Mahu on the Beach

Letters

Vol. 19 No. 15 · 31 July 1997

From John Rivers

I was somewhat disturbed that Greg Dening should write of Gauguin that ‘he took to wearing a woman’s wrap-around skirt’ (LRB, 22 May), since I was at that moment wearing a ‘woman’s wrap-around skirt’. My worry was not so much for myself and my limen but rather for the London reader who might overestimate the significance of a male choosing to wear a brightly coloured lap lap or lava lava, the wrap-around ‘skirt’ that is endemic in this part of the globe. I am not alone in ‘going native’ in this way, since evening temperatures that may reach 88° and 100 per cent humidity strongly reinforce the view that trousers were invented by horsemen riding the chilly steppes of Central Asia. It is true that the wrap-around ‘skirt’ is not as widely worn as it once was by London Missionary Society pastors, policemen, government officials et al. Some have attributed this decline in popularity to presumptuous comments from Australian tourists.

John Rivers
Papua New Guinea University of Technology