Why and how the PACIFIC ISLANDS MONTHLY was established

Click here, then click on 'Browse this Collection', then use the drop-down menu to select 'Set 461-480' and click on 'Go' to go straight to 1970.
Endless hours of pleasure and edification await you!

 

The Pacific Islands Monthly (PIM) was founded in Sydney by New Zealand born journalist Robert William (Robbie) Robson, who had moved to Australia during World War I. The first issue of PIM was in newspaper format and consisted of 12 pages. The number of pages gradually increased and by the 17th issue (December 1931) PIM had changed to a magazine style format. In later life it evolved into a glossier coloured magazine.

PIM was required reading for anyone interested in not only Papua New Guinea but also islands farther to the east, and after I'd moved to Guinea in the dying days of 1969, I never missed an issue. In fact, I've always thought that I got my first job in New Guinea with a firm of chartered accountants in Rabaul through a classified ad which I had placed in PIM sometime in late 1969, and in the early 2000s even made a trip to the National Archives in Canberra with the express purpose of finding the ad and taking a copy of it.

I remember sitting in their cavernous reading room and paging through all twelve issues of their 1969 magazines and not finding anything that looked even close to the Job Wanted ad as I remembered it, "Young accountant (24), still studying, seeks position in the islands." Of course, now that PIM has been digitised, I've been able to search the same issues on the computer from the comfort of "Riverbend" but with the same result - NOTHING! So how and where did I advertise? One thing I know for certain: I did not reply to a Position Vacant advertisement. Strange how faulty one's memory can become.

PIM was part of my life until its final edition in June 2000. A book, "A Short History of the Pacific Islands Monthly", has been published by Bob Lawrence and I've rushed off my $25 (plus $5.50 for postage and handling) to buy a copy. In the meantime, why not start at the beginning and read why and how PIM was established, as told by the man himself:

 

Click on image to enlarge

 

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In search for meaninglessness

Leo Umundum (aka Leo the Hun)

 

Alan Lucas, in his "Cruising the Coral Coast", described the situation on Thursday Island in 1980 in these words:

"Thursday Island has degenerated over the years from one of the world's most romantic pearling ports to something of a 'dole office' for Torres Strait Islanders and nearby mainland Aborigines. Littering, drunkenness and a total lack of self-respect appear to be the main sports and the administration does not give the impression of conquering the island's ills. As one who has known T.I. since the early 1960s and who has watched it go steadily downhill I can only lament its demise and admit that there is little there to interest the visitor."

True but he could have said the same of many of the 'whiteys' inhabiting the Torres Strait. I had my once-in-a-career chance to join them and succumb to the lure of this remote and soporific island when I worked as accountant for Thursday Island's Island Industries Board in 1977.

However, I wasn't ready yet to become either an alcoholic or a philosopher in search for the meaninglessness of the human existence and so moved on to bigger and better things. Nonetheless, the island kept me under its spell and I returned in April 2005 - see my travelogue - to find out what I might've missed out on.

Not much, I realised, when I entered the Grand Hotel and met the New Zealander Gary Duff, and Tony, on T.I. since 1959 but originally from Lausanne in Switzerland, and Henry the Dane, a mackerel fisherman. Tony was retired and only drank double gins with just a hint of tonic. The "indescribable intoxication" the famous island-lover Lawrence Durrell had experienced at finding himself in "a little world surrounded by the sea" was clearly not enough for Tony. He seemed coy about the sort of work he'd done on T.I. but it could be assumed that the only job he ever had done really well and with total dedication was drinking.

(In later years, I read about Tony in "Steady Steady: The Life and Music of Seaman Dan": "My engineer [at the time], Tony Tardent, an ex-croc shooter in the Northern Territory, [and I] were working the Darnley Deeps. [It was] spring tide so you can't anchor out at the work area, it is too deep, 30 fathoms. So we [would] always run in to Darnley [Erub] and anchor there. When it is work time, nobody goes ashore, everybody stays on board. When it is the spring tide you can go ashore. So this particular weekend, Saturday after work we race in ... and we are invited to go to this school dance. Tony is a white boy and I introduce him to my cousin, Wasie [née Kiwat], and they got on famously together. This was 1963. [Then] we signed off, got paid and finished [for the season]. The next thing I hear they both got married and they are still together today! [Click here])

 

 

I knew Gary, the cray fisherman, from my time on T.I. in 1977 when he had been married to Dang, a Thai girl, who now lived in Cairns. Gary, now 60, was remarried, again to a Thai girl, and was still diving for crays and drinking. He was said to keep his crew awake at night when he rolled over in bed, such was the noise the $100-notes made under the mattress. Not much of a life by his own admission and he seemed to envy me my thirty freewheeling years through over a dozen countries while he had done little more than enrich the local publicans.

 

 

Leo Umundum (aka Leo the Hun), an Austrian, soon joined us. Leo had come to T.I. in 1960. He lived in some style on neighbouring Friday Island in a shack with ocean views which he had built himself on land which he had never bought, sired some children with local women, and came across to Thursday Island once a fortnight to collect his dole cheque and convert it into urine. He continued to live on Friday Island with a bunch of other latter-day beachcombers who'd been on the dole for so long, they'd forgotten what kind of work they were out of.

I had always thought he'd one day be knighted for his services to the Australian brewing industry and live out his days as Sir Osis of the Liver, until I received this email from another T.I. identity a few days ago:

"Went to the Cooktown RSL earlier on where an old mate told me that Friday Island Leo had topped himself some time ago. I rang another friend to verify the story and she said that Leo had been diagnosed with advanced cancer, so he grabbed his gun and the rest is history!"

 

Andy Warhol once said, ""In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes."
Even never-working Leo the Hun got his one minute's worth.

 

Welcome to the T.I. pantheon, Leo the Hun, alongside such luminaries as German Harry, French Joe, Louis the Greek, Gösta Brand, and many others who in death have become larger than during their wasted lives.

And this is the way the story ends - to paraphrase T.S. Eliot - "Not with a whimper but a bang."

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P.S.
According to the National Archives of Australia, Leonhard UMUNDUM, born 1 July 1940, Austrian, travelled per ship SYDNEY, departing in 1960 under the Assisted Passage Scheme. And the assistance didn't stop there.

P.P.S. According to a facebook entry by Hans Hartner - since gone offline - Leo Umundum died on 29 July 2019. He also posted this photo taken on one of Leo's apparently annual visits - no doubt paid for by the long-suffering Australian taxpayers as Leo was always on government benefits and never gainfully employed - to his hometown Fohnsdorf in Austria.

 

Another great 'tusitala' of the twentieth century

 

There was Robert L. Stevenson and there was Australia's equivalent, Louis Becke, not forgetting New Zealand's Robert Julian Dashwood, writing under the name Julian Hillas, as well as America's Robert Dean Frisbie. They all wrote evocatively about the South Pacific and they have all been dead for a long time.

Compared to them, James A. Michener was with us until October 1997, and he wrote not just about the South Pacific, although his three books "Tales of the South Pacific", "Rascals in Paradise", and "Return to Paradise" make him a latter-day "tusitala" as good as any of the others. They are all out of print now but are in the public domain, so indulge yourself by dipping in and out of those many wonderful short stories.

Having lived and worked in the islands for many years and having left it too late to return, they make wonderful reading for armchair-travelling in my old age. There's his beautiful description of Rabaul which was the first port-of-call in my own odyssey through the islands - click here - and nothing could describe my feelings about New Guinea better than his story simply called New Guinea.

After New Guinea I moved to Honiara on Guadalcanal, and finally to the 'Cradle of Polynesia', Samoa. Only many years later, in retirement, did I have the time and money to travel to the quintessential South Pacific island, the atoll, by wandering through the countless islands in the Ha'apai group in the Kingdom of Tonga.

Anyway, it's all there, beautifully captured by this great 'tusitala' of the twentieth century. So sit back in your armchair and travel the wonderful world of the South Pacific with James A. Michener!

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Who was "German Harry"?

 

 

" ............. we reached the welcome shelter of Deliverance Island. Perhaps half a mile or so in circumference, ringed with a beach of white coral sand, crowned with coconut palms dancing in the breeze, and surrounded by a wide fringing reef, it resembled an island such as might be imagined in a boyhood adventure book ........"

 

 

Deliverance Island, the island in Torres Strait where German Harry lived for many years, is the nearest part of Australia to Indonesia. Although it is about 100 miles from the Australian mainland, it is only 25 miles from the coast of Papua. It is about 35 miles from the mouth of the Bensbach River which forms the southern part of the border between Indonesia and Papua New Guinea. The island was so named by Captain William W. Bampton of the ship "Shah Hormuzear", who spent 73 nerve-wracked days trying to find his way through reef-studded Torres Strait in 1793 in company with the whaler "Chesterfield". It was at Deliverance Island that the two ships finally reached clear water.

 

The story "German Harry" was one of W. Somerset Maugham's briefer efforts. After Maugham's visit to the Torres Strait, it first appeared in the "American Cosmopolitan" for January 1924 and was republished in the book "Cosmopolitans".

 

Continue here

 

Maugham gathered the material for the story in 1922 when he was making a leisurely journey from Indonesia to Torres Strait and back. He had heard about German Harry - he was really a Dane called Henry Evolt - when he visited Thursday Island, off the northern tip of Australia. He was so intrigued by what he learned that he resolved to pay Harry a visit.

German Harry was a hermit and the last of New Guinea's beachcombers. For almost forty years he had lived on Deliverance Island, a small cay, some thirty miles from the mouth of the Bensbach River which divides West New Guinea from the then Australian territory of Papua.

Born at Helsingfors, Denmark, in 1848 (or 1849 or 1854), he shipped before the mast as a lad of 16 and for many years sailed the oceans of the world. Coming to Newcastle, New South Wales, in the eighteen-eighties, he joined the Austrian ship Gibraud bound for Batavia (now Jakarta). The ship was wrecked on Woppa Reef in the Torres Strait and German Harry finished up in Thursday Island.

There he met an old shipmate, Louis the Greek, bought a half-share in his beche-de-mer boat, and fished and traded off the New Guinea coast for the next six years. The partnership prospered. By 1890 they had established their headquarters in Deliverance Island, to where they could retire from the pest- and fever-ridden coast, and also be safe from the fierce Tugeri headhunters who made periodic forays along the coast from West New Guinea.

 

It was to be out of reach of wild New guinea natives such as these that German Harry and his friend Louis the Greek settled on Deliverance Island in 1890. John Earnshaw took the photograph on the Koembe River, west of Merauke, in 1927 when he spent some time with Dick Roche, a bird of paradise hunter.

 

For another nine years all went well until another adventurer came to the island to work for them. This was "Joe Austen", or Joseph Augustin de Paoli, also known as "French Joe". He was a Corsican soldier of fortune who had fought in the Crimean and Franco-Prussian Wars, had joined the Communist uprising in Paris in 1871, and had been arrested and exiled to New Caledonia. However, on the voyage to New Caledonia, he escaped from the transport at Melbourne, and from there began a wandering life in the Pacific which eventually took him to Deliverance Island.

His arrival at Deliverance Island broke up the partnership between German Harry and Louis the Greek, for one night he decamped with their boat loaded with turtle shell and other trade, and sold the lot in Thursday Island. After this bitter blow Louis the Greek drifted away and German Harry was left alone on the island.

 

This ramshackle building was German Harry's dining hut. Outside, where he cooked his meals, was a mound of turtle-flipper bones several feet high - the midden of half a life of solitary meals

 

Except for a few months spent in Thursday Island in 1912, his solitude was almost unbroken for the twenty-eight years. In later years his greatest fear was that authority might wrest him from his little island and send him to the frightening care of a home for the aged near Brisbane. He was therefore always sour and suspicious when strangers arrived at Deliverance, and it was thus that Maugham found him when he reached the island in 1922 in a lugger that he had chartered in Thursday Island to carry him across the island-studded waters of Torres Strait to the Dutch settlement of Merauke.

In writing of his encounter with the old hermit, Maugham also prophesied his end. He wrote, "And then I foresaw the end. One day a pearl fisher would land on the island and German Harry would not be waiting for him, silent and suspicious, at the water's edge. He would go up to the hut and there, lying on the bed, unrecognizable, he would see all that remained of what had once been a man."

In March 1928, some four years after Maugham's story was published, John Earnshaw and Dick Roche called at Deliverance Island. The time of their arrival was just right for them to play the final role in the German Harry story a la Maugham:

 

"German Harry" Henry Evoldt or Henrik Enevoldsen, born on 14 October 1848, his remains found on 24 March 1928
Published January 1943 in PACIFIC ISLANDS MONTHLY

 

"Deliverance Harry" Johannes Henrik Enevoldsen, born in 1854, died on 27 January 1928 which was the last date marked on his "calendar"
Published June 1946 in PACIFIC ISLANDS MONTHLY

 

I let John Earnshaw have the last word:

 

 

Indeed, German Harry's end is a story in itself.

 

 

So as not to spoil a good story, I am adding this as a postscript because the "real" German Harry was another Dane by the name of Soren Christensen (or Jep - or Jeppe - Soren Christiansen) who was a(n) (in-)famous man in North Australian waters and who lived in Australia, New Guinea and different island and died in Sydney in 1912 or 1913. A well-known Danish author, Mr. B. Rosenkilde Nielsen, wrote a book, "Danish Pioneers in the Pacific Ocean" which was published in Copenhagen in 1944 (in Danish, of course). In it he mentions both German Harries, Maugham's "Deliverance Harry" who died on his island in 1928, and the "German Harry" who died in Sydney in 1912 or 1913. A Swedish book about the latter, "The Last South Sea Trader" (Swedish title "Den Sidste Sydhavstrader"), was mentioned to me by Patrick Lindahl in 2013 - click here. A blog about the "real" German Harry, Soren Christensen, may be the story for another blog for another day.

 

In Search of Michael Rockefeller

You may also want to watch this version

 

The mysterious disappearance of Michael Rockefeller in New Guinea in 1961 has kept the world and his powerful, influential family guessing for years.

The 23-year old, along with the Dutch anthropologist René Wessing and two young guides, were sailing in a dugout catamaran some three miles from the coast of Asmat. The craft overturned; the two locals swam for help, but as the wreck drifted farther from land an impatient Rockefeller decided to try and make it alone. With two fuel cans to help his buoyancy on what he reckoned would be a twenty-hour swim, he slid into the warm shallows of the Arafura Sea - never to be seen by friends or family again. Did he drown? Was he eaten by a shark? Did he vanish into the jungle, Kurtz-like? Or was he the victim of cannibalism at the hands of coastal villagers? Despite exhaustive searches, no trace of Rockefeller was ever found and his death was officially ruled a drowning. Yet doubts lingered. Sensational rumors and stories circulated, fuelling speculation and intrigue for decades. The real story has long waited to be told—until now.

As reported in the Pacific Islands Monthly of December 1961:

 

As reported in The Bulletion of December 1961:

 

Now, Carl Hoffman uncovers startling new evidence that finally tells the full, astonishing story. Retracing Rockefeller's steps, award-winning journalist Carl Hoffman traveled to the jungles of New Guinea, immersing himself in a world of headhunters and cannibals, secret spirits and customs, and getting to know generations of Asmat. Through exhaustive archival research, he uncovered never-before-seen original documents and located witnesses willing to speak publically after fifty years.

Carl Hoffman is also the author of "The Last Wild Men of Borneo: A True Story of Death and Treasure" and "The Lunatic Express: Discovering the World via Its Most Dangerous Buses, Boats, Trains, and Planes".
Further details of book cover
The Asmat of New Guinea
An article by the author in the magazine of the Smithsonian Institute

 

In "Savage Harvest" he finally solves this decades-old mystery and illuminates a culture transformed by years of colonial rule, whose people continue to be shaped by ancient customs and lore. Combining history, art, colonialism, adventure, and ethnography, "Savage Harvest" is a mesmerizing whodunit, and a fascinating portrait of the clash between two civilizations that resulted in one of America's richest and most powerful scions being eaten by cannibals. In that place and at that time, "We’d love to have you over for dinner" took on a whole new meaning.

Despite this book, speculations continue as evidenced by these articles in the New York Post and Daily Mail and as recently as September 2018.

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