"White Shadows in the South Seas"
Australia 1930. "White Shadows in the South Seas", an old silent, was showing in the picture houses and I had seen it three times. And each time the idea grew. The world I had known was obscured by an economic smog which seemed to cover everything, including myself. There were over a hundred thou-sand unemployed in Sydney alone and I was one of them. In less than six months I had spiralled from a good income and a Regent-model Buick down to a place in the government bread lines. The descent left me a little dizzy. I totalled up my assets and they came to £10. 'I'm going to the South Seas,' I announced."
So begin's Julian Hillas' book "South Seas Paradise". I had previously written about the movie "White Shadows in the South Seas" here and about Julian Hillas here, and today I also found a copy of his quite rare book "South Seas Paradise" in almost mint condition in an op-shop which was totally unaware of what literary gem they were harbouring.
In his book he even describes his meeting with island-legend Tom Neale:
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The nearest character to an authentic beachcomber I ever ran across was Tom Neale, hermit and sole occupant of Suwarrow atoll. Tom had spent most of his life at sea. It would be unfair to describe him as a sad sack. He was simply not fond of people and refused to become a cog in any system.
"What's your philosophy?" I once asked him. "Dunno as I've thought about it much," he said. "But way I figure things out is, a man needs something to live for but nothing to do, if you get the idea." I got it, and it seemed a reasonably good one provided it was possible to maintain a balance. Suwarrow is an atoll five hundred miles north-west of Rarotonga. The place had been inhabited for short periods over the past hundred years, but nothing had come of these attempts and it had reverted to a sanctuary for sea birds. You came on the atoll suddenly: one moment there was only the clear ocean ahead; the next, a green palisade of palms and a wall of leaping surf. The loneliness came back and hit you. With the exception of a single visit to Rarotonga, he has lived there ever since. Days, linked together by the perfect rythm of monotony, have grown into years with few events to mark their passage. Has Tom achieved total escape? Probably as nearly as humanly possible. Escape from people who would certainly have bored him: escape from the rat race and financial worries; escape from practically everything except himself, and I seriously doubt if he ever met anyone whom he liked better than Tom Neale. And so he will take the years easily, contentedly, as they pass, until that moment which must come to all, in London, California, or the South Seas. And I don't suppose it matters much whether the final tidying up is done in a crematorium or by the little white land crabs under the high rocking palms of Suwarrow. Both processes add up to the same score. |
Robert Julian Dashwood (pen name Julian Hillas) lived in the Cook Islands from the 1930s until his death in 1970, and this book is the candid and un-gilded account of his thirty-year holiday. As he writes at the end, "An autobiography is only an advance copy of an obituary."
