Lucy Irvine, author of the book "Castaway", spent a whole year of her life on a desert island in the sun with a ginger-bearded Crusoe character whom she had met through an unusual advertisement in the travel section of a London magazine, 'Writer seeks "wife" for year on tropical island".
The word "wife" was in inverted commas even though they actually had to get married, because the Australian Immigration authorities did not feel happy about allowing them to live as castaways on territory that came under their jurisdiction unless they had legalised their union.
That territory was the Torres Strait at the Top End of Australia, and the events described in the book "Castaway" took place on the tiny island of Tuin between May 1981 and June 1982, some four years after I had lived and worked on nearby Thursday Island, hence my interest in both her book and the subsequent movie of the same name, filmed in 1986.
Her book, uncompromisingly candid and sometimes shocking, is a very compulsively written account of a desert island dream which threatened to turn into a nightmare of illness, thirst and also personal antipathy.
(And here she talks about the problems she encountered, particularly the lack of water, and the eight records she would choose to take with her if she were a castaway again.
Years later our paths crossed again when I read her book "Faraway", in which she described her year spent with the Hepworth family on Pigeon Island in the Solomons. It was Tom Hepworth who offered me my first job in the islands (which I declined), but that's a story for another day.
