Few men who come to the islands leave them; they grow grey where they alighted; the palm shades and the trade-wind fans them till they die, perhaps cherishing to the last the fancy of a visit home, which is rarely made, more rarely enjoyed, and yet more rarely repeated. No part of the world exerts the same attractive power upon the visitor ..."
So begins Chapter I of Robert Louis Stevenson's "In the South Seas" which aptly describes the calibre of the human floatsam and jetsam that washes up on the shores of the tiny South Pacific Kingdom of Tonga, the length and breadth of which I island-hopped some years ago, jotting down the life stories of some of the stranded expats I encountered.
They were part of the shifting community of the planet's "homeless and assetless", languidly killing time like characters in a Graham Greene novel. They were Westerners who had been so ill-treated and badly wounded by life that they'd stopped the whole struggle and decided to camp out in Tonga indefinitely, where they could live cheaply, perhaps taking a young Tongan girl as a companion, where they could drink before noon without getting any static about it, where they could make a bit of money in a tourist business or sell real estate that's not for sale.
But generally, all they were doing was seeing to it that nothing serious would ever be asked of them again. They were not bums, mind you. They were a high grade of people, multinational, talented and clever. Everyone used to be something once (usually "married" or "employed"); now they were all united by the absence of the one thing they seemed to have surrendered completely and forever: ambition. To quote my favourite writer Joseph Conrad: "... in all they said - in their actions, in their looks, in their persons - could be detected the soft spot, the place of decay, the determination to lounge safely through existence."
Having come to Tonga after they'd made a mess of their lives back home, they decided they've had it with Western women, and married some sweet, obedient Tongan girl. They thought this little girl would make them happy, make their lives easy. Good luck to them because it's still two human beings trying to get along, and so it was going to become complicated because relationships are always complicated.
Some had their hearts broken, almost all of them their bank balance, some succeeded in some sort of legitimate business which offered them a marginal income while others sold real estate to other Westerners who'd also fallen for this misguided dream of a South Seas paradise.
Of course, Tonga is not such a bad place to putter away your life, ignoring the passing of the days. Most Tonga expats, when you asked them how long they'd lived there, weren't really sure. For one thing, they weren't really sure how much time had passed since they moved to Tonga. But for another thing, it's like they weren't really sure if they did live there. They belonged to nowhere, unanchored. Some of them liked to imagine they were just hanging out for a while, just running the engine on idle at the traffic light, waiting for the signal to change. But after several years of that they started to wonder ... would they ever leave? Conrad again: "Their death was the only event of their fantastic existence that seemed to have a reasonable certitude of achievement."
There was much to enjoy in their lazy company, in those long Sunday afternoons spent at brunch, drinking beer and talking about nothing. Still, the outsider who was just passing through, felt somewhat like Dorothy in the poppy fields of Oz. Be careful! Don't fall asleep in this narcotic meadow, or you could doze away the rest of your life here!
Their one and perhaps only achievement in life was to have mastered the intricate Tongan language, in which they had to demonstrate their proficiency before having their visas renewed (a policy Australia could be well advised to adopt before all this silly "multi-culturalism" results in a Balkanised country). "Malo e lelei ki he pongipongini" to you all!
