by Whispering Gums

A post in our 2026 series featuring works published in 1946 (or by authors who died in 1946). This post includes a story that was published in The Sydney Morning Herald on 23 April 1946.
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Of all the writers I’ve researched for this project, Beatrice Grimshaw is among the most documented, with articles in the Australian Dictionary of Biography (ADB) and Wikipedia, for a start. She was quite some woman – and yet, she too is little known today.

Beatrice Ethel Grimshaw (1870-1953) is described by Wikipedia as “an Irish writer and traveller”, while the ADB does not give a nationality. However, both state that she was born on 3 February 1870 at Cloona, Antrim, in Ireland, and died on 30 June 1953 at Kelso near Bathurst in New South Wales. She is buried in Bathurst cemetery.

It seems that Grimshaw, the fourth of six children, was never going to be the little wife and mother. Wikipedia says that she “defied her parents’ expectations to marry or become a teacher, instead working for various shipping companies including as a publicist for the Cunard Line” while ADB says that, although she went to university, “she did not take a degree and never married but saw herself as a liberated ‘New Woman'”. There is much detail about her life at these two sources so I’ll just share the salient points here. She loved the outdoors, and, according to Wikipedia, began her writing career when she became a sports journalist for Irish Cyclist magazine in 1891. Besides working as an editor, she wrote “a range of content including poems, dialogues, short stories, and two serialised novels under a pen name”. Her first novel, Broken away, was published in 1897.

She visited the Pacific in 1903, with commissions to report on the Pacific and write tourist publicity about the islands. In 1907, she returned to Papua, intending to stay for two or three months, but ending up living there for most of the next twenty-seven years. She wrote, joined expeditions up rivers and into the jungles, and established a tobacco plantation with her brother. Due to recurring malaria fever, she moved to Kelso in 1936 to live with her brothers. She didn’t retire, however. She continued to write books, and undertake other work, including, according to Broken Hill’s Barrier Daily Truth (12 Feb 1943) “liaison work for the Americans in Australia … She said that Australia offers unlimited opportunities for expansion, opportunities which the American people will be quick to utilise”. Beatrice Grimshaw, from her own writing and reports about her, comes across as positive and indefatigable.

“I FOUND Miss Grimshaw very interesting, a good churchwoman, a fearless character, and one who is not afraid to call a spade a spade”. (HJB)

Grimshaw was a prolific and highly popular writer, with around 35 novels to her name. She drew from her experiences in the South Seas, and wrote in the popular genres of the time – romantic adventure, crime fiction and some supernatural or ghost stories – but her tone was paternalistic. The Armidale Express and New England General Advertiser (3 July 1940) reported that many of her novels and short stories had been “translated into German, French, Danish and Swedish” and that her books were “known throughout England, America and Australia”. She also wrote numerous articles and short stories for papers and journals. Her 1922 novel, Conn of the Coral Seas, was made into a film, The Adorable Outcast, in 1928.

She was, in fact, quite a celebrity, for her adventurous life as well as for her writing. After all, as The Australian Women’s Weekly (Feb 1935) pointed out, she had lived amongst “headhunters”, no less! Her writing was frequently praised for its realism. A reviewer in Adelaide’s The Register wrote (9 Sept 1922):

There are, to me, two outstanding features in her writings—her understanding of human nature, and her power of description. There is no need to illustrate her books. Her own words conjure up pictures as accurate as they are enchanting …

Of course, not all agreed. A writer in The Queenslander (4 Mar 1922) admired her storytelling but had reservations:

The stories are very interesting, and they are well told, but one is forced to wonder if the beautiful islands hold nothing but hatred and dark intrigue.

AustLit concludes its brief bio with this assessment:

Although she was a best-selling author in the 1920s and sometimes favourably compared with Joseph Conrad, Bret Harte and Robert Louis Stevenson, Grimshaw is now almost unknown and all of her books are out of print. Her work may have had limited literary merit but her Times obituarist acknowledged her ‘high competence’.

Certainly, by the time she died, she was already fading from view, with an obituary in Bathurst’s National Advocate (1 Jul 1953) saying that “her novels are perhaps better known to an older generation”, though they were still circulating in libraries and literary institutes.

This post’s story, a romance titled “Shadow of the palm”, is told in the voice of 29-year-old Peter (or Pita to the locals), who returns to a Pacific island after the war, having been disillusioned at home by “warm receptions that rapidly grew cold”. It tells of local traditions and lustful dissolute men, of missionaries and young people in love. It is a predictable story typical of its time, but is enlivened by knowledge of a place that was exotic to its readers. It also encompasses awareness of some of the cultural conflict and exploitation that came with colonialism, and makes interesting reading for what is – perhaps unconsciously – shown as much as for what is told.

Shadow of the palm

WHEN I came back it was like taking a leap into the past. The six years past of nineteen thirty-nine. A hundred years ago.

There was not in our lives one thought the same, one feeling left where it had been, any more than, in the wrecked cities, one stone was left upon another.

But here, on Clare Island, nothing was changed, except that the white men, most of them, had gone and not returned. I had returned, from war and prison, from warm receptions that rapidly grew cold, to that which had touched me, once, and never been forgotten – the Shadow of the Palm.

When I was a ship’s boy of sixteen. I was given a day’s liberty on the island. There was a remittance-man called Bellingham, who lived in a shack by the beach, and I remember I asked him if he’d ever noticed the palm shadows. “Bonzer, aren’t they?” I said. And Bellingham answered, oddly: “You ever read the ‘Song of Solomon’?”

“Love poem in the Bible, ain’t it?” He said, “Yes. It says, among other things, ‘Set me as a seal upon thy heart, a seal upon thine arm.’ If you listen carefully to the sound the palm leaves make, you’ll hear just that.”

I thought he was drunk, and went my way. I laughed, as I went, and pulled up the sleeve from my brown arm. The shadow fell upon it, dark as tattoo. It has stayed there, and on my heart, ever since.

For years I was a purser. For years again, a grain of sand in the hourglass of the War. Now I was twenty-nine, and free, with my gratuity in my pocket and my purser’s training to show me the way of trade. And I meant to stay.

The ship had gone. The natives of Clare, soft-eyed and smiling, crowded round. Some of them remembered my call of thirteen years ago, and my boyish promise to come back again.

“Iorana, Pita!” they cried (my name is Peter Reed). “You come back, Pita. Iorana!”

The island greeting all but brought tears to my eyes. Iorana! It was the sound of the wind in the palms, the song of white combers out at sea, the rustle of warm rain upon an island “rau” roof. It was youth and one magic day; and all between was less than the littlest twig of coral, flying and tinkling down the sand.

They shouldered my cases of trade goods, and carried them to an empty house. The women, in their red and green and yellow parius (that Hollywood calls sarongs) crowded round. “Where’s Lili?” I asked them. And for a moment their chatter ceased.

There had been a pretty child the day I called – a white child, daughter of a trader and his wife. She had blue eyes, and floating yellow hair She was about six years of age, and as playful as a kitten. “I would like you for my little sister,” I told her – I who had no family or friends in the world. She laughed, and we kissed as innocently as babes. Through the years I had remembered her.

The women did not answer me and I asked the question again. I was growing troubled lest something should have happened to her.

A man’s voice sounded, crude and hoarse, with the tang of drink in it. “Lili’s Dad and Mum winked out years ago,” it said. “These cursed niggers took her and brought her up a nigger like themselves.”

I swung round and saw what was left of the remittance fellow, the beachcomber, who had spoken to me years before, in the way of a cultured man. On him the shadow of the palm had fallen heavily. There are some whom it takes like that.

Art Bellingham was stout and bloated. His belly overhung his soiled duck trousers. His hairy chest lay open to the winds. He showed broken teeth in an ugly grin.

He said: “There was a decent white man who’d have taken her. But those niggers, they stole her away and kept her.”

“What?” I cried. I was beginning to realise that it was not the child Lili I was going to see; it was a girl of nineteen. Stole her away? What did it mean?

“There weren’t any white men left, when the chaps went away to the war, and the trader fellow, Dreyer, and his wife, died of the ‘flu. There was only me.” He slapped himself on his hairy chest. “It stood to reason, didn’t it? Or ought to have.” He did not say what stood to reason, but I could guess.

“Well,” he went on, “those niggers couldn’t see it. And damn me if they haven’t got one of the heathen dances on to-night, just as if they’d never had a missionary here to teach them–” He spat blasphemy on that, as he spat saliva. “A dance to celebrate their taking the girl for one of their–“

“Not one of their men?” I cried. Well as I liked the folk of Clare, I could not face that idea.

Bart said, angrily– “No. The other way round. They’re making her a Taupo–“

“A what?” I asked. I seemed to have heard the word, but could not put any meaning to it.

He drew me a little way aside.

On the white sand the shadows danced, as they had danced through all the war. A bird sang two little bars of a tune, broke off, and began again. It had been singing the same two bars, when I was a lad on these sands. The women watched us, milling together as cattle mill in danger. I saw that they hated and feared Bellingham. Just what they feared, I did not know – then.

He went on talking. “There’s to be a feast and dance, and then she’ll be their blinking consecrated nun–Taupo–Maid of the Village–same as Samoa. Old women with her all the time, sleep alongside, never leave her alone. They’ll sit her up on a high stool, and next door to worship her. That’s what they do in Samoa. where these people came from; and they think it’s the best of good luck to have one. But these women here, they’re not the sort to make themselves into blooming virgins; they’re hot stuff.” He giggled. “So the place has had to do without its luck. But when a decent white man comes along, and offers to look after her, the girl goes to the High Chief, and offers to make herself into their Taupo more fool her! You’d better not go within a mile of her, after to-night – they’re by way of being civilised, but I lay they’d have your head!”

His little eyes were red like those of an angry bull; one could see that the defeat of the “decent man” went hard with him.

Going to my house, that was to be the trading store, I registered a vow. No matter how long I stayed, or what happened to me. I’d never, never, a hundred times, let myself go as he has gone.

Then – I saw Lili.

It was like a stage scene, as is so much of island life. The green glade, lit with sunset fires; the women, surrounding, in vividly coloured groups; in the midst of it all, touched by a spotlight of setting sun that fell through the forest crown, Lili.

She wore a pariu of green trade cotton; her bosom was lightly veiled by berry necklaces; her feet were bare, and her hair, very long and light, fell below her waist. She scarcely looked her nineteen years; with her streaming hair, and slight dainty figure.

Much can happen in a minute. Lili called out “Pita, ma falenni!” in the sweet, island tongue that greets a friend. But the women gathered round her, and, laughing, swept her away; she looked back at me, with something like dismay in her face and I fell in love with her. All in a little minute, after the way of island loves, which are, to loves of the cold countries, as the burning sun of coral beaches to the pale thin warmth of an Iceland noon.

There had been women in my life. None of them had been more to me than the glittering butterflies of Malaya, seized for a moment, held and let go. But Lili, child friend of the past, had flown straight into my heart, and rested there.

I watched her dance that night, in the cleared circle, lit by coconut torches, with the odour of the South Seas floating in that blend of frangipani, wood ash, weed and sand, and the salty tang of the coral reef through all. She wore the ceremonial grass skirt, like a ballet girl’s “tutu”; it swayed and sprang as she danced, but the dancer seemed to move little until one realised that every muscle of the beautiful body was playing its separate part. The natives watched with reverence and delight; on Bellingham’s face was the swollen rage of baffled desire; on mine – I do not know. But it caught the eye of Lili and again in her glance, I saw something like regret.

I did not stay for the feast that followed. I went away to my iron shack, and by the light of a hurricane lamp, sat long alone, thinking. You have lost nothing, I told myself; a man cannot lose what he never had. And you have, at least, your islands. On that I went to sleep, with the drumming of the reef in my ears.

A day or two passed. I saw nothing much of Lili, but my native friends came to buy, to barter, to invite me out fishing or pigeon snaring. And presently came Davida, the missionary.

Davida was an old Fijian, who had been shepherding the islanders for more than thirty years – without very much result. In the intervals of choosing and buying trade goods, he complained to me bitterly, as if to a kindred spirit, about the faults of the Clare people. I wasn’t interested; their faults were none of my business; for me, they had virtues enough to pass. But Davida was hot on their neglect of the marriage bond.

“Baptism, buryin’, I catch them for that,” he declared. “They giving me a little bit, sometimes. But marrying, they don’ want. This people going straight to hell, I thinking.”

He continued to mutter, but I hardly listened. One doesn’t listen in the Islands. There is always so much in one’s own mind; dreams born of the susurrus of the palm trees; the immemorial sobbing of the reef . . . But before the old man had passed the door, grumbling to himself, my dream was shattered.

“What’s that you say?” I cried. But I had heard.

“Art,” he was saying, “Art, he’s a child of the devil. He’s going after their girl that’s their god even as the golden calf was the -“

I seized him by the shoulder. “What d’you mean?”

“He not like you, Pita. He break every commandment, all the time. He want to steal Lili, he covet her. He make trouble. I see him, in moonlight, gathering bad flower-“

“What flower?”

“Little red flower that grow in wet ground, and always the bad wife put it in husband’s drink, when she go out to play the harlot -“

“But what has that to do -“

“Some night he make the women sleep, and steal Lili, take the canoe and go away. Maybe to-night.” He limped away, still muttering. “I go sleep,” he said.

For me there could be no sleep. I was on fire. I had had a few words with Lili, chaperoned always by the watchful old women, who didn’t know English, but knew love in all its shapes. “Pita,” she had told me, “I remember you. Pita – why did you come so late?”

“I came as soon as I could,” I told her. “How do you mean, late?”

She did not answer that. She bent her head down, so that the long gold hair fell forward, and hid her blushing face. And by heaven, then, if not before, I understood.

Boldly I said: “What would the chiefs do, if anyone eloped with you?”

“Kill me, maybe kill you,” she said. “If they catch “

At that the pride of the Army waked in me, and I said, “We’d smash the island into bits if they did!”

She said: “Maybe spare you. Me, I’m an islander.” Her very speech was coloured; she wore the native dress – but a fairer woman never trod island shore. Her parents, I remembered, had been Danes. Denmark was far away. Would Danish vengeance strike the island, if she died? Hardly.

The women called her off then, and I went.

ALL this was in my mind when Davida spoke. You learn swift thought, and swifter action, in the Army. The old man was not out of sight before I knew what I would do.

I called him back, and spoke to him, softly so that no wanderer should hear. “Get me those flowers,” I said. “And listen, Davida. Be ready when I want you.” I told him the rest and slipped a note into his hand.

He grinned and shook with joy. “I go,” he said. I waited near the Taupo house, till Davida returned, carrying a bowl of island kava. Into the house he went, and I heard him talking with the chaperons. When he came out, there was a wider grin upon his face. “Lili, she know,” he told me. “By-‘n-by, women sleep too much.”

There was a little while to wait. I found the canoe, and brought it round to the beach. I put stores into it, and blankets. It was seaworthy, big; it would carry us. in that calm weather, safely to the Blackbird Group, sixty miles away. In the Blackbird Group, there were white people, a Government agent even.

When all was quiet, in that dead hour before the night moves and turns in its sleep, I stole to the Taupo House, faint moonlight seeping in showed me the four old women, lying round about Lili’s white wrapped form. I said not a word; I bent and lifted her soft shoulders and warm knees, and carried her down the sand. And for the first time I had her kisses on my lips.

Davida was there, with his black Sunday pariu on, and a couple of grinning youths behind him as witnesses. In his hand he held an enormous prayerbook. I had scarcely set Lili on her feet before he began “Peat after me -“

And there, in the moonlight that made the sand like snow, with the palms whispering overhead, and the lagoon waves nulling below us, we were married. Married as fast as a Bishop could have done it. Davida had his own licence, and he had not forgotten to write out our certificate. We signed against the bow of the canoe, and Lili tucked the “lines” into her breast. Hardly was it done when heavy feet came tramping. Art Bellingham had wakened.

His face was contorted with rage. “Let the girl go,” he shouted. “You’ve no right – she’s island property. The High Chief’s coming, and he’ll have her life and yours.”

There were torches coming on behind, and I heard the gabble of island talk. Lili clutched at my arm. “Let me go back, Pita,” she faltered. “I’m their child – we shouldn’t have-“

That’s the Shadow I thought. One leaflet of it, fallen on you as it fell on Bellingham. The Shadow that can bless or brand. But shadow or none, you’re mine . . .

The High Chief was tall, almost stately. A man of looks and character. Holding back, with a gesture, his excited followers, he spoke to Lili in the island tongue.

“If you come back now – now, we will spare the stranger, and he will leave unhurt. If you go with him, we will follow and kill you both.

Through the mocking laugh of Bellingham, I made my reply.

“I’m an Australian soldier. If you touch her, or me, Australia will come! and blow your island to pieces.”

SILENCE followed for a moment, before the chattering broke out again. These people knew of the Anzac.

Then the Chief spoke. “This girl is not Australian.”

“She’s Danish. Send to Denmark for protection,” sneered Bellingham.

I said: “She is Australian. We are married. Touch her if you dare.”

“You!” the Chief cried, turning to Davida.

“And Davida,” I said, “has the London Missionary Society behind him.”

Davida added that he was a child of God, and that no sons of Satan (he indicated the people) could interfere with him.

The islanders, who had been ready to tear us to pieces, now broke into yells of amusement. Those mercurial people even helped us to push the canoe down into the water, and to load our stores. But the Chief stalked away, in silence.

Dawn caught us out beyond the reef. Lili was laughing, swinging her paddle like a Clare girl born. I saw the island lying away behind us, blue and gold in the sunrise, and something that was nearly pain clutched at my heart.

Still, I said to myself, as we caught the swell of open sea; still there are other islands – and other palms.

Sources

HJB, “At home with Beatrice Grimshaw, Novelist” in Sydney Mail (9 Dec 1931)  [Accessed: 10 February 2026]
Beatrice Grimshaw, AustLit (Accessed: 8 February 2026]
Beatrice Grimshaw, Wikipedia [Accessed: 7 February 2026]
Beatrice Grimshaw, “Shadow of the palm“, in The Sydney Morning Herald (23 April 1946) [Accessed: 4 January 2026]
Hugh Laracy, ‘Grimshaw, Beatrice Ethel (1870–1953)‘, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Australian National University, 1983 [Accessed: 7 February 2026]

All other sources are linked in the article.