How to avoid a crocodile while shopping

This is Paula’s introduction to the Solomon Islands when she started a two-year posting for the Australian Government in 2010. Follow her funny and frustrating encounters with security guards, bank clerks and missing ferries as she started her new life in Honiara, the country's capital. Nothing was straightforward. Time was an endless piece of string and crocodiles lurked around every corner. She was tempted to run away.

But then she snorkelled with manta rays and swam with reef sharks in a tropical resort, discovered that Honiara's second-hand clothing stores were dripping with designer gems and made a truckload of new friends—including Constantine, a betel-chewing basket dealer and man full of surprises!

The Solomon Islands took Paula far beyond her comfort zone, but offered unforeseen bounties. She returned to Australia lugging a pile of designer clothes and love for a country that had changed her forever.

I am standing in a crowded store with my back pressed against a rack of faded tropical shirts. My hair and clothes are clammy with sweat. People are jostling with their elbows, while I’m oblivious, focused on a row of dresses on the far wall. They’re tempting, but out of reach— my way is blocked by an untidy pile of kaleko (clothing) on the floor. Women are sitting cross-legged around it and rifling through the rags, then throwing their rejects back onto a spreading pile. Their pikaninnies (children) are sitting alongside. Some are joining in the work at hand while others are plainly bored, crying or begging to go home.

We’re in ‘Island Clothing’, a busy emporium on Honiara’s main street. It’s no fashion boutique, more like a thrift shop where bales of secondhand clothes arrive weekly to be sold rapidly to an eager clientele. When I first arrived in Honiara women told me stories of the designer outfits they’d picked up for a song at one of these shops. Some were brand new, with their labels still attached. Of course such finds are always buried amongst the old and tired clothes you’d expect to find in second-hand stores. The quality garments in amongst the dross are a fossicker’s delight and here I am fossicking away.

The place is packed with people since new bales arrived today— parcels of tightly-packed garments that spring open with a musty pong. Long skirts, jeans and overalls are crammed along nearby walls and a low rack of blouses splashes colour through the centre of the room. It’s steaming under the tin roof. An attendant sweeps a broom across the grubby floor, then a hand across his forehead and the room hums with languid energy—but I’m stranded in a scrum of women, with no hope of reaching those enticing frocks.

It’s 2011 and I’ve been in the Solomon Islands for just over a year, here on an AusAID posting to manage the Australian Government’s country health program. It’s not an easy job, juggling competing priorities with limited resources. Soon after arriving I found that living and working in the Solomons was like swimming in opaque waters with occasional glimpses of stunning coral, while always knowing that a crocodile might be approaching unseen.

So far I’ve not met a real crocodile, and hope I never do. There are constant tales of the big ones seen at Bonegi, Ranadi or Kakabona beaches, but crocodiles can come in many forms, particularly amongst a small expatriate community in a country emerging from civil unrest.

Paula Henriksen

Paula Henriksen is a Canberra-based writer. Her short story An Unpredictable Land was published by Stringybark Press in 2015 in the ‘Non Posso’ anthology.

Crocodiles and Kaleko is her first full-length book: a memoir of a funny, chaotic, challenging and ultimately inspiring two years, when she worked for the Australian Government in the Solomon Islands. She’d expected to be living in a tropical paradise, so was unprepared for pot-holed dirt roads, barbed wire and the need for constant security guards. But out of confusion came understanding and admiration for the warmth and optimism she encountered. She left Honiara with hope for the future of the Solomon Islands, as it faces the dangers of climate change and other uncertainties.