1940: style, modernity and popular magazines: writing Pacific travel

[Extract] In 1940, Beatrice Grimshaw's murder-mystery, Murder in Paradise, was published. Grimshaw came to international public attention during the first decades of the twentieth century for her numerous articles and books centred on the South Pacific, where she travelled widely and lived, spending some 27 years in Papua before moving to Australia in 1936. Murder in Paradise is set on an island off the Papuan coast and features a clutch of characters trying to solve the murders of two of their number. Native trickery is suspected. How these characters came to be here, however, is what is of interest - they have been offloaded onto the island on their way to elsewhere because their ship is sinking. Murder and shipwreck are hardly good press for sea-travel, and such events, coming at the beginning of the 19408, pick up on, but also suggest a narrative turn away from, the preponderance of travel stories in the 1930s that coincided with the popularity in Australia of Pacific touring. Of course, the shipwreck in Grimshaw's book does not signal the death-knell for writers' interest in the Pacific. Thea Astley, decades later and among others, would find the Pacific a source for novels such as Beachmasters (1985). Yet, Grimshaw's now all-but forgotten novel does offer a suggestive, if ominous, bookend for a decade and genre in which Pacific travel and its narratives were finding wide expression in new magazines of the period