Surely there must be some Melanesian proverb, despite their one-time pre-literacy,
to admonish us bookish literati that "If a reviewer cannot be expected to be friendly,
why expect a friend to be your reviewer?" As a non-Pacificer (and Sir Colin is
forthright in his views of "the idiom and life style ... combined with a general
contempt" by those he labels "African activists", transferring to 'Island Service' as the
Continent's Colonial Services closed down and "imposing African mores on both
Solomon Islanders and us who had been there since World War II - and some before")
at once eager to learn from the memoir of such a distinguished colonial administrator
and reluctant to step in where angels might fear to tread, I accepted the editor's
invitation to review this book only because, with no review copies being sent out (I had
ordered my own copy back in 1989), this was the only way Sir Colin's memoir could be
noticed. Having had the pleasure of meeting Sir Colin Allan at a Corona
Club party, dare I still hope to confound my home-baked item of Melanesian
proverbial lore?
With this plea for mercy, or at least not Coventry, entered, let us turn first to the
author. He is a New Zealander, one of that small but effective group of literal
non-Britishers who made their career - often an eminent one, right up to Government
House - in a very British Colonial Service. Graduating from Canterbury University,
Allan joined the Colonial Administrative Service in 1945 and was posted to the BSIP.
Thirty-three years later he retired, having spent his last twelve years as British Resident
Commissioner of the New Hebrides (1966), Governor of the Seychelles (1973) and,
enviably in career terms, back to his first territory as Governor of the Solomon Islands
from 1976 to 1978. He retired to Auckland.
Despite the fact that his memoir is published in two volumes, though together they
amount to under 200 pages all told, it is not a full-scale autobiography. Page 1 opens in
1952, when Allan already had seven years' seniority under his belt; and the story ends
in early 1958, when the High Commissioner, Sir John Gutch, despatches Allan to the
New Hebrides. It is Allan's travels, observations and work as Special Lands
Commissioner in the Solomons between 1953 and 1958 that form the heart of the
matter. And, like the best of artichokes, what a rich heart it is! We are treated to closely
detailed descriptions of the scores of islands and settlements visited and the hundreds
of people met. Indeed, Sir Colin is irreproachable on naming names, even when he is not very impressed by some of his colleagues, e.g. the "unhelpful" MacLeod-Smith,
who thought the Commission a waste of time, and the "down-at-heel - ramshackle"
Western Pacific High Commission Secretariat at Honiara, in 1954 "dominated by
Africanists" and with an identified High Commissioner, a Chief Secretary and a
Financial Secretary who, however outstanding, did not have a day's Pacific service
between them! I learned more about the WPHC, and in particular the administration
of the BSIP, from these pages than from any official handbook, report or treaties.
Indeed, I was sorry to reach p. 193 and realise that there were a further twenty years of
Sir Colin's upwardly mobile Colonial Service career that he might have written and I
profited from.
So why, given such pleasures to be derived from Solomons Safari, do I wish I had
left it at reading it without reviewing it? In a nutshell. Sir Colin's style does not match
up to his content. It is heavy ("On 1 December I left Auki in Veronica on my
circuminsular tour of Malaita"; "Then back to the airfield and we took off for Bilva on
Vella Lavella, flying by way of Mundi Mundi and Bagga"; "Paralang could not be
compared with 'Gunantamby', Emma Forsyte's famous old home at Ralum, near
Kokopo"); and it is bumpy. The proliferation of upper case letters (p.37 is a notorious
example) and the habit of jumping from the well-described present to twenty-five
years on ("Years later, as governor, my wife and I ..."; "twenty-five years later I paid
several visits to ..."; "As governor I returned to Roroni and spent the day with Vouza
on 19 December 1977") make little concession to the needs of the wider readership. We
cannot all expect to be Grimbles or Conrads or Robert Louis Stevenson, but, as so
many colonial civil servants have shown in an exemplary fashion in both memoir and
novel, readability remains an art and not a gift.
Perhaps, after all, Solomons Safari is best looked on as a book for the Pacific
specialist and not for the general reader. If that is so, I regret it; for I have enjoyed its
contents enormously. The book is superbly printed, on beautiful paper, as a handset
limited edition. The map is excellent (it appears in both volumes), but oh! for an index
to all those valued names!
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