Stories From The Pacific

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30919, 27 November 1965, Page 4

Stories From The Pacific

Pirn’s Pacific: Stories from the South Seas. Selected and edited by Judy Tudor. Pacific Publications, Sydney. With map. 223 pp.

Illustrated with excellent photography and small drawings of traditional New Guinea designs, this is a collection of 46 pieces published in the Pacific Islands Monthly magazine between 1950 and 1965. All of them are short in length and favour fact rather than fiction. But if they fail to confirm the South Seas idyll popularised by romantic stories, they do present a composite picture of life as it actually is on the islands, coral and otherwise. Not all of the writers have the “professional touch,” but they are all well experienced in the subjects they deal with. They live on the islands, or trade between them, or fly over them. They know their traditions, their present and their hopes for the future. Thus, this wordscape of fact and anecdote takes us informatively from New Guinea. Papua and the Solomons to Fiji. Samoa, Tonga and other islands en route and farther east. And on one occasion we visit coral atolls in New Zealand’s Sunderland flying boats. A word about the dust jacket: produced in colour, it presents a most attractive montage of island views.