Author(s): Chris Crump

Captain Cook & Pacific Exploration | Secondhand

Chris Crump was a Presbyterian missionary's wife in the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu) between 1938 and 1956. Her fascinating account of those years is not one of piety and conversion, but about the daily business of living and working among local people and a handful of expatriate Europeans, in what was then a remote part of the world. She observes island customs and her own reactions to the tropics with wry humour. She is housewife, mother, nurse, dentist, teacher, launch hand, radio operator, her husband's confessor and many other roles besides. She describes a vocation that was practical as well as pastoral, where as well as delivering sermons, the local missionary was the primary giver of medical and dental care, who kept the local school going and developed local infrastructure such as water supplies and sanitation.