Great Barrier Is. acclaimed in book

Press, 12 September 1983, Page 29

Great Barrier Is. acclaimed in book

NZPA staff correspondent London

Launching his latest book, “A World of Islands," the acclaimed novelist and travel writer, Leslie Thomas, described Great Barrier Island as “the most rewarding and most pleasant place I have visited.’’ After two years of research, visiting more than 30 islands, he has focused on relatively unknown islands as well as familiar ones around the globe, from Nantucket and Oshima to Capri and Corfu.

After being launched at New Zealand House, his book will be released simultaneously in Britain, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand by the publishers, Michael Joseph and Rainbird.

Full of anecdotes, descriptions, and lavish photography it presents itself as an armchair travel book for “island-haunted” people, a term he applies to himself. His own preference for Great Barrier is not easily

rationalised — “I guess I was tired, perhaps even homesick” — but it remains the island where he felt most at home. The Welshman had visited New Zealand several times before but he chose Great Barrier as one specific island he wanted to visit after reading extensively about it in other travel and history books. “It was interesting also because of a famous shipwreck (the Wairarapa, in 1894) and curiously enough was the first place in the world to have a

pigeon post,” he said. In his book, Great Barrier conjures up the ideal of an island, a world which in itself evokes a sense of paradise and desolation with the inevitable isolation.

It is introduced by Robert Louis Stevenson's lines: “Of bird song at morning and star shine at night, I will make a palace fit for you and me of green days in forest and blue days at sea.”

Mr Thomas refers to the “enclosed quietness . . .

empty and exquisite coasts” and the island’s inaccessibility with a certain outlandishness.

to cite one example, he found the gangster Al Capone’s Chrysler Imperial being used as a local taxi though now it has been shipped back to the United States.

“Stories seem to grow in such places as this” with “outlandish chances that make a writer’s life worth living.” He seldom restricts himself to writing only about travel, usually writing a novel in tangent with his voyages. His renown as an author was established with his first novel, “The Virgin Soldiers,” published in 1966, and later made into a film.