Tom M. Wilson

In case you don’t know him, Robert Louis Stevenson was a Scottish writer from the nineteenth century who wrote many poems, travel books and novels, including Treasure Island. He loved language, and his poetic turn of phrase is obvious even in his fiction. He also loved adventure, and this combination of a love of language and adventure made his books quite popular in their time. He travelled to beautiful places in France and America in a time when a British gentleman travelled in style, and there were some very stylish places to travel to. Travel was also a more serious undertaking in those days; as he writes on chartering a ship accross the Pacific: the vessel ‘ploughed her path of snow accross the empty deep, far from any hand of help’.

Stevenson was a small man with a big nose, and long dark hair. At the age of forty or so Stevenson moved with his wife and her children to Upolu, the main island of Samoa, just up the hill from where I’m writing now. He built a lovely white, wooden-boarded, two-story house next to a steep hill which overlooks Apia. He had health problems throughout his life, and he died in this house four years later. The house has in the last ten years or so been restored to more or less how it looked when the family lived in it over a hundred years ago. Walking through it you could imagine blinking and having Robert or Fanny stroll into the room to proffer a gin or a port, depending on the hour of the evening. I have to admit that I appreciated the light elegance of the stylish English nineteenth century after being in the chaotic downtown Apia just down the road.

In some parts of this island there really is a Treasure Island aesthetic. Look for yourself.

On the south side of the island there are secret coves which could be approached over the fringing reef, beneath billowing cumulus clouds.

Here I and a couple of friends found an ocean trench, a deep hole in the ground close to the shoreline into which the ocean ebbs and flows under the ground through caves and tunnels.

This open roofed cave is like a ten metre deep and thirty metre wide natural bath tub, with a sandy bottom beneath a couple of metres of fresh sea water. After climbing down a ladder into the water, with a slightly cooler temperature, ferns hanging off the dark rock walls, one’s voice bouncing off the surfaces with an errie echo, and then having a couple of errant coconuts bobbing by in the lambent blue twilight, I truly felt like a character out of an R. L. Stevenson novel. This would have to be my best moment so far in Samoa, and it was a moment when I said to myself ‘no wonder Stevenson settled on this island for the last few years of his life.’

This is the man’s study, on the second story of his house, surrounded by a spacious verandah over which refreshing sea breezes would flow to cool the brow of a toiling scribbler.

Doesn’t Upolu’s southern coast just look like a scene out of a pirate-festooned book or film?

This is the room of Austin, the son of Fanny, Stevenson’s wife. Stevenson’s fiction is adept at imaginatively performing the struggle for survival in the wilds of nature, and maybe in this way it speaks to that aspect of the young adventurer inside of many men. On the little mountain besides the house the man is buried and on his tomb reads the inscription: ‘Home is the sailor, home from the sea/ And the hunter home from the hill.’

Young boys have this spirit of adventure in nature - I know I did - and in this way I found Austin’s bedroom to be, ironically, the most R. L. Stevenson room of any room in the house.

Samoa is made up of two main islands, Upolu and Savaii (you pronounce Savaii like you pronounce Hawaii). Upolu is where the capital is, and where most people live. It is about 70 kms from east to west, and about 30 kms wide. The islands have some rare wood pigeons and flying foxes, and plenty of species of native rainforest trees still growing up in the mountains. The pigeons act as the dispersal agents for the seeds of some of these rainforest trees, so if the pigeons go (and they are hunted for food), the trees will go. If the trees go the pigeons will lose their nesting places and food sources, so they will go.

Although this island has green everywhere you look, nature does have some troubles. The four pictures below (from Samoa: Mapping the Diversity, R. Gerard Ward and Paul Ashcroft, Suva: University of the South Pacific 1998) show how much forest has been chopped down in the last fifty or so years. The centre of both the islands is full of mountains, and it is for this reason that the forest remains in the centre of the islands. These uplands have a much higher rainfall, lower hours of sunshine and temperature, steeper slopes and poorer soils than the lowlands. So like many places in the world, nature hangs out and hangs on where the ground is too steep for humans to grow stuff on it.

The two pictures below are of the main island - home to the capital and where most Samoans live. Witness the even greater change between the fifties and the eighties on Upolu.

From the mid 1950s to the late 1980s the amount of forest on Samoa went from 74 per cent of its land area to 55 per cent. Before Europeans arrived here the population was stable and forest regeneration was allowed to happen as they moved their root crops from one area to another. Then along come the white folks…

The Germans and then the Kiwis encouraged the expansion of cash crop production: coconuts, cocoa and bananas. This combined with the clearing places on the edge of the forest to plant taro, and a rising population from the 1920s onwards, saw the forest retreat. New roads now aided the clearing of the land for agriculture. The high rate of clearing slumped a little when there was a collapse in the export trade of bananas in the 1960s. But then by the 1970s there were Samoans living in New Zealand and Samoa started exporting taro for their taste preferences overseas, and this continued the high rate of clearing. The introduction of the Taro Leaf Blight in 1993 destroyed this export trade, and some former taro growing land has regenerated.

Then there was the change in tenure practices. Land was traditionally controlled through the title of the matai (chief), but more and more people have tried to control land as individuals. The act of clearing a bit of land traditionally gave you ownership of it, so people have tried to clear land to get land for themselves.

So on Samoa in the late 1980s forest loss was 2 per cent per year - about the same rate as the loss of tropical rainforests worldwide. Unlike other parts of the world, only a small amount of this loss comes from logging for timber. There has been some, but by 1992 only 14 per cent of the primary forest on Savaii was suitable for logging, and there was none left on Upolu.

So you have to hand it to the champions of Western civilization. Sure there are some sealed roads on the island now, and some hydro-generated electricity, both good things. But the West can be proud at having brought Samoa export trades and a dash of selfish individualism which in combination have gradually skinned the lowlands of their nation. I was hoping to be able to walk around some flat, lowland rainforest with big old trees, but that isn’t too easy nowadays.

I’ve now been on Samoa for four days. Samoa consists of a couple of small islands in the South Pacific, not far south of the equator, and about 180 thousand Samoans. I’ve been staying with a friend who is working for an aid program of the Australian government, Ausaid, in the capital, Apia.

This place is really a land unto its own. Despite having had a New Zealand administration from 1914 to the sixties, English is not understood by everybody, and Samoan is most assuredly the language of the land. ‘Saaa Moa’…. pronounce it that way, and do so with a deep voice and an air of brusque finality and you’ll sound like an insider. My lips had been cracked and almost bleeding from the dry, cold air of New Zealand, but within minutes of stepping out of the plane they felt ok again and rehydrated. The air is sopping with humidity here and the temperature is always in the high twenties. Apia is a small town for a capital, and the place has a dilapidated air, perhaps prematurely aged from the tropical conditions. Faded Coke signs are here and there, and taxis crawl down the high street. Leaving uncharasmatic Apia, you head into the suburbs, which here are just villages which join up on the edges. Lots of space and virulent greenery. Except in the middle of town there are no pavements, and the seemingly blithe indifference shown by the motley strollers to oncoming traffic is surprising. School boys walk along wearing skirts, which all the men wear here. Older men are generally fat, except if they are playing sport, in which case they are very athletic. The taro, chicken, pork, cream and Vailima (the local beer), with no shortage of deep fried options, is the die (not to forget the great tropical fruit everywhere growing), and beyond bok choy greens are a rarity. As you pass around where I’m staying there are hedges, stray dogs, lots of churches, breadfruit, mango and papaya trees. The men generally seem to be quite macho, and the way that you communicate here seems to be, well for the men, speaking in short bursts and deep tones in a way which is subconsciously perhaps intended to express their control of the situation.

I’m sleeping under my tripod with a mosquito net I brought with me draped over the top of it - National Geographic journalists on location eat your heart out! I have yet to have the courage to do much photography of the people here, but that will come. For the time being here are three photos of the island. This is the real Samoa as far as I’m concerned anyway, not Apia. I have a mobile number here also: 7582361 (you’ll have to find Samoa’s area code also).

The south side of the main island, Upolu, looking eastwards.

Everybody wears colourful shirts with flowers on them… perhaps this kind of thing was the inspiration.

There is only one road that crosses the centre of the island. Here I stand looking southwards. Lots more photos to come!