Painting the south seas in words and images

In Search of Paradise by Graeme Lay. Photo / NZ Herald

This is a most instructive work. It is also a singularly seductive one. For it is at once both an exciting introduction to the field of Pacific history for anyone looking for somewhere to start, and a revitalising treatment of a major theme within that subject which will delight and gratify readers who might consider themselves already well-informed. It is opulently illustrated, has an authoritative and richly informed text and is clearly written.

As the sub-title indicates, Graeme Lay's topic is the imaginatively creative response - artistic and literary - of European writers to the Pacific and its peoples, particularly in Polynesia. He begins in the age of exploration, with Magellan on November 27, 1520: "It was like bursting into a new universe." From there he introduces the enduringly romantic image that derives most explicitly from Bougainville's visit to Tahiti in 1768.

So hospitable were the people there, having been roughly treated by the Englishman Wallis a few months before, that the Frenchman likened the island to Cythera, the home of Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love (Venus to the Romans).

Other voyagers whose reports helped reveal Polynesia to the world beyond, and reinforced that alluring impression, include James Cook, William Bligh and Charles Darwin. Then, more deliberately image- making, there were the artists. These range from Sydney Parkinson and William Hodges (who sailed with Cook) to Paul Gauguin (who died in the Marquesas in 1903).

In their works the South Pacific might have been idealised, and presented as a wondrously congenial place of escape, but that does not mean there is no substance in the images, as generations of tourists can cheerfully attest. It should also be remembered that the two dozen commentators presented in this book experienced and observed the Pacific at first hand, and there was no collusion in their reporting on it.

Next, beginning with Herman Melville who jumped ship at Nuku Hiva in 1842, Lay turns to "the writers" (although nearly all of his cast left some writings). This line of luminaries, which includes - among others - Robert Louis Stevenson, Rupert Brooke and Somerset Maugham, leads up to James Michener. The latter's realistic World War II novel Tales of the South Pacific (1947) became the famous Broadway musical South Pacific in 1949 and a Hollywood film in 1958.

Lay's technique in constructing this book has been to provide a biographical and critical essay on his various subjects and to illustrate his point with generous quotations from their literary remains and extended captions for the illustrations. The overall effect is to establish a pleasing harmony, maintain consistency and highlight linkages within a text that treats disparate individuals over a broad span of time and place. Some connections were deliberate. Thus in 1907 Jack London, inspired by Typee, which he had read as a child, sailed in search of Melville's landfall. And in 1917 Maugham was in Tahiti researching The Moon and Sixpence, his novel about Gauguin.

Another exoticist, less well-known to English readers, was the French writer Pierre Loti (pen-name of Louis Viaud), who is said to have some influence on Marcel Proust. His emotionally charged novel The Marriage of Loti (1880) tells of the frustrated love of a young sailor for a Tahitian girl and laments the decline of a traditional Arcadia in the face of European contact. Still, it drew Gauguin, that discontented Parisian stockbroker, to Tahiti in 1891.

Similarly, the previous year the tubercular but high-spirited Scotsman Stevenson had settled in Samoa. He continued to write fiction but, more significantly, quickly developed a marked affection for the local people and an informed sympathy for them in the entangled conflicts between the European powers trying to annex the group. From this emerged his account A Footnote to History: eight years of trouble in Samoa (1892). Of particular New Zealand interest, there are also stylish essays on Earle, Heaphy, Lindauer, and Samuel Butler.

In addition to their individual merits the segments of this book constitute a whole that is greater than the parts. To adopt a sporting image, exploring their common theme was kicked off by eminent scholars such as Bernard Smith and Bill Pearson, but with this book Lay has, like the forever-to-be-blessed William Webb Ellis of Rugby/rugby fame, "picked up the ball and run with it".

In Search of Paradise should be a strong contender for a literary award, for its design as well as its content. It will seduce anyone who opens it, no less than the Pacific islands have seduced so many of those who have come visiting.

In Search of Paradise: Artists and Writers in the Colonial South Pacific
By Graeme Lay (Godwit $90)

* Hugh Laracy teaches Pacific history at the University of Auckland.