We set off this morning at about 6.30am from Canberra and had a nice flight here. Derek Freeman saw us off and gave Mungo a rattle.

Mungo’s been nice. We had a spring roll between us this morning and he slept like a log on the bus out to the airport from town. I kept dozing off myself and nearly dropping him. People here are nearly all Australian as opposed to New Australian though I met some New Australians in Paddington. At one point I was longing for a lavatory and rushed into a baby shop. To be a little less direct I asked for somewhere to change the baby. The two ? Italian ladies were delighted and produced a piece of brown paper for me to do it on the counter which I did cursing inwardly a) because he didn’t need changing and I only had one nappy b) I still didn’t have a lavatory. Finally I sneaked into the Town Hall and took advantage of the facilities there.

I am struck by how English I am here bur after all I’d only been in Australia for three months. My language! I haven’t said lavatory for over fifty years and as for ‘Australian as opposed to New Australian’ How strange that sanitised notion is now. I find it slightly unsettling to think I was ever anything but Australian now.

One notices Hotels here – rather lugubrious and austere places – all male.

Paddington was very pretty in the sun – very hilly too so that the terraced houses mounted one behind the other up the hill.

Now we are waiting in the airport ready to head for the Fiji plane.

Fiji, 28th March, 1972

I’ve just completed a perambulation around the Motel Gateway to lull Mungo to sleep. He behaved very well during the flight from Sydney though he didn’t sleep but kept up a string of antics and laughs all the way. Now it is hot and steamy and there are lots of little frogs in the grass of the motel.

We had a day in Fiji before catching the plane to Tahiti.

March 29th Tahiti

We had a good flight last night with Mungo sleeping all the way. He never woke, even on take off. It was weird getting on to the plane because there was a huge jumbo jet parked alongside our UTA plane making a fearful noise revving up. We scuttled up our steps and inside where we settled down and wrapped ourselves in little rugs. We flew up and over lots of little scudding clouds with a full moon. We had quarter bottles of wine and some rather inferior sandwiches and slept for a couple of hours. The flight took four and half hours so that we arrived at six am. It was a very spectacular entry that we made into Papeete. Suddenly a black jagged shape appeared to my left. I suddenly realised how low we were because it was an offshore island of Tahiti. Then we came down lower and lower over the sea until we just hit the airstrip and landed. Grant lost his glasses and found them again.

At the airport I had a great sense of exhilaration. It was warm and breezy and the sun had only just come up. The airport seemed to be full of marvellous people – middle aged ladies in beautiful hats and girls with long stiff hair and flowers and brown skins. A party from the plane was being met as we went through the passport check. The meters had leis slung over their arms and each person gave each person off the plane one so that they ended up with piles of flowers round their necks. The flowers smelled very sweet and the people kissed each other and laughed and talked and finally a photo was taken and they all went away and a girl came up to sweep up petals from the airport floor.

We had a nice surprise here. Apparently the airline is obliged to pay for the hotel and food of transit passengers and they do it in style too. We are in the Maeve Hotel on a beach. It is very modern and comfortable and has only the vice of playing supermarket music softly over loudspeakers.

This afternoon we had a sumptuous lunch and it pelted with rain as it did on Fiji. Everywhere here is covered with brilliant flowers – hibiscus and bougainvillea flowers and many more I don’t know the names of. Afterwards Mungo and I played on the beach and we went into Papeete. I was a bit disappointed in it in a way. It could almost have been a French town, even down to the baby shops. Only the market had a hint of Tahiti in its fruits and avocado pears.

We visited Bengt Danielson who was on the Kon Tiki. He lives with his wife in a real Polynesian house – one of the most beautiful houses I could imagine in a gorgeous setting. You drive in and there are ancient looking trees and the black island out in the sea. You cross a little bridge and there’s a thatched hut all open with warm breezes flowing through. He came out to meet us and wore a blue printed sarong. He and Grant talked and I talked to Marie Therese, his wife. She showed me their family albums. They have a twenty year old daughter and an adopted son of twelve whose mother was their maid, I think.

The Danielsons were very kind to us throughout our stay on Easter Island and sent little luxuries to us from time to time. Chocolate and an electric hotplate to replace the Chilean one that nearly electrocuted me.

We are both a bit tense about what tomorrow will bring. This comfortable hotel gives us no sense of preparing for Easter Island at all.

March 30th, On the way to Easter Island

Julia and Mungo on the flight to Rapanui, 1972.

There are 70 people on board and Mungo is sleeping. The plane is bumping a bit and I saw a flash of lightning out of the window. I hope we don’t crash. The fasten your seat belt sign is on. We are all three very smelly after a hot day in Tahiti. And I accidentally put the Mung to sleep on a wet disposable nappy so he smells of urine. Ah well.

Grant and I had been married for about a year and had been parents to Mungo for eight months. He’d been born in London and we’d got married so that I too could be funded to go with Grant to the Australian National University in Canberra, Australia where he was to do a doctorate in Anthropology. We set off to do fieldwork after about three months in Canberra. I took just eight nappies. I can’t imagine how I thought I’d manage.

He wanted to study the culture of Easter Island, (also called Rapanui and Isla de Pascua). The island, now a part of Chile, has a fascinating and tragic history. Its original Polynesian population was reduced to 111 souls in 1874 because of slave trading raids and the diseases brought on the ships they came in. Also two groups of islanders set off for Magareva and Tahiti at this time.

Grant first wanted to know how much of the original culture had survived. Many popular books have sensationalized the mystery that surrounds the strange and solemn statues that are both scattered around the island, and left, half finished, in the volcanic quarry where they were carved. There are no stories to account for this state of affairs and nobody has yet deciphered the wooden tablets known as rongo rongo boards of which hardly any now exist. Grant was not interested in solving any particular mysteries but he wanted to know how completely knowledge of the past had disappeared, and what the islanders had done to fill the void created by the absence of traditional knowledge and customs.

Studies had been done in the Caribbean to see what the human beings did there when torn from their African homelands. What took the place of what had been lost? Would Easter Island’s situation throw any light on what humans do when deprived of their cultural framework?

After we had been on the island a while, I asked Grant what business of ours it was to poke into the lives of the islanders. What was the purpose of anthropology anyway? I think I was a bit irritated and homesick at the time. But his answer pleased me. He said the purpose was to tell the story of people who couldn’t tell it themselves because it didn’t seem like a story to them. It was “normality”. Systematic data collection, particularly genealogical, tells its own story which is usually of immense interest to the subjects of the research themselves. In fact, over the years, many islanders have sought out details of their genealogies from Grant who rounded up all known Rapanui, living and dead, from parish records and other sources together with the stories that attached to them.

I had my plans too. I wanted to gather native plants and find out about their medicinal uses and also see what child raising practices were. Being a relatively new mother myself I hope that perhaps thought I might learn a thing or two and it turned out people were all too ready to teach me. I had also been asked to learn and record string figures or cats’ cradles if they were still known by anyone on the island as these were often found in the Pacific region.

The journal was to be a data record – the people I met, the things I saw and so on. In the event it was much more than that to me. As Ann Frank’s diary was to her, it became my friend and confidante. I have edited bits that are boring but the bulk of the text is as it was written even when incidents do me or Grant no credit.. I sometimes comment on these from the point of view of the eighty old woman I am now. Sometimes I forgive my younger self and sometimes I don’t.

One issue I have had is whether to give people their real names. Since nearly fifty years have passed since I wrote these diaries, most of the principal characters have died and even the naughty children are now middle aged. It seems worth using the names as I learnt them for history’s sake.

The diaries often show Grant in a rather bad light, especially in our domestic context, but he was happy with that. It’s the way it was and if the diaries were his I’m sure I wouldn’t come off so well myself.