Fishing with Flowers

The Shortland Islands, Solomon Islands

I was visiting friends from theological days who now lived in the Shortland Islands. The friends were mixed race couple: Peter, the father, like me, once a would be parson, had moved to paradise a little earlier than he had originally planned. He was an Australian and Blandine, his wife, originally from Bougainville: the island to the north.

            There was not much to do at their delightful tropical paradise but relax. Peter suggested I pass the time till he came back by doing a spot of fishing.

I went out but despite trying as hard as I could, which meant throwing something at the water and hoping that something might bight, nothing happened. I sought out Peter and complained that I had no luck. He simply laughed.

‘I’ll have to fix you up with some of my magic potions to catch fish,’ he said and I thought he was joking. ‘Let’s leave it till tomorrow, mate.’

Next day, he made a garland of leaves and draped it ceremoniously round my neck. He mumbled a few words while I looked at him trying not to crack a smile. I knew he had been in the Solomons for about a thousand years, but he was still sane, wasn’t he?

I looked at the garland. I looked at him. I frowned.

‘See,’ he said. ‘I still have the magic touch I learned in college. Mumbo jumbo lives! The difference it, this works: the stuff we went through in theological days does not.’

I glared at him and pretended to be offended. Wearing my garland, I pushed off in a small canoe. I threw in a line.

Imagine my shock when, only a few meters from the shore, a school of the biggest mullet I had ever seen began leaping out of the water, almost as if they were lemmings. I laughed in delight and shouted out to Peter who was watching from the shore and drinking a cold beer.

‘You beauty! It’s working!’

As I shouted, one of the fish leaped out of the water and fell into the canoe. After only twenty minutes I had enough mullet to provide hairpieces for every Melbourne teenager! I kid you not. It was amazing. I have never been a fisherman: there are not all that many fish in Mount Isa’s river. There is mot any water in that river either: perhaps there is a connection.

As for fish, on the only other occasion I had gone fishing, I had hooked several mackerel on one line: in my wife’s home island of Lewis, Scotland. I began to consider a career change but it was all far too fishy.

I stayed with Peter and Blandine for a couple of weeks and went fishing every second day. If I wore the garland I caught fish. If I did not wear it, I caught nothing. Intrigued, I asked Peter to tell me more about the flowers he used. He took me into the garden near his charming house. Actually, the house was an old World War II relic: a Quonset hut with bamboo and palm leaf embellishments forming shady nooks on all sides of the hut.

He showed me a plant with long oblate leaves striped with red. These were the leaves he had braided together to form my garland.

‘I also use these leaves to prepare the lure,’ he said and took me into a shed where he kept his fishing gear. ‘I fold another one of the leaves that I use in the garland in half and wipe it all along the fishing line from the hook upwards. ‘

He reached into a shelf and took out a beautifully crafted fishing lure.

‘What is that made of?’ I asked.

‘Pearl shell’.

I looked again at the leaves. I took one and crushed it. It had a strong pungent odor.

‘Does the smell attract the fish?’ I asked.

‘Maybe it masks the smell of the fishermen,’ he said and I looked at him askance.

He smiled and nodded.

‘Who really knows?’

He kept twirling and fiddling as he continued.

‘If I go out with my friends to fish it will take three of us to control the canoe. One does the actual fishing’. He sniffed at me and grinned. ‘If the guy trying to catch the fish has no success, we swap. More often than not, the new man will immediately catch a fish’.

‘Why?’ I asked.

‘That is the question you asked your Uncle Ian (the master of King’s Theological College) when we were trying to understand the virgin birth.’

That was before. This was now. This was the reality. We walked down to the beach. The lagoon shimmered brilliantly in the afternoon sunlight.

‘Prince Charles may talk to trees,’ he said, ‘and I don’t blame him. They are probably more responsive than the rest of the royal family’.

I looked suitably shocked.

I looked at him again. ‘Enough of the mystery, mate. Tell me why it works?’

‘I talk to the fish. I tell them who I am and that I have been coming here for years, as have my relatives. I know that I am white, but I am family here now’.

‘And do they answer you?’ I asked cheekily.

‘Yes they do,’ he said, but before I could pooh-pooh the idea, he continued. ‘I have seen whole schools of fish stop moving away from me, turn and come in my direction when I talk to them. Soon, I'm reeling them in by the dozen’.

Once again it was my turn to be skeptical but I still could not forget the effect of my own garland.

‘So the fish hear you?’

‘Not really,’ he said. ‘It is probably like the leaves. You are the one that benefits. It makes you believe you will succeed and you do’.

So, to paraphrase the famous song:

If you fish in the Solomon Islands,

Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair…

If you can’t sing it, say it…