We were already on our way out from Vinnies when Padma said, Look! You missed this one!", and handed me this book. The title was alluring enough and so, without any checking, I added it to my pile of books.
What is an island? To say that an island is a piece of land surrounded by water, and smaller than a continent and larger than a rock, is to state the obvious and shows a lack of imagination. To say that the largest island in the world is Greenland and the second-largest New Guinea, that Java has the highest island population, that the smallest island that is a nation is Nauru, that the world remotest island with people living on it is Tristan da Cunha, is to merely show a knowledge of geography.
People have gone to war over islands, as they did with the Falklands and the island of Run (now part of Indonesia), which was the only source of the precious spice nutmeg during the seventeenth century. And islands have been instrumental in making peace: the British ceded the very same Run to the Dutch in 1667 in exchange for Manhattan (arguably the worst-ever real estate deal - for the Dutch!), and France traded in part of Canada (and more) to Britain in 1763 in order to secure Guadaloupe and Martinique because of the islands' sugar cane (arguably the second-worst real estate deal ever - for the French!)
There are islands that limit us, and islands that liberate us; there are islands we escape to, and islands we escape from. There are islands which are only imagined: no one ever landed on the mythical island of Buss in the North Atlantic, for example, but it was still charted on maps and even chartered to the Hudson's Bay Company to harvest furs. Maybe stories themselves began with islands, for islands have fascinated people as long as they have been singing songs and telling tales.
For millennia, seafarers and settlers and storytellers have sought out islands for reasons that go deep into the human psyche and haunt its imagination, even - or sometimes especially - when ignorant of geography. It may have something to do with the way an island rises up from the sea and then sooner or later disappears again, perhaps invoking a primordial consciousness of the beginning and the end of life. Or it may be connected to the journey between the mainland and an island, and between one island an another, requiring the crossing of water. This has haunted humans since time immemorial; the word "metaphor", the signature of stories and songs, means "to carry across".
There have been countless islands where marvellous - or malicious - things supposedly happened, and memorable islands with fiction-following-history stories of true island adventures like "Robinson Crusoe". Psychiatry began with an awareness of of "islanded" psyches, and anthropology made islands an academic fetish (and a travel excuse), with island accounts beginning in the late nineteenth century by Arthur Hadden on the Torres Strait Islands and Alfred Radcliffe-Brown on the Andamans, and then by Bronislaw Malinowski on the Trobriand Islands - you'll love "In A Savage Land" - and Margaret Mead on Samoa.
Many poets, from Homer (in the "Odyssey") to Shakespeare (in "The Tempest"), have located some of their most intriguing stories on islands. Later, Jonathan Swift took readers to islands of wonderment on Gulliver's travels, Alexandre Dumas to the treasure of Monte Cristo, and H. G. Wells to the menacing "Island of Dr. Moreau". And they are certainly places where fabled creatures live: there are real islands with dragons, like Komodo in Indonesia, and imaginary islands with dragons, like those in the "Chronicles of Narnia".
Islands represent both paradise and purgatory, just as they invoke madness and invite magic. They have been places where curious things occur - or where nothing at all takes place. There are islands of solitude, and islands with a social life - though no always an easy one. So is the ultimate appeal of islands "home" - or "away"?
I lived and worked on several islands, and felt totally "at home" on New Britain and Bougainville in New Guinea, and New Guinea itself, and Guadalcanal, and Borneo, and Thursday Island, and Upolu, and Penang. They also flew me to Mornington Island in the Gulf of Carpentaria and to King Island in Bass Strait, and offered me jobs on both, and I guess I would've felt "at home" there too - on second thoughts, maybe not on King Island because to me the word "island" is inseparable from the word "tropical", even though King Island Scheelite, part of CRA and now Rio Tinto, offered me a promising career but I've never been a career man. I had even bought a building block in Picnic Bay on Magnetic Island off the coast of Townsville but that's another story better left for another day.
I reflected on all this and more as I started to read Pat Carney's "On Island" which, as it turned out, is another King Island, situated midway between the lower mainland of British Columbia and Vancouver Island. It's an evocative picture of what it is like to live on an island, albeit without the heat and the palm trees. Thanks, Padma, for spotting it!
P.S. Never expecting to buy just one or two books, I always bring my own shopping bag as free plastic bags are slowly being phased out which is good (I am old enough to remember when paper bags were being blamed for the destruction of trees and plastic bags were the solution). But what about the billions of used face masks, swabs and syringes being discarded during this ongoing pandemic? Just thinking!
