An Island to Oneself: The remarkable story of a Kiwi’s 16 years alone on a remote Pacific atoll

Sunday, 29 September 2024

Tom Neale spent 16 years living alone on Suwarrow Island, a remote Cook Islands atoll, where he was self-sufficient.

New Zealander Tom Neale did what millions dream of, and lived alone on a tropical island. The little-known story of his remarkable life on Suwarrow Island is about to be retold, with a new edition of Neale’s classic book. Mike White reports.

For company, he had two cats, Mrs Thievery and Mr Tom-Tom.

There were chickens free-ranging in the bush, ferocious coconut crabs, and five feral pigs.

There were thousands of swirling seabirds, a lagoon full of fish, and one windblown wild duck.

And that was it.

Suwarrow is more than 300km from the nearest inhabited island.

That was everything Tom Neale had to share his remote Pacific island with.

He’d thought about taking a radio with him in 1952 when he set out for Suwarrow Island, 900km north of Rarotonga, 320km from the next inhabited island.

But Neale feared he’d miss this fragile link with the world beyond his coral atoll when its batteries died. Better unalterable solace.

So he stayed cut off, self-sufficient, supremely contented.

It was an existence many dreamt of, but a life Neale had actively sought for years.

He wasn’t marooned by ill-fate, or a shipwrecked castaway. He wasn’t a grudging Crusoe figure.

Tom Neale’s happiest times were watching sunset from the beach on Suwarrow.

He wanted to live this way.

He was the happiest man in the world, albeit on the edge of a world he’d left behind.

Neale grew up in Timaru, but went to sea as an 18-year-old, joining the navy in 1921, and travelling the Pacific from the hellish bowels of ships where he stoked steam engines.

After four years, he quit, jaded by a circuit of South Seas ports with their rusty machinery and raucous bars.

Instead, he wanted to see the real islands, and eventually settled in Moorea, near Tahiti, which he considered “the nearest thing on earth to paradise”.

But work took him to the Cook Islands, where he met American writer Robert Dean Frisbie.

It was Frisbie who told Neale of Suwarrow (or Suvarov as it was then known), an atoll so spectacular, Robert Louis Stevenson’s wife, Fanny, described it as the most romantic island in the world.

Frisbie had lived there for nearly a year, and enchanted Neale with stories of its 80km curving coral reef, and a lagoon 10km across pocked with 20 islets, the largest of which was just 800 metres long.

In 1952, Neale had 79 pounds to his name when he heard of a trading boat passing near Suwarrow. The captain said he’d take Neale there for 30 pounds, leaving the remainder of his meagre savings to buy everything he needed for a life alone.

Everything from a crowbar to copper nails; flour to fish-hooks; coffee beans for a year; two dozen razor blades; 12 dozen boxes of matches; 20 gallons of kerosene; four tubes of toothpaste; six pairs of sandshoes; and an extensive selection of seeds.

He packed novels by Dickens; Mutiny on the Bounty; a diary; and a calendar.

At the end of it all, Neale was left with just five shillings and eight pence in the pocket of his khaki shorts as he stood on Rarotonga’s docks, ready to embark.

He was nearly 50, and the thought of getting sick or injured while far from rescue had inevitably crossed his mind.

Suwarrow was described by Robert Louis Stevenson’s wife, Fanny, as the most romantic island in the world.

“But I couldn’t allow myself to be afraid, otherwise I might just as well go back to storekeeping,” Neale wrote.

And when he arrived at Suwarrow, and walked up the overgrown path to a shack 50m from the beach, Neale knew he’d been right to ignore anxiety.

“I was quite sure I had broken free.”

Years of working on ships and throughout Pacific islands meant Neale could cope with nearly anything, from sustenance to cyclones.

He could spear fish, thatch a roof, keep an eternal fire, and build a garden from scant topsoil.

Tom Neale described himself as a “handyman incarnate”, and was able to make or fix anything he needed.

He made a paint brush from rope, a rake from palm fronds, and candles from wax washed ashore on Suwarrow.

In the evenings, he would take a bowl of tea to the beach, watch the sunset, light a fire, and cook the fish he’d caught for his cats.

When they’d finished, they would curl up on his lap.

“I was entirely content,” Neale recalled. “Nothing could seem more perfect.”

But two years after he arrived on Suwarrow, Neale badly injured his back.

Fantastic fortune in the form of a rare passing yacht saw him rescued, but Neale cursed his fate and having to leave his island.

For him, living on Suwarrow wasn’t a temporary adventure, “it was something infinitely bigger - a whole way of life.”

Back in Rarotonga, Neale had to wear trousers, was captive to a clock, and found himself nauseated by petrol fumes.

It was six years before he could return to Suwarrow, Cook Islands’ bureaucracy stymieing his plans, his savings slow to accumulate.

But in April 1960, an American sailor offered to take him back, and this time Neale towed a small boat he’d built, on the 11-day voyage.

People inevitably, and ceaselessly, asked Neale why he was going back.

“I returned because I couldn’t keep away from the place,” Neale remembered. “My reasons for loving Suvarov have always been as uncomplicated as that.”

In the three-and-a-half years of his second stint on Suwarrow, only six yachts called by. He once went 14 months without human contact.

But he was never lonely. The only reason he craved company was “just because all this beauty seemed too perfect to keep to myself”.

Tom Neale grating coconuts on Suwarrow. In the background is the boat he built.

Nor did he miss the luxuries modernity and civilisation tempted him with.

“It was a price I had long ago decided I was not interested in paying.”

But just after Christmas 1963, Neale decided to leave Suwarrow, mainly because a group of pearl divers had relocated there, destroying his peace.

“I realised I was getting on, and the prospect of a lonely death did not particularly appeal to me.

“The time had come to wake up from an exquisite dream, before it turned into a nightmare.”

But Neale couldn’t stay away.

Tom Neale was fastidious about keeping his house clean, sweeping it out twice a day, and boiling his sheets every week.

In July 1967, he once again went back to Suwarrow, and this time stayed 10 years.

The year before, he had published a book about his Suwarrow life, An Island to Oneself, in part to pay for his return, and it became a classic tale of escape and survival.

But there was a price to pay, as more yachties sought out Suwarrow, media wrote stories about him, and letters arrived on his atoll.

“The world is beating its track to my door, dammit,” Neale wrote.

The monument to Tom Neale on Suwarrow Island.

This time he had taken a radio. But he didn’t much like the news it brought him each evening when he tuned in, so it often stayed silent.

In March 1977, crew of a passing yacht discovered Neale suffering from stomach pain, and he was evacuated.

Neale thought he would be back within a month, but died of cancer in Rarotonga later that year, shortly after his 75th birthday.

In some ways, Neale became better known abroad than in New Zealand, with so many around the world envying his freedom, and inspired by his fortitude.

An Island to Oneself made the universal dream of desert island escape a reality, and was translated into French, German, Norwegian and Dutch. There are illegal versions in Italian and Chinese.

One of those who came to know Neale was famed mariner Bernard Moitessier.

After Neale’s death, Moitessier sailed to Suwarrow and erected a coral monument to him, engraving the inscription: “Tom Neale lived his dream on this island.”

But there was more to Tom Neale than idyllic isolation - another aspect untold in the pages of his book.

Tom Neale had a wife and children.

Tom Neale, aged eight, and his daughter, Stella Neale, when she was six.

Between his first and second trips to Suwarrow, Neale married Sarah Marsters from Palmerston Island, another remote Cooks atoll.

They had two children, Arthur and Stella.

The plan had been for the family to return to Suwarrow, but the authorities barred Neale from taking the children.

After the marriage foundered, Neale decided to go alone.

Stella Neale with her daughters, Sarah-Elyss, left, and Elizabeth, Tom Neale's granddaughters.

When people learn of this, they often hasten to judge Neale for an act of stupendous selfishness, abandoning his family and fleeing his responsibilities.

Not so fast, warns Stella Neale, now 66.

One of her first memories of her father was when she was five, and he returned from his second stint on Suwarrow. She still remembers the taste of the raspberry soft drink he bought her on the way home from Rarotonga’s wharves.

But one of her toughest memories is when her father sailed back to Suwarrow three years later, the hardest of goodbyes, and the hurt that came as his ship closed on the horizon, till it disappeared.

By that time, the relationship between her parents was fractured and fractious, and it wasn’t easy for Neale to see his children.

Nearly 50 years on, Stella now understands her father’s actions more clearly.

“He chose to go back to Suwarrow to live because that was where home was. And if my brother and I couldn’t be with him all the time, then he might as well be back where it was home for him.

“So I don’t begrudge the decision he made.

“But in some ways, I’m still that little girl, saying goodbye to him.”

To Stella, Tom Neale was just her father, an ordinary man.

Arthur and Stella Neale, Tom Neale's children from his marriage to Sarah Marsters. Tom Neale had another son, John, from a previous relationship, who died in 1975.

But in the last 20 years, she has come to appreciate the extraordinary things he did, and be proud of him.

“There was something in him that saw an opportunity, and decided to go for it.”

She bridles when people reach for simple stereotypes, and describe her father as a loner, a recluse, a hermit.

Those who knew him talk of someone “who was funny, who was caring, who was lively”, Stella says.

“People who call him a hermit do him a disservice, because that makes you think of someone who pulls away from human contact, who has no heart - and he was not that.”

Neale penned screeds of letters to Stella and Arthur while he was on Suwarrow, details of his days scrawled on page after page of cursive, which Stella spent weeks deciphering.

She always felt loved by him, despite not being with him.

The story of Stella’s relationship with her father is finally and fully told as an epilogue to a new publication of An Island to Oneself, launched this week.

In the extra chapter, Stella lends context to her father’s life, while dispelling myths and misconceptions.

She had always hoped her father’s book would be republished, and is thrilled his experiences are being brought back to life for new generations.

The new edition came about when a sales rep and keen sailor at publisher HarperCollins complained to her boss, Alex Hedley, that she couldn’t find Neale’s book anywhere.

She had read it years ago, and wanted a copy for her son, but the only one was in the depths of Auckland Library’s reference section.

Hedley eventually located a second-hand copy in America, which he paid US$100 (NZ$158) for.

“And I read it in one sitting, and just loved it.

“I thought, a story like this wouldn’t happen nowadays. If you got the flu while you were on a desert island you could punch in GPS coordinates and someone would come and get you.”

Hedley couldn’t believe Neale’s book wasn’t still in print, and was also surprised Neale wasn’t better known, so decided to give An Island to Oneself another life.

“It’s a classic adventure story, and a survival story. It’s not an easy thing to do, to survive on a desert island for that length of time.

“But it took a Kiwi to do it.”

Stella Neale was 19 when her father died.

Ironically, he’s buried beside a busy road in Rarotonga, near the airport - far from the serenity of Suwarrow.

She often visits his grave, leaving flowers and rekindled memories.

She has only one photo with her father.

It’s from when she visited him on Suwarrow, the year before he died. It’s not displayed anywhere, because she doesn’t like how she looks, her hair awry and amok after a three-day voyage.

The cover of the new edition of Tom Neale's classic 1966 book, An Island to Oneself.

If there was distance between them during much of their lives, it has shrunk, with Stella now following a path similar to her father.

In October, she will leave Rarotonga for Palmerston Island, where her mother came from, and where Stella was born.

Its population will increase to 27 with her arrival.

After years nursing in the Cook Islands and New Zealand, Stella is now retired, and wants a simpler, quieter life.

So she increasingly understands how her father felt, and why he had to keep returning to Suwarrow, despite what he had to leave behind.

“There was something about that island that pulled him and drew him there.

“Because when home pulls you, you can’t ignore it.

“And home for him was Suwarrow.

“And home for me is Palmerston.”

What do you think? Email sundayletters@stuff.co.nz. Please include your full name and address.

An Island to Oneself, by Tom Neale (HarperCollins, $45) is republished on October 2.