Many years ago near Burril Lake, in a musty second-hand shop that has long since gone I found a book. Places like this seem to attract abandoned dreams because there, for a mere two dollars, I held in my hand the South Pacific dream, not abandoned, but lived out in 255 pages and 17 colour plates.
That book was Tom Neale's "An Island To Oneself". Published in the nineteen-sixties, with scant advertising support and authored by a man who had no literary reputation, it has worked its way into the hearts of many people, including mine, to become a lasting South Pacific legend.
Sitting then on my motor-sailer "Lady Anne" or now in peaceful and secluded "Melbourne", closing my eyes and dreaming Tom Neale's dream, I have often wished to be able to listen to Tom's words. My wish turned into reality when I discovered this advertisement of his audiobook.
However, listening to the sample I was disappointed: not only did they pick a rather obscure part of the book - see pages 115 and 116 below - but the reader's voice hasn't even Tom Neale's New Zealand accent.
The opening lines are so much more promising: "I was fifty when I went to live alone on Suvarov, after thirty years of roaming the Pacific, and in this story I will try to describe my feelings, try to put into words what was, for me, the most remarkable and worth-while experience of my whole life. I chose to live in the Pacific islands because life there moves at the sort of pace which you feel God must have had in mind originally when He made the sun to keep us warm and provided the fruits of the earth for the taking ..."
Long after the last page of "An Island to Oneself" is turned, even after Tom Neale's name is forgotten, the story of his isolation, hundreds of miles from the nearest inhabited island, will continue to enrich the lives of its readers. As for the audiobook, I won't allow it to spoil my dreams.
