PARADISE LOST

New Zealand Listener, Volume 28, Issue 717, 10 April 1953, Page 13

PARADISE LOST

| THE HAPPY ISLAND, by Bengt Danielsson; | Allen and Unwin. English price, 15’-. STARRY-EYED optimists who are | ™ sure than an island in the South Seas | must be a paradise on earth will find | disillusionment in this tale by the stew- | ard of the Kon-Tiki expedition, particularly in the concluding chapter. But in the meantime they will -have been | through many pages of excitement and | humour. Danielsson returned with his | wife to Raroia in the Tuamotu Group (on which the famous raft was wrecked) to spend 18 months which in some ways were carefree and idyllic but in others | dismaying; dismaying because they | found a community whose enemies were their own primitive ideas of economics and the encroachment of the outside world, Danielsson found the answer to South Sea dreamers crushingly simple. No foreigner would get official permission to settle on the island of Raroia; even if by some means he succeeded in getting permission, he would find nobody willing to sell him land. To try, as a last resource, to live without either land or income would be unthinkable, especially among people whose motto is "aita peapea" (it doesn’t. matter). The author discusses with feelings of alarm) the swelling stream of Chinese into Raroia | and gives a chapter to ways in which | (continued on page 15)

EB K$

(continued from page 13) the natives are exploited. He makes the gloomy forecast that in the end there will be Chinese domination of the type already found on many other islands of the Tuamotu Group. "However long we wrestle with the problem" (of Raroia’s future), Danielsson says sadly, "the conclusion is always the same: even if at some future time chance should enable us to return to Raroia, we shall never again find the same happy island."

E. R.

B.