Prologue: eight nappies and pursuing a doctorate

I was doing a cull of my books recently when I came across three fat foolscap hardbound notebooks of mine from long ago. Written on the cover of the first one was Journal 1972 Easter Island. I would have been twenty-six years old then. I began to read. Quickly I became engrossed and a little disturbed. My eighty year old self was looking over the shoulder of the young wife and mother I was then, and so much was a bit appalling.

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.