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That's what we asked ourselves when many years ago a yachting couple, whom we had befriended while they lay at anchor off "Riverbend", sent us a postcard from Karragarra Island with the words, "We're settled here now!"
What is it about islands that has captivated millions of people around the world and through the centuries? Is it because the smallness of an island invites the illusion that here the complexities of continental societies can be avoided?
I think it's all of that, but also because they inspire feelings of great passion and serenity, because they give people the opportunity to find themselves, because they are revered as paradise, and because they provide a real, friendly community, as we found out when we visited Max and Judy in their island paradise a few months later.
We found it very much to our liking, so much so that we inspected several island properties that were for sale at the time. If the truth be known, had there been a ready buyer for "Riverbend" at the time, I'd probably be blogging this from Karragarra Island right now, but there wasn't and I'm not.
And neither are Max and Judy who left Karragarra Island again a long time ago. Reality always intervenes.
Steve arriving at Gizo in the Solomons in November 2011. Note the "PT 109 Gizo Yacht Club", named after the torpedo boat skippered by JF Kennedy which sank off Gizo during WWII
I first heard of Steve Gates, owner and captain of the Searunner 37 trimaran Manu-O-Ku, when I became involved with Villa Mamana on the tiny island of Telekivava'u in Tonga through its previous owners Joe Altenhein and Matt Muirhead - see here.
Steve had lived in Hawaii for 31 years, raised two children, and been building one-off epoxy composite boats in his own Tradewind Island Boatworks (a long name for a small company), before sailing to Tonga in late 2003 to become the paid caretaker of the very remote 40-acre private island of Telekivava'u in the remote island group of Ha’apai.
Sunset over the lagoon on Telekivava'u, August 2005
Steve's trimaran Manu-O-Ku anchored off Telekivava'u
Think of spending whole weeks at a time totally alone on an idyllic, pristine island with your yacht anchored in the lagoon ... no wonder, Steve sat it out for a whole three years. It was a wonderful lifestyle but, as he said, "security is overrated, and the nomadic lifestyle was calling ...", and so he sailed north to the Vava’u Group where he ran a charter business for the next 4½ years.
Steve Gates made this video clip on Telekivava'u in Tonga in 2005. As the island's previous owner, Matt Muirhead, wrote, "It was bittersweet to watch the video, knowing each tree intimately, but I'm a changed and better man for having had the experience." Remeet Steve Gates during a visit by SY HARMONICA in October 2005 - click here.
For nearly eight years Tonga gave him an incredibly comfortable life which he lived "one moment at a time" and which he found very hard to leave. However, he did so finally in June 2011, first sailing back to the Ha’apai Group for a week to revisit the remote island he had lived on for three years, and then singlehandedly to Savusavu in Fiji where he arrived on July 1, 2011. On to Vanuatu in September, then the Solomon Islands in November. In February 2012 he made the 2000 nm passage to Palau in western Micronesia before finally arriving in the Philippines on New Year’s Eve 2012.
His trimaran is his only home. As he writes, "This lifestyle works for me, a nomadic self-reliant lifestyle, on the oceans, among islands, sailing your home, wandering the world yet sleeping in your own bed."
He's been in the Philippines ever since, running his charter business Manu-O-Ku Sailing Adventures out of Port Barton, one of the last few untouched gems of the Philippines (the website is long gone - so where is Steve Gates now? - but there's still an archived copy here). It's a 45-minute flight from Manila to Puerto Princesa, and from there an easy ride to Port Barton, a sleepy fishing village, unspoiled and authentic, where life goes at its own pace and which Steve is in no hurry to leave.
Joe Altenhein, the creator of Villa Mamana on Telekivava'u, described Steve as "a nice man, doing what I wish I could do" --- and so think all of us. The nearest I ever got to Palawan was Boracay and, oh boy, am I still itching to go again!
After my return to Australia in 1985, I tried to settle back into beachside suburbia at Cape Pallarenda just north of Townsville but the old magic of just walking back in and picking up from where I had left off had deserted me.
I eventually landed a job large enough for my ambitions in far-away Sydney, but not before I had made friends with two Townsville locals, Elizabeth and John, who at the time were the heart and soul of the budding German Club. I spent many happy hours at their crowded home in Railway Estate, with Elizabeth trying to encourage me to stay in town because, as she put it, "something always turns up".
Which was pretty much how she viewed the world because for her something - or someone - always turned up, just as twenty years earlier a young migrant from Austria on a round-Australia-trip had ridden his motorbike into Home Hill, a small place a hundred kilometres south of Townsville, and swept her off her feet. Not that everything went exactly to plan because, as she once wistfully remarked. "I married a migrant in the hope of seeing the world and got as far as Townsville".
Populate or perish: the Gamauf family sometime in the early 80s
That migrant became her husband John who'd come out, just like me but eight years earlier and slightly older, as an 'assisted migrant' from his native Salzburg aboard the TOSCANA. Whether six children had been part of his plan is unknown but it certainly fitted in with Immigration Minister Arthur Calwell's post-WWII rallying cry of 'populate or perish'.
I stayed in touch with Elizabeth and John, and briefly enjoyed their Austro-Australian hospitality again during a short visit in 1999, but, sadly, they have both since passed away, Elizabeth far too soon in August 2004, only weeks after her 57th birthday, and John in September 2015.
"Auch für immer in meinem Herzen. Danke für eure Freundschaft, Elizabeth und John"
They have both been laid to rest in the Home Hill Cemetery in Elizabeth's old home town Home Hill, approximately 98 kilometres south of Townsville. Home at last!
Thanks to them and their six children and many more grandchildren, Australia is not likely to perish, and nor am I likely to forget them. They were the salt of the earth with hearts of gold. May they rest in peace!
Sunday afternoon at "Riverbend". A little overcast and a little cool. I don't think a translation is needed but if you insist, ask Padma.
Meantime, I just quietly sit here and read my book.
It's a special edition with an introduction by Anne Boleyn, left unfinished due to circumstances beyond her control.
'Yours truly' on the left, and the bearded Austrian on the right, in September 2006
Take one part of sun-soaked, palm-lined beach, add a hammock stretched between two palm trees, a dash of ice-cold beer, and a pinch of gentle tradewinds, and finish with a twist of tropical sunset. It's easy to lose track of time in the land where time begins. Welcome to the South Sea Island Paradise of Ha'apai in the tiny Kingdom of Tonga!
There are so many romantic beaches to wander at sunrise and sunset, or in fact, all day long! You can explore on foot or mountain-bike too - just bring along a change of clothes, beach towel, and snorkel and mask. As you stay in a traditional fale on a deserted beach or uninhabited island, you may think for a moment you have died and gone to heaven. But this paradise is real. And you can live this dream lifestyle for a fraction of what it costs to live anywhere else.
Which is what a man from Austria (not Australia but Austria, that little country in Central Europe where they speak German with a funny accent) had done in 1995 at the ripe old age of 39, following a workplace accident in Vienna which gave him a small pension to live on.
By the time I met him in Pangai on the island of Lifuka in 2006, he had already fully succumbed to the siren song of these remote and soporific islands which is that on this small and human-sized stage your life counts for more and even your smallest accomplishments will be remembered.
His one accomplishment since coming to Tonga had been to marry a local girl and sire two kids. By the time we met, his wife had already separated again but he was still paying for her and the two kids which made his small pension even smaller. Suddenly, paradise seemed more like paradise lost!
He didn't seem to be ever struck by homesickness. And why would he want to leave? He subscribes to Louis Becke's sentiments - of whom he knows nothing - who once wrote about life in the South Seas, "Return? not they! Why should they go back? Here they had all things which are wont to satisfy man here below. A paradise of Eden-like beauty, amid which they wandered day by day all unheeding of the morrow. Why - why, indeed, should they leave the land of magical delights for the cold climate and still more glacial moral atmosphere of their native land, miscalled home?"
We kept up a correspondence over many years, sporadic at best because of the unreliable mail service in Tonga, but in recent years I heard nothing from him. He'd be 69 years old now which, given the sort of life he has led for the past thirty years and the restricted diet and even worse health service in the islands, would have make him an old man.
We had talked about this back in 2006, and he seemed to accept the fact that if he ever grew old or sick, he would be far away from any help. He seemed to accept his eventual fate with the stoicism of a man still in the prime of his life, but I wonder if he was still as accepting of his fate today.
As Somerset Maugham wrote in his story "The Lotus Eater" about a certain Thomas Wilson who had moved to the island of Capri with an annuity that would last him for twenty-five years: "Most people, the vast majority in fact, lead the lives that circumstances have thrust upon them, and though some repine, looking upon themselves as round pegs in square holes, and think that if things had been different they might have made a much better showing, the greater part accept their lot, if not with serenity, at all events with resignation. They are like train-cars travelling forever on the selfsame rails. They go backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards, inevitably, till they can go no longer and then are sold as scrap-iron. It is not often that you find a man who has boldly taken the course of his life into his own hands. When you do, it is worth while having a good look at him."
In the story, Wilson is asked, "Have you never regretted?", to which he replies, "Never. I've had my money's worth already. And I've got ten years more. Don't you think after twenty-five years of perfect happiness one ought to be satisfied to call it a day?" In short, when the money had run out he was going to commit suicide. As the author observed, "Wilson's plan was all right. There was only one flaw in it and this, I suppose, he could not have foreseen. It had never occurred to him that after twenty-five years of complete happiness, in this quiet backwater, with nothing in the world to disturb his serenity, his character would gradually lose its strength. The will needs obstacles in order to exercise its power; when it is never thwarted, when no effort is needed to achieve one's desires, because one has placed one's desires only in the things that can be obtained by stretching out one's hand, the will grows impotent. If you walk on a level all the time the muscles you need to climb a mountain will atrophy. These observations are trite, but there they are. When Wilson's annuity expired he had no longer the resolution to make the end which was the price he had agreed to pay for that long period of happy tranquility. I do not think, as far as I could gather, both from what my friend told me and afterwards from others, that he wanted courage. It was just that he couldn't make up his mind. He put it off from day to day."
I lost contact with the Austrian a long time ago and don't know if he's still living his lotus-eating existence, but I do know what happened to poor old Wilson. And so will you after you've read "The Lotus Eater".
Ich wanderte im Jahre 1965 vom (k)alten Deutschland nach Australien aus. In Erinnerung an das alte Sprichwort "Gott hüte mich vor Sturm und Wind und Deutschen die im Ausland sind" wurde ich in 1971 im Dschungel von Neu-Guinea australischer Staatsbürger. Das kostete mich nur einen Umlaut und das zweite n im Nachnamen - von -mann auf -man.
Australien gab mir eine zweite Sprache und eine zweite Chance und es war auch der Anfang und das Ende: nach fünfzig Arbeiten in fünfzehn Ländern - "Die ganze Welt mein Arbeitsfeld" - lebe ich jetzt im Ruhestand in Australien an der schönen Südküste von Neusüdwales.
Ich verbringe meine Tage mit dem Lesen von Büchern, segle mein Boot den Fluss hinunter, beschäftige mich mit Holzarbeit, oder mache Pläne für eine neue Reise.
This blog is written in the version of English that is standard here. So recognise is spelled recognise and not recognize etc. I recognise that some North American readers may find this upsetting, and while I sympathise with them, I sympathise even more with my countrymen who taught me how to spell. However, as an apology, here are a bunch of Zs for you to put where needed.
Zzzzzz
Disclaimer
This blog has no particular axe to grind, apart from that of having no particular axe to grind. It is written by a bloke who was born in Germany at the end of the war (that is, for younger readers, the Second World War, the one the Americans think they won single-handedly). He left for Australia when most Germans had not yet visited any foreign countries, except to invade them. He lived and worked all over the world, and even managed a couple of visits back to the (c)old country whose inhabitants he found very efficient, especially when it came to totting up what he had consumed from the hotels' minibars. In retirement, he lives (again) in Australia, but is yet to grow up anywhere.
He reserves the right to revise his views at any time. He might even indulge in the freedom of contradicting himself. He has done so in the past and will most certainly do so in the future. He is not persuading you or anyone else to believe anything that is reported on or linked to from this site, but encourages you to use all available resources to form your own opinions about important things that affect all our lives and to express them in accordance with Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Everything on this website, including any material that third parties may consider to be their copyright, has been used on the basis of “fair dealing” for the purposes of research and study, and criticism and review. Any party who feels that their copyright has been infringed should contact me with details of the copyright material and proof of their ownership and I will remove it.
And finally, don't bother trying to read between the lines. There are no lines - only snapshots, most out of focus.
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