I am an Australian writer with a passion for all books about the South Pacific. Thirty years ago, I embarked on a two-year mission to the Kingdom of Tonga, and soon after, my job as a naturalist on cruise ships took me to many beautiful, fascinating, and often very remote island nations in that region. Nowadays, my jobs as a writer, scientist, high school teacher, and mother leave little room to navigate to that beautiful part of the world, but I continue to read whatever seems even slightly related to the South Pacific Theme. I hope you enjoy the books on this list as much as I have!
I wrote
Volcanic Adventures in Tonga: Species Conservation on Tin Can Island
This book evoked so many memories from my life in Tonga.
Prior’s humorous accounts of his travels in this island kingdom brought back to me the laidback lifestyle, the flexibility one needs to have when living and traveling in “Tongan Time”, the different foods, customs, and attitudes, and most of all, the friendliness of the people. Having been there myself, one thing was clear: Prior did experience the real Tonga.
And having visited several uninhabited islands there, I especially enjoyed the vivid descriptions of his breakaway to a deserted island, which was full of adventure, tropical bliss, and unexpected hiccups. Simply Tonga as it lives and breathes!
When Simon and Fiona embark on a quest to track down the Queen of Tonga, they have no idea they’ll end up marooned on a desert island.
No idea they’ll encounter an undiscovered tribe, rescue a drowning actress, learn jungle survival from a commando, and attend cultural ceremonies few Westerners have seen.
As they find out who hooks up, who breaks up, who cracks up, and who throws up, will they fulfil Simon’s ambition to see the queen, or will they be distracted by insomniac chickens, grunting wild piglets, and the easy-going Tongan lifestyle?
When I first learnt that I would embark on a two-year expedition to Tonga, I knew nothing about that part of the world.
Theroux’s book brought it so much closer and opened up my eyes to many different aspects of the history and culture of South Pacific islands. I also admired Theroux for his endurance when he paddled his way from one island to the next.
The author of The Great Railway Bazaar explores the South Pacific by kayak: “This exhilarating epic ranks with [his] best travel books” (Publishers Weekly).
In one of his most exotic and adventuresome journeys, travel writer Paul Theroux embarks on an eighteen-month tour of the South Pacific, exploring fifty-one islands by collapsible kayak. Beginning in New Zealand's rain forests and ultimately coming to shore thousands of miles away in Hawaii, Theroux paddles alone over isolated atolls, through dirty harbors and shark-filled waters, and along treacherous coastlines.
Along the way, Theroux meets the king of Tonga, encounters street gangs in Auckland, and…
The Good Woman's Guide to Making Better Choices
by
Liz Foster,
A heart-warming and hilarious novel about the highs and lows of marriage, fraud, and goat’s cheese.
Libby Popovic is a country girl who’s now living a golden life in Bondi with her confident financier husband Ludo, and their two children. When Ludo is jailed for financial fraud, and Libby’s friends…
Having lived with Polynesian people on remote islands for 17 months, I always wondered where they originally came from and how their fascinating culture evolved.
This book enlightened me as it beautifully describes how the earliest Polynesians reached these far-away islands with amazing seafarer skills but no written tradition or metal tools at hand. I came across this book when it won the 2020 Australian Prime Minister’s Literary Award for nonfiction and can only agree that it is very well-researched and written in an easy-to-understand way.
A blend of Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel and Simon Winchester's Pacific, a thrilling intellectual detective story that looks deep into the past to uncover who first settled the islands of the remote Pacific, where they came from, how they got there, and how we know.
For more than a millennium, Polynesians have occupied the remotest islands in the Pacific Ocean, a vast triangle stretching from Hawaii to New Zealand to Easter Island. Until the arrival of European explorers they were the only people to have ever lived there. Both the most closely related and the most widely dispersed…
Although this book is set in 1952, I picked it because I have a soft spot for Easter Island. In the 1990s, when working on a cruise ship, I was fortunate enough to visit this remote place and was deeply fascinated by the Moai statues and how society can function so far from the mainland.
Dr. Verdugo, a doctor recruited to the island, gives a vivid account of the culture shock he experienced there, and the carefree, simple culture of the locals. This mirrored my own experience on Tin Can Island in Tonga, as did his insights into the importance of family ties, tradition, and the solitude one experiences on such a remote island.
LIFE AND SOLITUDE IN EASTER ISLAND. The exotic Easter Island: Isla de Pascua as it's known to Chileans, Rapa Nui as it's known to the natives, and Te Pito O Te Henua to their ancestors who erected the mysterious moai statues which placidly stand guard throughout this most isolated island on Earth. Although Easter Island is still a rustic place by current standards, today you'll find running water, electricity, money, plus other amenities, and a growing population of several thousand, most of whom came from the mainland. But a mere 50 years ago, Easter Island had none of these. In…
The Pianist's Only Daughter
by
Kathryn Betts Adams,
ThePianist's Only Daughter is a frank, humorous, and heartbreaking exploration of aging in an aging expert's own family.
Social worker and gerontologist Kathryn Betts Adams spent decades negotiating evolving family dynamics with her colorful and talented parents: her mother, an English scholar and poet, and her father, a pianist…
I read this book before we embarked on a two-year mission to Tonga, and it created in me a picture of the South Pacific that proved to be somewhat misleading – largely because I didn’t pay enough attention to the fact that it was set in the 1700s and on Tahiti, which is quite different from Tonga.
Nevertheless, it was worth reading. First, because it is still a thrilling story, even after so many years. And second, because little did I know that some months later I would travel on rickety rusty fishing boats to visit remote islands at roughly the same location where the mutiny on the Bounty had occurred about 200 years before me.
The version I read was published in 1980 (by Sir John D Barrow), but I recommend this version as it makes the topic more accessible. It is a piece of South Pacific history that every traveler to this area should know about.
The mutiny on HMS Bounty, in the South Pacific on 28 April 1789, is one of history's great epics - and in the hands of Peter FitzSimons it comes to life as never before.
Commissioned by the Royal Navy to collect breadfruit plants from Tahiti and take them to the West Indies, the Bounty's crew found themselves in a tropical paradise. Five months later, they did not want to leave. Under the leadership of Fletcher Christian most of the crew mutinied soon after sailing from Tahiti, setting Captain William Bligh and 18 loyal crewmen adrift in a small open boat.…
A real-life travel adventure that takes you to the remotest islands in the remotest South Pacific nation on Earth. When Ann and her boyfriend leave their world behind and embark on an expedition to save a unique volcano bird in Tonga, they are unaware of the challenges lying ahead: a simple existence while being stuck on far-away islands, learning about local traditions that few Westerners have encountered, and eating things not part of many people’s diet. Their mission takes them to volcanoes about to erupt and coral cays rarely visited by most people. Will they be able to help save the bird from extinction, or will they be absorbed by the hidden wonders and harsh realities of life on a remote tropical island?
Tap Dancing on Everest, part coming-of-age memoir, part true-survival adventure story, is about a young medical student, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor raised in N.Y.C., who battles self-doubt to serve as the doctor—and only woman—on a remote Everest climb in Tibet.
We Had Fun and Nobody Died
by
Amy T. Waldman,
Peter Jest,
This irreverent biography provides a rare window into the music industry from a promoter’s perspective. From a young age, Peter Jest was determined to make a career in live music, and despite naysayers and obstacles, he did just that, bringing national acts to his college campus atUW-Milwaukee, booking thousands of…
