Gothic Moods and Colonial Night Guests: Beatrice Grimshaw’s Writings on Fiji

Abstract

In 1904, Beatrice Grimshaw travelled to the Pacific islands, documenting her tour of Fiji in a book-length travel narrative, From Fiji to the Cannibal Islands (1907) (subsequently re-published as Fiji and its Possibilities [1907]). Her book makes scant reference to indentured Indian labour and focuses instead on the amiable Fijian as reformed cannibal. The point of this essay is that the Australian literary tradition must be read with clear-sighted and unflinching appraisal of its unsavoury elements (and Grimshaw’s blatant racism provides an example of such) as much as it lauds its achievements. To do so offers a way forward for Australian literature as it navigates a tradition of denial and silence on key aspects of its colonial past.

In the pitch dark, we forded a river, allowing the horse to find his own way in and out, and at last came up to a five-foot high palisade of thick bamboos, surrounding a cluster of dim, tall objects that looked more like haystacks than anything else. My men lowered the bars of a gate, and I rode into the village. All was dark and silent, but the men soon routed out the inhabitants of the biggest house, ran and looked for a light, and succeeded in finding a ship’s lantern. This they lit, and then proceeded unceremoniously to take possession of the house, lighting a fire in the small square fire-pit near the door, “shooing” the sleepers out from under their mats on the floor, and depositing my various packages in convenient places. The inhabitants took this quite as a matter of course, merely asking (or so I judged), who the marvellous apparition might be, and then squatting down outside the doorways to stare their fill, in stolid amazement.

Beatrice Grimshaw, From Fiji to the Cannibal Islands (London: Eveleigh Nash, 1904), 41.