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forbes : unconducted wanderers,
1919
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Rosita Forbes : Unconducted
Wanderers, 1919.
Extract
from
Forbes, Rosita: Unconducted Wanderers.
John Lane, the Bodley
Head, London, 1919, pages 16-17.
Introduction.
Notes from:
The Pacific: An exhibition of material
from the Monash University Library Rare Books Collection.
27 September 2007- 29 February 2008
Exhibition room, level 1, ISB Wing, Sir
Louis Matheson Library, Clayton campus.
http://www.lib.monash.edu.au/exhibitions/pacific/pacific-catalogue.pdf
60. Forbes, Rosita,
(1890-1967)
Unconducted wanderers
by Rosita Forbes. (London: John Lane, 1919)
Rosita Forbes,
an Englishwoman, born in Lincoln, was "a bold and successful traveller"
(DNB).
Unconducted Wanderers
was her first book.
It deals with
her journey though the Pacific to Asia, with long descriptions of the islands,
especially Hawaii. Her later reputation rests however on her exploits in
the Arab countries of North Africa and the Near East. Her first impressions
of Hawaii, Honolulu on the island of Oahu, are captured atmospherically.
Pages 16-17
There were magnolias
in bloom and fig-trees, and only a hedge of scarlet hibiscus separated
us from the far-famed Waikiki beach where brown Hawaiian boys came flying
in on their surf-boards -bronze statues upright upon the breakers, kings
of the whirling surf, foam-crowned!
It was quite
a different effect whenever we tried to do it.
With fiendish
ingenuity, our surf-boards used to turn over, deposit us on a particularly
vicious coral rock, deliver several sharp blows to the head as we tried
to rise from underneath them and float triumphantly away, leaving us puffing
and panting a quarter of a mile from shore.
... But, oh,
the joy when first one mastered the intricacies of the surf-board and came
sweeping shorewards at the speed of an express train, on the very edge
of a wave, tilted a little forward with the foam whirling right and left
before one.
The population
of Honolulu is amphibious.
It wanders about
in bathing kit, generally a la Annette Kellerman, at all hours and in all
places - on foot in the hotel gardens, in cars along the big avenues, cloakless
and undisguised and burnt a beautiful, dark copper brown.
Forbes, Rosita: Unconducted
Wanderers.
John Lane, London,
1919, pages 16-17.
surfresearch.com.au
Geoff Cater (2007) : Rosita Forbes
: Unconducted Wanderers, 1919.
http://www.surfresearch.com.au/1919_Forbes_Wanderers_Waikiki.html