VSA) offered a similar, but more altruistic looking package. While I thought Rarotonga, they sent me to Sāmoa.
My single days, a Sāmoan matriarch said, would soon be over.
‘The nights are warm and it’s hard to sleep.’
To be young and single and to find myself living in a Sāmoan fale with a large family whose numbers included at least three teenage maidens. What could be so hard? What little I thought I knew of Polynesians, spoke of guilt free and always available romantic sex.
Truth was not slow to dawn in Vaivase-uta; wrong address, wrong country.
Earth mother
Rather than do useful things like digging wells, teaching the illiterate or curing leprosy, VSA put me on the staff of Prime Minister Tupoula Efi.
The Prime Minister’s Department had not thought about me and there was no house. I could have camped in a hotel. Instead, the department tea-lady offered me board with her policeman husband and all those girls.
With me was Margaret Mead, the great American anthropologist, or at least her book Coming of Age in Sāmoa. Written in 1928, it got Americans believing that Sāmoan teenagers were relaxed and happy in their free love, and if they could do it, so could everybody else.
I explained all this to the girls, but slowly it dawned Mead was wrong.
She then died.
A telex machine I had to share my office with clattered with demands for grief-stricken tributes from happy natives. Tupuola said no. Delegations pounded their way up a narrow wooden staircase that hit the landing outside my office, horrified that the prime minister was not showing suitable respect to Earth Mother.
It was not that he thought she was better off dead. He just did not want to glorify a woman who had libelled Sāmoans for decades.
New Zealand anthropologist Derek Freeman went on to unveil Mead as a fraud. He was a little potty; several Sāmoan villages had tales of Freeman parading nude. Sāmoans were tense, uptight and prone to violence, he said.
I found middle ground; Sāmoa, like the Pacific, was more interesting than paradise.
Diplomatic intelligence
I had hitchhiked around Rhodesia’s civil war and at Victoria Falls, I had photographed a shunting train picked up carriages on the bridge over the Zambezi, pushing and pulling them from Zambia. It was United Nations sanction busting. Back in Gaborone, Botswana’s capital, I returned from a movie to a ransacked apartment. The train photos were gone, an early lesson in spooks.
The Soviet Union and the Cold War softly ruffled Pacific's waters when I arrived. In an Aitutaki bar, I heard Mao Zedong had died a week earlier. No one was interested.
Assorted Israelis and Libyans blended into the background of the standard Pacific bars, listening, perhaps with the same distaste I felt, to Pacific music decaying into sentimental country and western.
Spying in the Pacific does, at first blush, seem unnecessary. State secrets quickly become market gossip.
At the PM’s Department, mid-level diplomats wanted to chat about the boss’s thinking. As if I knew.
Israelis were friendly. They won my interest by taking me to restaurants.
Saudis teased Sāmoans with the prospect of cheap oil in return for support of Arab causes. Their delegation rated a village welcome but there was a problem with the pig. Any self-respecting village wanted to give a visitor a cooked one.
Sāmoa still pays market prices for oil.
In the theological thinking of a Sāmoan politician Jesus, who loved Sāmoans more than anybody else, was on Israel's side. He was ‘King of the Jews’ after all. Sāmoans were not big on Roman irony.
An Egyptian diplomat (with hints of spy about him in that he asked me, with a nod and wink, to let me know secret stuff) was of good humour, realising God's Chosen People, Sāmoans, were not about to abandon his second choice, Jews.
A third ranked diplomat at the newly opened Chinese Embassy came to my office for discussions on Fa’asalaiga taro production figures. Other equally riveting issues came up.
Sāmoans had no problems with Chinese. Germans had imported Cantonese coolies. New Zealand, which invaded in 1914, made it a criminal offence for Sāmoans to have sex with Chinese. The large number of Sāmoans with traces of Chinese in them, including my own children, speaks volumes on the effectiveness of that law.
China sent the Chungking (now Chongqing) Acrobatic Troupe to Apia where a performance on the Reclaimed Area (now occupied by a couple of large Chinese built government buildings) attracted a third of Sāmoa’s population.
A friend from the New Zealand High Commission came by, saying their External Intelligence Bureau was in a deep Chungking funk and demanded a report. Over a barbeque and beer, we contrived a ‘Top Secret’ analysis, detailing kung fu and Bruce Lee movies and the way they were gripping Apia.
Cunning communists had used the acrobatic connection to win Sāmoan hearts and minds.
New Zealand hosted cocktails on aging warships.
Head of State Malietoa Tanumafili II went to China. When he got back, the Chinese Embassy invited us around to watch movies of Malietoa inspecting agricultural equipment.
It came with a meal and fierce maotai, which had a gregarious impact on Malietoa’s aide de camp son. We stood, many times, as an increasingly drunk ADC sounded new toasts to glorious China or his father.
A Chinese vice president arrived in Apia during hurricane rains.
In the corrugated iron-roofed Chinese Hall in Taufusi, the austere Mao jacket wearing vice-president gave her People's of the World Unite speech in Mandarin as a man read it out in Cantonese. Others translated into Sāmoan and English and with the rain pounding the roof, none of us heard a thing.
This was an introduction into the dross and boredom of diplomatic-speak.
I saw it again when Sāmoa hosted a European Union-African, Caribbean and Pacific (EU-ACP) meeting. A matai spoke for 20 minutes in Sāmoan to the Europeans. No one translated. The EU president replied in un-translated Italian. Drink flowed anyway.
Wellington compiled secret reports, offering salacious detail for Prime Minister Robert Muldoon’s eyes only. He read that Tupoula knew nothing of wine, drinking ‘Cold Duck’.
True, but in those days, who did?
Reports documented women in Tupuola’s life. That was one of my early ‘secrets’, only to be told chapter and verse by a nurse at the National Hospital.
A new Soviet ambassador arrived in Sāmoa, Vladimir Sofinsky from his Wellington base, to present credentials.
I interviewed him for the government newspaper Savali, which I was editor, reporter and photographer of. Conversation turned to the Great Patriotic War and I asked him whether he had fought. He leapt up and took off his shirt, counting the scars on his body.
That interview coincided with a struggle with Tupoula.
I wanted to publish a story on electoral corruption. He did not.
I had to pull the story but put nothing in its space other than a small note saying Tupuola had removed its content. Leave in 24 hours they said. Six weeks on, with a memorable party, I departed.
I joined the Evening Post in Wellington as Muldoon declared Sofinsky persona non grata. He had given cash in a paper bag to a communist trade union boss. I was at the airport as he left.
He grabbed me with a bear bug.
‘You and me, we are comrades, both expelled; you from Sāmoa, me from New Zealand.’
Fiji spies
Invariably, Fiji was different.
Sitiveni Rabuka, inaugural coup plotter, created the Fiji Intelligence Service (FIS). I knew one of their spies. His day began at his desk where, because he was important, he got his own copy of the Fiji Times and a computer. He and the spies divided the stories up. Sometimes they would call the reporter to find out how they got the story. They generated little of their own spying.
When Mahendra Chaudhry became prime minister in 1999, he abolished the FIS. Its boss, Metuisela Mua, then joined later coup plotter George Speight. During Speight’s coup, shops would close and people anxiously race home. I never knew what was happening.
My Hong Kong office phoned saying the Sydney Morning Herald was reporting ‘Hill Tribes’ on the move. I tried to find a Hill Tribes spokesman, but I concluded quickly they were the same as the famed ‘Lost Tribes’ or ‘Last Tribes’ of PNG; there was always a group there being found that had never before contacted the outside world. They would good fodder for anthropologists. In Botswana US Ivy League universities had paid nomadic Bushman to stay in one place in the Okavango so that their anthropology students would not have to spend so much time trying to find them.
Viti Levu’s Hill Tribes came from a noble tradition of that kind of thing.
Bloody Mary
Aggie Grey was the woman who mattered in my Apia. She created her Beach Road hotel in World War Two with a simple and efficient service. Rooms were basic, tidy and quiet. The food was straightforward and filling.
Good at business to the point of being ruthless, she also won hearts. She lived in rooms above the hotel souvenir shop where one day I had tea.
There was a shadow in her life, she told me. A wartime guest had been US Navy officer James A Mitchner who wrote Tales of the South Pacific. It turned into the musical South Pacific. (Mitchner’s Pacific books are racist. He said Fiji’s Indians were like mynah birds, raucous, uncultured, uncouth and grubby.)
South Pacific had a character called Bloody Mary. Aggie feared people believed she was Bloody Mary and as she grew older, she found it distressing.
Biographer Nelson Eustis wrote to Mitchner asking whether Aggie was Bloody Mary.
Mitchner replied, saying he had been stationed at Pago Pago. ‘I managed to reach Apia half a dozen times, always with a gasp of relief and a cry of joy at seeing dear Aggie once again,’ Mitchner wrote.
She was ebullient, effervescent, outrageous, illegal and terribly right. She and her crew must have bilked the American occupation forces out of a couple million dollars worth of services, and never was wartime money spent any better. The catalogue of her manipulations would fill a small book and of her kindness a library.
He found her generous, robust and instructive.
When I returned to New York to edit the manuscript … I needed a reference point as to what Bloody Mary would do or say I simply recalled Aggie and had my answer. Aggie was not the prototype of Bloody Mary; that worthy Tonkinese was on paper long before I met Aggie.
But it was Aggie, and she alone, would fortified my writing in the editing stage, who remained as the visualisation of the island manipulator when the play was in formation, and who lives, in a curious way, as the real-life Bloody Mary. Aggie was a marvellous woman, inventive and a creation of war. I still love her.
Aggie gave me the letter and I printed it over a half a page in Savali.
Long after she died, I was back at Aggie’s, having flown there with Prime Minister Helen Clark on a Royal New Zealand Air Force (RNZAF) flight. Also on the plane was politician Taito Phillip Field (no relation) who would eventually disgrace himself.
At Faleolo, while the VIPs were going down the front stairway for greetings, the media band was taken down the back. We arrived at Aggies first. The receptionist was a woman I worked with in the PM’s Department years before.
She handed me a key and when I found myself at the Marlon Brando Suite I recognised old loyalties still counted.
After a shower, there was a knock at the door. Outside a group of traditionally dressed matai stood, ready with small gifts and a fine speech, of some kind. I told them I was not Taito and had no idea where he was. Back at the airport some days later, I heard Taito complaining to other MPs that he had spent his time in a pokey room down the back of the hotel.
Guess that was my room.
©Michael J Field