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Married to Melanesia (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R2,680
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Married to Melanesia (Hardcover)
Series: Routledge Library Editions: Marriage
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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'We were married after three years at opposite ends of the
world.... We then, too rapidly for comfort, made off in a snowstorm
for the South Seas.... All this we imprudently did in our late
forties.' Thus Muriel Jones introduces her account, originally
published in 1974, of how she came to start her married life in the
Solomon Islands, 'whose impact was traumatic, perhaps just because
we were not in our first youth or innocent of other tropical
experience'. 'St Peter's College was the only thing at Siota';
there was no store and the only post office on the island 'was so
difficult of access that I never visited it ... we ourselves did
most of the postal business - quite informally - at our end of the
island'. It is not surprising that even high-ranking visitors
tended to arrive looking like ship-wrecked sailors. 'If one was ill
enough to see a doctor one was, on the whole, too ill to be
subjected to several hours of sun or rain in an open boat and a
probable night en route.' There is, too, the account of the old
lady whose family, on her death, wanted to bury her in a coffin
instead of the customary mat. 'Poor old lady; at the end of all
these exertions, the coffin with her in it stood in the church for
the funeral, uneasily supported on two rickety small tables from
our sitting room, mutely exhorting us to STOW AWAY FROM BOILERS.'
Muriel Jones tells the unusual story of her five Melanesian years,
of the impact of Christianity on a pagan people, of her husband's
college and its move to another island, of the students, the
islands and their animals and exotic vegetation, of the islanders
(nine-tenths of whom live in communities ranging from twenty to two
hundred people) and of their changing way of life. Her story takes
one about as far as it is possible to go from an urban civilisation
and in telling it she reveals the resources of her own character.
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