I have just read a piece by an American travel writer about the Ovalau Club in Levuka on the small Fijian Island of Ovalau. He writes somewhat sardonically of the sad remnants of British colonial rule he detected there. In doing so he has overlooked the role played by Americans in Levuka’s history. He may not have noted that cannibalism was popular protein supplement in Fiji until Christianity took hold in the late 19th Century. Probably the last person to be eaten in Fiji was the missionary, the Reverend Thomas Baker, who was cooked and consumed by the people of Nubutautau village in 1907, some say with his boots on. Writing disparaging stories about British colonialism is popular amongst the generation responsible for calamitous interventions in Iraq and Libya.
June, Nikki and I left Libya to live in Fiji. June and I worked for a trading company in Suva. The company, now doing business in Papua New Guinea and the Pacific Islands, had its origins in the trade store opened in Levuka in 1868, in the wild and rambunctious time of whaling, copra trading, cannibalism, fighting and carousing.
In the late 1960’s the manager of the now historic trade store asked me to help him arrange for a gang of men from the interior of the island of Ovalau to fly to Queensland for a season of work on the pineapple plantations. There was little or no employment on the island and the village men were not unhappy about it. The trade store manager was the son of a Kai Valagi (European) father and a Fijian mother. He had been brought up in his mother’s village which we were to visit together. We intended to make the preliminary and somewhat formal arrangements to get the menfolk to earn some money.
In those days, you could not fly from Suva to Levuka. You caught the ferry. It departed from a rickety jetty by a Chinese trade store some miles by road out of Suva. In so doing it avoided the time-consuming business of negotiating the gap in the reef which guarded Suva’s harbour.
You could park your car at the Chinese store for a small fee. A hut at the far end of the jetty housed a toilet which was drained through a hole in the floor under which colourful fish fed on the rich bounty left by waiting passengers. Levuka is on the East side of Ovalau so the ferry took a while to get there. I found watching flying fish and spotting turtles helped to pass the time.
The lone hotel in Levuka, the Royal, was a wooden building riddled with termites. They were consuming the hotel. It is still there so they have not been wholly successful. I have little memory of the place because the store manager and I spent a long and convivial time in the Ovalau Club about which I remember but two things. The first was the captain of a Japanese super trawler who flew into a rage when asked where his highly efficient fishing fleet operated. The second was a framed letter dated sometime during World War I and displayed on the wall. The writer was apologising for the theft of some chicken from the neighbouring island of Wakaya. It was signed by Felix Graf von Luckner, the German officer who captained the commercial raider Seeadler (‘Sea Eagle’) operating in the Pacific during World War I.
I was the lone Englishman in the club. It was thus my sole responsibility to behave like an oppressive colonialist. I did my best.
In the morning, we set off for the village in the store manager’s car. We were both nursing a hangover which in my case reduced my anxiety about driving in mountainous country. The village was somewhere in the middle of the island and the road was rough. There is a sovereign remedy for a hangover in Fiji. It is known as Kava. It is what Fijians drink ceremonially and socially. We were looking forward to the greeting ceremony during which Kava is drunk in the Vale Levu, the chief’s house.
In a Fijian village, the Vale Levu is the biggest of the straw built residences. It is usually decorated with cowry shells and rich in tapa cloth. The floor is often covered with finely woven grass mats. The chief’s bed is featured and usually has a bamboo frame containing layers of pandanus mats for comfort. The chief’s wife and children are provided with a lesser bed.
When the store manager and I arrived, we found the village men huddled in a group around a tanoa, the big wooden bowl in which Kava is prepared from the roots of the Yongona bush and from which it is dispensed in half coconut shells. Small amounts of Kava make your mouth and some of your face numb. This is probably why it is a hangover cure. A medium amount induces feelings of relaxation and renders the concepts of work and money irrelevant. Too much Kava sends you to sleep.
We entered the Vale Levu with a proper show of politeness. In the middle of the room was the chief’s matrimonial bed. He had been to the trade store and purchased the biggest modern double bed, the most elaborate headboard, the plushest matrass and the brightest of bed linen available. It was a cultural anomaly which dominated the Vale Levu; a mighty marital metaphor.
For some years, men from the village did seasonal work in Queensland.
DON'T KILL ME NOW 