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Sydney Morning Herald - Sydney,New South Wales,Australia



An isolated group of islands in French Polynesia provides balm for Craig Tansley's soul.

"Hurrah my lads, it's a settled thing, we shape our course to them: the Marquesas! What strange visions of outlandish things does the very name spirit up! ... Cannibal banquets - groves of cocoa-nut - coral reefs - tattooed chiefs and bamboo temples ... carved canoes dancing on the flashing blue waters - savage woodlands guarded by horrible idols - heathenish rites and human sacrifices ..."From Herman Melville's novel Typee, 1846.

In the Marquesas Islands, it's more auspicious to be born male because the choicest cut of meat on the body is said to be the female forearm; it's juicy and tender and is mostly devoid of fat and sinew. The victim is baked like pork, rolled up in banana leaves between hot stones in an earth oven, called an umu pae. The flesh tastes sweet, apparently; like sweet potato. The Marquesans I've met so far seem far more partial to pork, fish, even corn chips - the last known practising cannibal died about 60 years ago - yet I don't find it difficult at all to imagine lost tribes of cannibals living somewhere deep in these largely inaccessible islands. Here, where chunky Polynesians with full facial tattoos still fish the seas and work the land, where forests are full of ancient stone walls, altar-like structures, tikis, carvings and petroglyphs, beside ancient banyan trees filled with human skulls, anything seems possible.

The Marquesas seem the ultimate adventurer's paradise; an archipelago that so inspired some of history's great creative minds that they chose to live, and some to die, here. Characters such as Herman Melville (author of Moby-Dick ), who absconded from his whaling boat to live with cannibals in the forests of Nuku Hiva, and Robert Louis Stevenson, who decided upon seeing the majestic Anaho Bay on the island of Nuku Hiva that he must live out his days in Polynesia. The grave of the troubled French artist Paul Gauguin can be found on the tiny island of Hiva Oa, next to the Belgian singer Jacques Brel. The writer Jack London came here and the adventurer Thor Heyerdahl came to live in the forests of Fatu Hiva in 1936 with his 20-year-old Norwegian bride. "There we could make our experience. Go back to the forests. Abandon modern times. The culture. The civil. Leap thousands of years into the past. To the way of life of early man. To life itself in its fullest and simplest form," he wrote in Fatu Hiva: Back To Nature.