Have you ever wanted to chuck it all and spend the rest of your life on a South Sea island? Every ten years or so a pied piper with a literary bend comes along and captures so perfectly the haunting sound of surf on a South Pacific reef that the dreams of every reader are refurbished, and not a few actually cast off their humdrm routines and set sail for Tahiti, Rarotonga, and points south. Men such as Conrad, Maugham, Michener, Nordhoff and Hall have been caught in the spell of the islands, and they in turn have written so convincingly and compellingly of the Polynesian paradise that there has been a steadily increasing flow of bewitched believers - a flow that included footloose, carefree, resolute individualist Julian Hillas, the author of the book "South Seas Paradise". In 1930, when the full weight of the Depression was felt round the world, Julian Hillas found himself in Sydney, Australia, with a wife (whom he had married more for convenience than anything else), a car, little money and no prospect of employment. An old silent movie called "White Shadow in the South Seas" was playing in the local theatres and after seeing it for the third time Mr Hillas liquidated his limited assets, left half with his wife, and booked passage for the islands of the South Pacific. He has been living in the Cook Islands ever since. "South Seas Paradise" is his warm, refreshing, unusually candid and ungilded account of a thirty-year holiday spent rewardingly, if not exactly idyllically, in the pursuit of happiness. As Julian Hillas relives the best years of his life, it's just possible the reader may decide to get aboard the next jet, liner, or banana boat and join him. Or us at VILLA MAMANA on tropical Telekivava'u.
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