native Fijian life, and contributed to The Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland a series of valuable papers dealing with burial customs, land tenure, riddles, rites of initiation, and the classificatory system of relationship.[1] Many years afterwards Mr. Fison published a volume of Fijian stories with an introduction and notes illustrating some aspects of the native life and manners.[2]
From Fiji Mr. Fison returned to Victoria in 1884. Next year he resumed his ministerial duties, and continued to discharge them until 1888, when ill-health obliged him finally to resign them. In the same year (1888) he built, partly with borrowed capital, a house at Essendon, near Melbourne, where he resided with his wife and four unmarried daughters to the end of his life. The house was built for a school, and his daughters, accomplished and industrious ladies, taught pupils in it until new rules adopted by the State of Victoria rendered the house, in which Mr. Fison had sunk some of his small savings, unsuitable for the purpose. Meantime Mr. Fison laboured hard at journalism. From 1888 to within about three years of his death he edited The Spectator, a Melbourne paper published in connection with the Wesleyan Church. To a weekly paper, The Australasian, he contributed a series of articles on "The Testimony of Fijian Words," the substance of some of which he appears to have afterwards embodied in the introduction to his Tales from Old Fiji. He was one of the first Fellows of Queen's College in the University of Melbourne, and for some years he acted as Secretary to the College Council. Indeed, he had been
- ↑ "Notes on Fijian Burial Customs," The Journal of the Anthropological Institute etc., vol. x. (1881), pp. 137-149; "Land Tenure in Fiji," ibid., pp. 332-352; "On Fijian Riddles," ibid., vol. xi. (1882), pp. 406-410; "The Nanga, or Sacred Stone Enclosure, of Wainimala, Fiji," ibid., vol. xiv. (1885), pp. 14-31; "The Classificatory System of Relationship," ibid., vol. xxiv. (1895) pp. 360-371.
- ↑ Tales from Old Fiji, London, 1904.
