Hormones and justice in the Pacific

Palagi Tafaovale: A wanderer in the Pacific By Bob Rankin. Photo / Supplied

Journalist, teacher, and man-about-islands Bob Rankin spent more than half a century in Samoa.

Those years are the core of this engaging memoir. We begin with a childhood of collecting mushrooms and blackbird nests in rural Drury, wartime attendance at Teachers' College with Bert Sutcliffe, and naval training on HMNZS Tamaki.

Then, after a brief career as a chimney sweep (yes, chimney sweep), the author learns Japanese and is sent as a military interpreter to serve with the occupying forces. He makes all sorts of cultural and sexual discoveries; he does a sound job; he reads like a thoroughly good-hearted and red-blooded young chap. Then it's off to teaching in Samoa, where he meets gorgeous Sophia with the red hibiscus in her hair, and begins a varied career path as photographer, painter-screen-printer, maker of wines and soap (separately, I hasten to add).

He publishes stories of dogs fighting over a severed arm on the lawn; takes spectacular photos of the British H-Bomb test on Christmas Island. He has 50 excellent years of marriage, and fathers a handsome family. It's a narrative with a lot of laddish pranks, laddish anecdotes and laddish hormones.

It also displays an impressive compassion for victims on all sides, and a firm sense of justice. Rankin neatly conveys the intricate, almost infinite delicacies and manoeuvrings of trying to reconcile Pasifika and European ways.

He tells the distressing story of a young man who suffers from palagi justice; is appropriately severe on the Muldoon government's discriminatory attitude and the "corruption of so many Third World politicians". There's a useful mini-summary of Samoan political problems.

Like many memoirs, it goes at the same pace all the way through and isn't terribly good at knowing what to leave out. But Bob Rankin tells a strong, accessible story, and has an eye and an ear for the quirks of language.

Another nice clean production by Steele Roberts.

Palagi Tafaovale: A wanderer in the Pacific
By Bob Rankin (Steele Roberts $30)

* David Hill is a Taranaki writer.