Florence 'Johnny' Frisbie

Florence Ngatokura "Johnny" Frisbie (born 19 June 1932), also known as Johnny Frisbie Hebenstreit, is a Cook Islands author. Her autobiographical children's novel, Miss Ulysses of Puka-Puka, was the first published literary work by a Pacific Islander woman author.

Biography Frisbie was born in Papeete, Tahiti, the second child of American writer Robert Dean Frisbie and Ngatokura ‘A Mata’a. In 1934 the family moved to Ngatokura's home of Pukapuka in the Cook Islands, where Frisbie was raised. As a child she helped her father type up his writings and kept a journal in Pukapukan, Cook Islands Māori, and English, which she learned from her father's library and from comic books. Following the death of her mother in 1939 the family left Pukapuka and travelled to Manihiki and Rarotonga before settling on Suwarrow in January 1942. Later that year the atoll was hit by a tropical cyclone which washed away 16 of its 22 islets; the Frisbies survived by tying themselves to trees and taking shelter in a tree house. The family continued to travel around the South Pacific until her father's death of tetanus in 1948. During this time, Frisbie published Miss Ulysses of Puka-Puka, dealing with her life on the atoll and her bond with her father and family. and then in television, working with Selwyn Toogood as a panelist on the New Zealand version of Beauty and the Beast. She served on the Māori and South Pacific Arts Council She subsequently returned to the Cook Islands, and then Hawaii. The film The Island in Me (originally titled Homecoming) debuted in November 2021 at the Hawaii International Film Festival.