In a small op-shop, long since gone, on the shores of Burrill Lake I found a book. Places like this seem to attract abandoned dreams; yet, for a mere dollar I held in my hand the South Pacific dream, not abandoned, but lived out in 255 pages and 17 colour plates.
People, and sometimes nations, fasten themselves to these rare books. "An Island to Oneself" was just such a book. Published in the sixties, with scant advertising support and authored by a man who had no literary reputation, this book has worked its way into the heart of South Pacific legend. The eccentric author was a humble 51-year-old New Zealander, Tom Neale, former navyman, storeman, and world-famous hermit.
Although Tom was an avid reader he had never published anything until he wrote "An Island to Oneself" - nor after, for that matter. This was a singular work of a lifetime. The voice of the author was stark and simple, concentrating on facts of a solo existence on Suvarov Atoll in the Cook Islands. The landscape was a remote, long-forgotten part of the South Pacific. None of this would have been at all popular at the time, nevertheless people discovered this book; they found it on their own, in musty second-hand bookstores and boat book swaps, without the benefit of marketing hype or midnight sales.
For years I kept a copy on my boat. Every so often I would take it off the shelf, slide into my bunk and go back with Tom to his shack perched on Anchorage Island, half a mile long and three hundred yards wide, to the coconut palms and the boom of the surf on the reef and the time he steps ashore for the first time. His story is sketched out in stark sentences and dry chapter headings, beneath which burns a simple dream.
Tom was gloriously out of step with his time, however, he managed to capture a collective revelation in his readers. Not long after "An Island to Oneself" went to print, society was ripe for change. Long-range cruising was beginning to gain popularity and was no longer the realm of a few courageous souls. Amongst these cruising folk Tom and his book found a following.
Getting to Suvarov took thirty years of dreaming, patience and planning by Tom, fueled by a chance meeting with another South Seas legend, Robert Dean Frisbie. Frisbie had inhabited the island in the forties accompanied by his four young children. His experiences of Suvarov produced the classic South Seas adventure "Island of Desire". More important than his book was the fact that Frisbie had shown Tom a glimpse of the possible.
In 1942 Frisbie had been almost wiped off the island by a cyclone, literally lashing himself and his children to a tree to survive the inundation of the sea. It was through this experience and other lesser storms that both these men were to come to know Suvarov intimately, savouring the fragility of the tiny island as both a blessing and a curse. At a maximum ten feet above sea level, existence on Suvarov became more akin to being at sea than on land. With the onset of inclement weather Tom would bury his tools and other items deemed necessary for survival; this was his only form of insurance.
More than the weather it was the fragility of his own existence, which terrified Tom the most. Near the end of Tom's first stint on Suvarov, while on a planting expedition to a nearby island, the simple act of throwing out his dinghy's anchor dislocated his back rendering him near paralyzed and alone. The chance discovery of an emaciated Tom by an American yachtie named Rockefeller who nursed him back to health and spared him a lonely death could only be described as miraculous. This kind of fragility gave Tom a clarity to his existence and to his book.
Trying to describe "An Island to Oneself" to the unread can be difficult. Tom's story is not just a book about living on a desert island. Its essence is larger than that. It's a book about a passion for simplicity; it's about being alone and doing alone. It tells us that life is incomplete without dreams and risk. It teaches the important and hard-to-appreciate truths that the ocean is beautiful and violent, that soil is precious and that there is a use for a bicycle pump on a desert island. It's a book about how to dream and how to live. It is a book that has become a place.
"An Island to Oneself" leaves us in 1963 with Tom quitting the island. As Tom put it "the time had come to wake up from an exquisite dream before it turned into a nightmare". Tom's dream never quite released its powerful grip and in 1967 he returned to Suvarov for his final stint of ten years. The place and the man had become fused.
For a man who lived so well, the obvious question is how did he go? It wasn't loneliness or even a cyclone that drove Tom from Suvarov; it was the cold grip of cancer that saw him on his way. Returning to Rarotonga he was treated by the notorious Dr Milan Brych, died and was buried in the RSA cemetery next to the airport. Tom's end could almost have been written by himself, with only the stark facts to console us.
In a dark twist Suvarov's own future moved into darkness, with the atoll marked as the head quarters for a black pearl fishery. Tom's hut was going to be removed to make way for up to one hundred workers and the associated complexity of satellite TV and steak dinners.
At the eleventh hour, just before the black pearl fishers turned up, something changed the view of the Cook Island's government on the value of Suvarov. Perhaps it was the political clout of his yachtie friends, or perhaps Tom's old book? For whatever reason, the atoll now remains as Tom found it, as the only National Park in the Cook Islands.
We should all be so lucky to love our place in the world so much.
Now sit back and read the book: click here or here.
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P.S. My German yachting hero Rollo Gebhard visited Tom Neale twice. Read more about it here.
