Anybody who spent time in New Guinea would have read the Pacific Islands Monthly and heard of Errol Flynn, writer, adventurer, con-man, screen star, Don Juan, frustrated in marriage and career, butt of sexual jokes and sly smirks ("in like Flynn"), bouts with disease, drink, and drugs, and then suddenly death in 1959 at the age of fifty.
He lived a fast life but left behind some revealing introspections:
"I am going to front the essentials of life to see if I can learn what it has to teach and above all not to discover when I come to die, that I have not lived.
We fritter our lives away in detail, but I am not going to do this. I am going to live deeply, to acknowledge not one of the so-called social forces which hold our lives in thrall & reduce us to economic dependency. The best part of life is spent earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it.
I am going ... to drive life into a corner & reduce it to its lowest terms and if I find it mean than I'll know its meanness, and if I find it sublime I shall know it by experience --- and not make wistful conjectures about it conjured up by illustrated magazines."
Errol Flynn most certainly "fronted up" to life, spent money as fast as he earned it (and then some), and learned about life from first-hand experience.
Here are some pages from PIM's May 1977 issue which I found on the Errol Flynn Blog:
