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forbes : unconducted wanderers, 1919

Rosita Forbes : Unconducted Wanderers, 1919.

Extract from
Forbes, Rosita: Unconducted Wanderers.
John Lane, the Bodley Head, London, 1919, pages 16-17.

Introduction.
Notes from:
The Pacific: An exhibition of material from the Monash University Library Rare Books Collection.
27 September 2007- 29 February 2008
Exhibition room, level 1, ISB Wing, Sir Louis Matheson Library, Clayton campus.
http://www.lib.monash.edu.au/exhibitions/pacific/pacific-catalogue.pdf

60. Forbes, Rosita, (1890-1967)
Unconducted wanderers by Rosita Forbes. (London: John Lane, 1919)
Rosita Forbes, an Englishwoman, born in Lincoln, was "a bold and successful traveller" (DNB).
Unconducted Wanderers was her first book.
It deals with her journey though the Pacific to Asia, with long descriptions of the islands, especially Hawaii. Her later reputation rests however on her exploits in the Arab countries of North Africa and the Near East. Her first impressions of Hawaii, Honolulu on the island of Oahu, are captured atmospherically.

Pages 16-17

There were magnolias in bloom and fig-trees, and only a hedge of scarlet hibiscus separated us from the far-famed Waikiki beach where brown Hawaiian boys came flying in on their surf-boards -bronze statues upright upon the breakers, kings of the whirling surf, foam-crowned!
It was quite a different effect whenever we tried to do it.
With fiendish ingenuity, our surf-boards used to turn over, deposit us on a particularly vicious coral rock, deliver several sharp blows to the head as we tried to rise from underneath them and float triumphantly away, leaving us puffing and panting a quarter of a mile from shore.
... But, oh, the joy when first one mastered the intricacies of the surf-board and came sweeping shorewards at the speed of an express train, on the very edge of a wave, tilted a little forward with the foam whirling right and left before one.

The population of Honolulu is amphibious.
It wanders about in bathing kit, generally a la Annette Kellerman, at all hours and in all places - on foot in the hotel gardens, in cars along the big avenues, cloakless and undisguised and burnt a beautiful, dark copper brown.

Forbes, Rosita: Unconducted Wanderers.
John Lane, London, 1919, pages 16-17.

surfresearch.com.au

Geoff Cater (2007-2016) : Rosita Forbes : Unconducted Wanderers, 1919.
http://www.surfresearch.com.au/1919_Forbes_Wanderers_Waikiki.html