COUNTLESS THOUSANDS of international travellers have seen the Pacific – through the windows of a jet liner cruising at 11,000 metres. Far fewer have seen it at sea level, or visited some of the scores of high islands and atolls which are strewn across Earth’s largest ocean like constellations in a watery universe. Just to fly over this universe is to miss a great deal, for each of the inhabited islands of the Pacific is a miniature world, with its own distinctive culture and way of life. The Miss Tutti Frutti Contest is about my exploration of some of these island worlds and my encounters with some of their inhabitants.
My fascination with islands began long before I ever went to one. As a boy growing up in a small town on the rocky, windswept Taranaki coast, the sea became an intimate part of my life. Rock-pool exploration, fishing, swimming, surfing: all these activities brought me into close contact with the sea. And as an avid reader from early boyhood, the books I read – sea adventure stories, mainly – reflected this intimacy. If the story was set on an island, I found it irresistible. I remember in particular reading and re-reading my father’s copy of The Coral Island, by R. M. Ballantyne, along with Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island and Enid Blyton’s Five on a Treasure Island. In my imagination, islands were places of romance and adventure, exotic locations with infinite possibilities.
When I first visited the islands of the South Pacific as an adult twenty years ago, I was in no way disappointed by what I found there. The islands’ shores, reefs, lagoons and forests captivated me. From their coasts or mountains the Pacific Ocean’s beauty and changing moods could be readily observed: silken and docile one day, tempestuous and threatening the next. And every day, spellbinding.
Added to these natural attractions were the people I encountered, the locals as well as the often bizarre outsiders who had made the Pacific their adopted home. The indigenous cultures reached back into the sea mists of prehistory. There were languages which had been spoken for thousands of years, songs, dances and art which traced their history, and whose appeal was alluring. Superimposed on these traditional cultures was the introduced way of life of the Europeans and Asians – men mainly – who had come to the South Pacific for a variety of reasons, some honourable, some not. The subsequent blending of these cultures and peoples has produced something unique and special in the islands of the South Pacific.
The stories in this book are the collected accounts of many separate journeys taken over the last decade, at times conflated to iron out the creases. They are intended primarily to entertain, but if readers become informed as well, that will be gratifying. The collection confines itself to the islands of tropical Polynesia – rather than the other great Pacific cultural spheres of Melanesia and Micronesia – because it is in Polynesia that this writer’s interest lies. It is not intended to be a guidebook; there are many of those already available. Instead, it tries to convey some of the enchantment and surprise I have found when visiting the islands of the South Pacific – islands best savoured not from high in the air, but with feet firmly on the ground or dipped in the warm ocean waters.
GRAEME LAY
May 2004