My friend Hubert, who is carving out a new life a few miles west of Cooktown after half a lifetime spent on Thursday Island, sent me a photo he took of the tree which Jack McLaren mentions in the opening lines of his acclaimed book "My Crowded solitude".
"On a mighty blaze on a mighty tree are cut two initials and a date. The initials are mine, the date is when I began an eight years' lonely residence among the most backward race of people in the whole of the tropical South Pacific, which is a place where backward peoples abound."
tree I cut the initials and the date: J.M. 7/10/11"
-o-
The initials are hardly noticeable but in 1986
the letters "J. M. & 11" were still discernible.
"My Crowded Solitude" is the story of Jack McLaren who went ashore at Cape York to establish a coconut plantation in 1911. The book traces his encounters with Australian Aborigines who were still living as they had in the stone age and his discovery that life in the wilderness can be rich and fulfilling.
According to the Australian Dictionary of Biography, " McLaren in 1902-11 engaged in various romantic occupations in tropical places. He worked as a miner, mule-driver and rabbit-poisoner. He searched for pearl-shell out from Thursday Island, for bêche-de-mer and tortoise shell on the Barrier Reef, and for sandalwood on Cape York. In Malaya, the Solomon Islands and Fiji he worked as an overseer, and sometimes a labour-recruiter, on coconut plantations. He visited Java and the Ellice Islands, and was shipwrecked in the Gulf of Papua. In New Guinea he ran trade stores, prospected, transported copper overland to Port Moresby, and hunted birds of paradise. "My Odyssey" (London, 1923) tells part of the story of these years. On 6 October 1911, tired of wandering, McLaren landed at Simpson's Bay on the west coast of Cape York. Alone except for the tribe of Aborigines whom he paid to work for him, he built a house and established a coconut plantation."
What a man after my own heart! I rushed to my crowded library for another read of "My Crowded Solitude" during my coronavirus-induced solitude. What a read; what a life! But don't take my word for it; read your own online copy at Project Gutenberg.
The most fundamental delight which literature can offer has something to do with the perception or discovery of truth, not necessarily a profound or complex or earthshaking truth, but a particular truth of some order. This "epiphany" comes at the moment of recognition when the reader's experience is reflected back at him. And much of my own experience was reflected back at me, right down to the book's final lines which pretty much sum up what happened to me time and again, BEFORE I had chained myself to "Riverbend" ...
"And then the wanderlust welled up in me, strongly, insistently, and grew to a tidal wave which drowned all other thought, flooded all other desire, washed clear away the dead debris of the urge which had caused me to settle at all. The wilding that was ME would not be denied. I accepted the price -- and set forth on my wanderings once more."
... and AFTER I had bought "Riverbend":
"There would be all manner of adventures on the way. But I couldn't go. There was the plantation [read "Riverbend"]. There was always the plantation [read "Riverbend"], and on present appearances there would always be the plantation [read "Riverbend"]."
"I saw myself journeying to the places to which I would journey were I free of the restrictions of possessions. I saw myself happy and content down the years in this place of mine. I wanted to go, and I wanted to stay, and knew not which to do."
To paraphrase two more lines from Jack MacLaren's book: "The reading of his adventures gave me a curiously ecstatic pleasure -- and a somewhat eerie one besides. It was as though I were listening to someone telling me the story of my life."
Jack McLaren died on 16 May 1954, aged 69, in Brighton, England. His was a life well lived!
P.S. As I wrote, "My Odyssey" is on my shopping list; trouble is, shops no longer stock it. However, good ol' archive.org has an online copy of "My Odyssey" and "The White Witch". Thank you, archive.org!
