By Peter Cole. My four months on Tanna could fill another book by itself.  It was a lifestyle like nothing I had experienced before, or after for that matter. Bob (Paul)’s wife Kath was a delightful person; she loved everything English. She spoke good French with a strong English accent. We got on well, as I did with Bob. The more you got to know this couple the more amazing they were. Their children were all home; the youngest two, Brett and Gail, were still at school, Robin had just left school and Russ (Russell) had left a few years earlier.

We all got on well. Robin had an old bitza motorbike, based on an old BSA. It hardly went, and was very dilapidated, but he kept it going with the help of Bob’s Fijian mechanic, Manu.

Their house was a large, rambling wooden building, with wooden pushout shutters, polished floors and high ceilings. The veranda’s were all built in. Ken (Rasua) and I had a room each on the south side of the house, in the enclosed veranda. It was cosy and comfortable.

The kitchen was a wooden structure with an iron roof, which had been tacked on many years earlier. It was on its last legs; old and shaky. The bathroom was inside the house.

We studied the plans for the new building. We were going to build the new one alongside the old kitchen, and pull the old kitchen down when it was complete.

We levelled the new site, set up the profiles and got the boys digging the footings. Then Bob told me to jump in the Land Rover – of which he had several – and we drove out to somewhere where there were a couple of houses. He pointed into the bushes. I was a bit confused; what was I looking at? We ripped away some of the bush and inside there was a very old and battered cement mixer! It had been abandoned years ago by a builder. We dragged it out and towed it back to the house on its steel wheels.

Bob said to try and get it going. The engine was an old Australian made Ronaldson Tippet.  I had never heard of it before, but I stripped off the head and got it all turning, and gave it a valve grind. Manu found a new spark plug that was the same size. We put it all back together and, after a few cranks, it coughed and spluttered. A bit more tickling and it fired up. It was a big surprise. Only trouble was that it would race – the brass carbie was worn on the butterfly shaft – and sucked too much air. I fixed it with some chewing gum, and after that it gave sterling service throughout the job!

After a week, Bob told us our bikes were on the next flight. He was the Airline agent in Tanna, so when he went up to the airstrip, Ken and I jumped in. Bob told Robin to get in too, and we all went up to the strip to meet the plane. There were only two passengers, plus our bikes. We helped unload the bikes. Ken was very excited; his bike was blue, mine was yellow. Then Bob wheeled out a red 100cc Honda, and called Robin to help him. “This one is yours,” he said. Robin was beside himself.  It was second hand, but looked great.

After the plane took off we raced down the airstrip and back, then rode back to the house.

That weekend we all raced over the island to Yusur Volcano. There was a huge ash plain around the base of this very active volcano, great for riding. Brett took the old bitza and followed; it was slow, but still managed the trip.

Ken and I climbed to the rim of the volcano; it took an hour to get up, on foot! It was an awesome sight; rumbling and spitting rocks and lava about every twenty minutes. There were clouds of sulphur puffing through vents on the inside of the crater, and it was very smelly. It was actually a blowhole – the lava pool was deep in the ground and couldn’t be seen – but the constant activity was not disappointing. This is the closest I had ever been to an active volcano, and it was as close as I wanted to be!!

We went to the ash plain most weekends to ride our bikes. One weekend we had a Volcano Party; we all climbed to the rim in the evening carrying our wine and beer then we sat on the rim watching the fireworks in the dark while we had a drink. Another unforgettable experience.

Life in the house was very formal; for example, we dressed for dinner. The Pauls’ had two house-girls and a permanent cook and kitchen-hand. Bob had a well-stocked wine cellar and the table was never shy of a couple of bottles of French or Australian wine. He was also the sole agent and importer of Glenfiddich Malt Whisky, an agency he had arranged many years ago at the Glenfiddich Distillery in Scotland when he and Kath were over there on a holiday. Burns Philp would order dozens of cases at a time and Bob got the commission. The French loved the whisky!! And there was always a tipple after dinner! Most evenings were spent playing cards – Five Hundred or Canasta – it could get very competitive and often very vocal, but they were great evenings.

In the 50’s Bob introduced coffee to Tanna, with the help of the Agriculture Department – British, not French! He set up a nursery to grow thousands of coffee trees, which he gave to the locals and helped them set up small plantations. It took a while before the berries appeared, but when they did, he would buy them. It was a cash crop every year. He bagged most of the crop, but prepared some of the beans and roasted them himself. They were very popular with the French on the island, and very popular after dinner too. While I was there, he had almost filled his warehouse with sacks of beans, so he contacted his coffee buyer in Australia, who flew out to Tanna with another Swiss buyer. They sampled the bags, all stacked neatly on racks to keep them fresh and aired. The Swiss bought them all, $40,000 worth. Kath told me later they bought a house in Turramurra, northern Sydney with that money!

I could go on and on, Bob truly was an amazing guy; never short of a funny or interesting story, and I never heard him repeat himself.

When we finished the blockwork we needed timber for the roof, so Bob told Russ to take their boat –  a 40 foot ex-Army workboat called Trudy – to Aneityum Island and pick up the timber he had ordered from the owner of a sawmill (the only one there). The owner was an expat Aussie called Artie Craft. His real name was Arthur Craft, but everyone called him Artie. He had been living on the island for decades. I went along to help.

Artie lived in Analgahut Village, on the south side of the island.

It was an overnight trip. Russ had been there before and we tied to a makeshift jetty. Artie was a rotund jovial guy – the only white man on the island – and he soon had a dozen locals loading timber onto the Trudy. While it was being loaded, we went up to his house for lunch; taro and bully beef! We chatted for a while and just before sunset we set off back to Tanna, arriving at Lenakle in the morning. We unloaded the timber and the Trudy retired to Resolution Bay, a safe anchorage. Lenakle was not safe; it was very exposed and only to be used in calm weather.

After sorting the timber we started on the roof. I was doing the plumbing in the bathroom and kitchen, a local guy was doing the plastering and another one doing the wiring. It was all go! Bob had gathered all the essential items for the bathroom; anything we didn’t have was flown down within a few days.

The Pauls had a big General Store on the property, run by Kath. The store would not be out of place on the main street of Vila. It was big and they sold everything imaginable.  It had a diesel-driven cold room and freezer where they kept meat and fish. They butchered their own cattle and purchased fish from the local fishermen. The French had a store too, but it was tiny compared to Kath’s.

It was a bit of a joke on Tanna that when the British set up a police station in the early 60’s, the French had to do the same. Then the Brits sent down a District Agent, shortly followed by a French equivalent. Next a British school, and a French one; a British Agricultural Department, then a French one, and so it went on. The only resident French on the island were the people sent down by the French government! As a result everyone on Tanna spoke English, no one spoke French, and the locals spoke pidgin (often called Bislama).

The only thing the French didn’t have was a bakery; this was Bob’s pride and joy. He had built a wood-fired oven and a local baker baked delicious bread, and baguettes for the French. The poor old French couldn’t top that one! Funny story, after a few years of constant use the oven brickwork needed repairing, so Bob ordered a 20 kilo bag of furnace cement. This duly arrived and was taken to the bakery. When the baker turned up at one o’clock in the morning, he saw the bag and, because he couldn’t read, thought it was an additive for the dough. So he opened it up and put a cupful in the mix! When Bob arrived later that morning to instruct a couple of men to repair the brickwork, he saw the bag was opened, and was horrified to hear the baker had used it in the mix.  He ran to the shop and told Kath. Luckily only a few baguettes had been sold – to the French District Agent! They pondered whether to tell him, but decided against it; he had probably eaten them already. So they just withdrew all that days bake!! He didn’t die, but probably had constipation for a day or two!

Slowly the building came together. Ken was tiling the walls, I was painting the woodwork. All the roof was tied down to the concrete walls with steel straps.  To cyclone proof the roof, the iron sheeting was fixed with double rows of roofing nails. The windows were louvres with outside shutters. It was a real fortress. We built a concrete path to the house and a covered walkway.

Earlier, on October 23rd of that year (1972) the Air Melanesiae morning flight arrived and then took off. A few hours later it had not been heard from, nor had it arrived back in Port Vila. Bob was alerted and another plane was sent down to Tanna on a search pattern. A couple of hours later a young man turned up at the store, driven in by a local man. He told Bob he was a survivor of the missing plane; it had crashed in an area known as White Sands, a large open area in the hills of north Tanna. This man was uninjured and had walked down to a village to raise the alarm. There were survivors there and injured people too. The wreck was about 20 miles to the north. Bob got on the radio and passed on the message, requesting a helicopter to evacuate the injured. He called his best drivers together and loaded three Land Rovers with food, water and blankets, and set off for the wreck. He got there before the helicopter, and helped all that he could; he made the injured comfortable and left them for the helicopter, which arrived shortly after. All the others were driven back to the airstrip where the search plane had landed. They were then returned to Vila for treatment and debriefing. It was a traumatic day, which continued into the week as crash inspectors arrived. They dismantled the wreck to return it to Vila.

What had happened was: Many of the pilots liked to fly over White Sands to see the wild horses. As a treat for the tourist passengers, some of the pilots used to chase the horses. This pilot was one of those. He was the only French pilot in the airline. He was an ex French navy pilot, with a lot of Carrier experience, but he was flying too low and got caught in a downdraft that slammed the plane into the ground. It flipped upside down.

Just before Christmas the renovations were finished. Our final job was to dismantle the old kitchen, which was done by Bob’s labourers. We cleaned up the old site which was full of huge Hermit Crabs; they were living off the scraps dropped from the kitchen! Bob invited Ken and me to stay for Christmas, which we accepted. On Boxing Day we all drove over to the other side of the island where Bob had a ‘Weekender’, it was a locally made leaf house on a secluded beach. We took a large picnic with us and had it on the beach.  It was a beautiful spot. You could dig a shallow hole on the waterline and lay in it, and the water was hot. The volcano was not far behind us, and when we heard it rumble you had to get ready to roll out because the water would scald you if it was a big rumble! Another amazing experience!!

We had a wonderful time, but all good things come to an end, and early January 1973 I flew back to Vila with my Suzuki. I stayed with my mate Bruce, for a short while, before I decided to return to Sydney.

I was not to return to the New Hebrides until 1979, which I did on my yacht Oyster Cove, but that my dear reader is yet another, ‘Another Story’.

Copyright Peter Cole 2023. All rights reserved.