SI Joondalup – SI Joondalup Soroptimist Visits Tahiti – Oct 2011

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You had to be there…!

Be where?… Papeete, in Tahiti, and if you consult the map it is midway between the east coast of Australia and the west coast of South America. I was ‘suffering’ from the tropical climate and a large newly diagnosed gall stone. My husband and I had visited the market, seen the amazing heliconia and ginger flowers and really needed a place to sit down… then I turned a corner and there is was…a SI donated seat in Bougainville Park. We are all familiar with the hardy and beautiful displays of the bougainvillia genus (South American). In his progress across the Pacific, Bougainville was deterred by some reefs (Cook later ‘found’ the Great Barrier Reef) and steered north, found the Solomons and named Bougainville Island for himself.

My French is non-existent but my husband suggested it said, ‘Peace starts here’. I assume this relates to the nuclear tests at Mururoa and Fangataufa Atolls, and the associated riots during the 1960s. It was certainly a lovely spot, with a running stream and a pool just behind the seat. The park is across the road from the main wharf and the Sun Princess with thousands of tourists was docked.

Louis de Bougainville, the first French navigator to circle the world, was a contemporary of Captain James Cook and but for different tides and coral reefs, Australia might have been discovered by him and my French might now be 100% better than it is. In 1771 he published the log of his expedition to Argentina, Patagonia, Tahiti and Batavia (Indonesia). He was a celebrity of his day and the book, sensational – went might say – it went viral (well as much as it could when majority of the French were illiterate). His description of Tahiti and the life he observed there: ‘an earthly paradise where men and women lived in blissful innocence’ impacted the philosophers of the day – Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and the author Denis Diderot who aimed to criticise contemporary European ways of living and thinking. The concept of the ‘noble savage’ was generated here (a concept the artist, Paul Gauguin later searched for).

The trip we had returned from was aboard a cargo passenger ship, the Aranui III, to the Masquesas Islands, which were settled around 500 BC by Lapita navigators from Taiwan… but that is another story. My apologies to the SI Papeete club members, for not contacting them, but thank you so much for the seat in the park, where I watched a local elderly woman beating out the some traditional tapa cloth – a rare sight in modern Tahiti.

Interesting web sites: just Google – heliconia flowers, ginger flowers, bougainvillia flowers. The colours are amazing in the tropics and mora and tiari are highly fragrant great for making ‘lei’ and ‘hei’ (floral crowns); Marquesas Islands, Paul Gauguin, tapa, Lapita – you get the idea!

Ailsa Rothenbury
SI Joondalup
October. 2011