Islands of the Imagination

I love islands -- I mean REALLY love them... perhaps in an unnatural way. Just writing about them -- just mentioning them -- makes my hands shake with excitement. Yes, they're shaking involuntarily right now. I'm missing every second key because I'm too island orgasmic to concentrate. Get a hold of yourself, you island-ridden fuck!

A recently published book on the subject of remote islands (my favorite kind!) is a publishing watershed. There has never been anything quite like this book. Probably never will again.

Movies about islands destroy me with their dramatic, sexual, and savage possibilities. An island is a world divorced from continents, divorced from the rule of law, divorced from all that is orderly, conservative, and determined to get in the way of sundry forms of mischief and raw animalism.

My island fetish, surely the most alarming of all fetishes because it will kill me one day, probably began with my reading of RM Ballantyne's The Coral Island.  This book, the Daddy-O of juvenile island adventures, had me combing through atlases to plan my escape from civilization -- and my parents' house. Going against me was the fact that I was eight year's old, but age was no barrier to my dreaming, at least.

Gilligan's Island was around more than my dad when I was growing up. The Skipper, well, he was a second dad, and he didn't hit near as hard as my first one. He did swipe Gilligan with his cap now and then, but those swipes were a loving, caring thing. Gilligan made island life look like fun. He got to drive a pedal-powered car between the palm trees,  meet Japanese submariners who spoke Stereotype, hang oit with jungle boys played by Kurt Russell, meet inventors, and hang out with farm girls in short shorts.

Despite my passion for Gilligan's piece of heaven, my parallel preference was for islands of danger, gore, and dismemberment -- naturall, I was all over 'Danger Island', a segment of the TV show Banana Splits. This anarchic gem featured a bunch of multi-colored everyday folks -- including Jan Michael Vincent sans bottle -- being chased across a hostile island by angry, chortling, spear-waving savages. Often directed by future bigshot director Richard Donner, this was one fantastic island where the excitement never stopped.

In Dennis Gifford's boyhood bible of horror, Horror Movies, I got my first look at images from several island films including The Island of Dr. Moreau, The Mad Doctor of Blood Island, Isle of the Dead, and Island of Terror. It became clear to me very early on in life that islands were where it's at, man, they were the place to be if you craved the kind of fun you can only have without your parnets. Clearly, I wasn't the only one who grooved on the very idea of islands -- Filipino filmmaker Eddie Romero set a whole stew of movies on islands with his 'Blood Island' pictures.

Author of Jaws, Peter Benchley, had island flu, too, because he wrote The Island, a cracking good yarn about a mysterious island located in the Bermuda Triangle that was a secret hideway for pirates from another century . Universal made a fun film of the movie, and though it's not available on DVD in the US, it is available in Australia, Germany, and other more island-friendly nations. It even stars Michael Caine, clearly another island connoisseur.

British scribe Guy N. Smith wrote a novel titled The Island in '88. Set on 'Ulver Island', it cut quickly to the nitty-gritty of island life love by introducing a bevy of beautiful ladies, hussies all,  to a romantic mixture of death, doom, and island inhospitality.

The possibilities are limitless on islands. I never grow tired of these lonely patches of land in some godforsaken sea a thousand miles south of nowhere and a hundred clicks north of Fuck You All.



Goat fucking gets pride of place in Nico Mastorakis's Island of Death, another gem of an island film involving the adventures of two incestuous siblings with homicidal tendencies. Then there's the fetus-eating island treats of Joe D'Amato's Anthropophagus. Not the greatest film ever made, but another vote for island hopping and bopping. D'Amato, unable to resist the pull of the concept, stuck around for more sleazy island screwing in the underappreciated Porno Holocaust. Crikey, visiting islands is like having a gory, horny Xmas every day of the year. 

Filmmakers and novelists do not tire of islands, and neither they should. Richard Laymon served up his  own Island with geysers of blood; TM Wright gave us Children of the Island (the island being Manhattan in this case) and The Island (both classics!), and Scott O'Dell got serious about islands and island life in Island of the Blue Dolphins. Japanese filmmaker Kaneto Shindo went island mad, too, with his The Naked Island, a film documenting the infernal hardships of island life over a one year period.

The modern grandpappy of island movies is Battle Royale, a masterpiece that contrasts brutal killing with shimmering island vistas.  I can't watch the film without wanting to join those kids on that amazing island, the very same where Spielberg shot Jurassic Park.

Islands connect with our lust for adventure and touch something deep within us that is primal and private. We yearn in varying degrees for the freedom an island implies, even if that freedom is rarely achieved in the stories that shape us... or in reality.

My island reality is that I have spent a total of two weeks on a couple of uninhabited islands in Indonesia. Accompanied by cans of sardines, water and a local boatman's promise that he would remember to pick me up after my two week, it was a trying but amazing experience.

Lying at the base of my Aussie homeland is the continent's only island state, Tasmania. Although Tasmania has the population of a small city and looks like a vagina prior to a Brazilian, its geographical location still sets my dreams soaring, and I'm certain that it is in Tasmania where I will spend my final days.

Although my preferred final crash pad is Tristan de Cunha...

... island living there is by family invite only, so my chances of landing feet first and permanent there are as remote as the place itself.

Which brings me full circle to the publishing watershed that is Judith Schalansky's Atlas of Remote Islands, a Penguin hardcover originally published in 2009, but re-published with English translation by Christine Lo in 2010.

Last year was a year of amazing non-fiction such as Mark W. Moffett's Adventures Among Ants (fuck me, what a book!), Marcus Hearn's The Art of Hammer (as good as first time sex), Jimmy McDonough's Big Bosoms and Square Jaws (not published in 2010, but read that year by me), the 10th anniversary edition of Stephen King's On Writing, and Mike Howlett's The Weird World of Creepy Publications. For mine, though, the Atlas of Remote Islands was and remains my favorite non-fiction book of the last twelve months.

"Fifty Islands I Have Never Set Foot On and Never Will" is how Schalansky prefaces her mini-essays on close to fifty ultra-remote islands in regions encompassing the Arctic Ocean, the Atlantic, the Indian, the Pacific, and Antartica.

In the Pacific, which boasts the world's most remote landfalls, she writes about Napuka, Pingelap, Pitcairn, St. George Island, and Tikopia, "an island so small that breaking waves can be heard from its (center)". The writer's descriptions of each island are sourced from historical narrative, scientific records,  and legend, and she succeeds in creating in us, her readers, a desperate hunger to explore these almost intangible lands, lands so far off the beaten shipping lane that imagining them is akin to conjuring life on another planet.

Accompanying each island's micro-history is, of course, a lovingly rendered map, and it is these maps that have held me hypnotized since I cracked opened the book's first pages.

This impeccably presented, essential volume is one to carry with you at all times. It has rarely left my side or leather pouch since landing on my modest domestic island close to six months ago.

Writer Beth Simmons, who writes for gonomad.com, recently interviewed the book's author, Judith Schalansky, and learned that she grew up in East Germany where she was confined, as a child, to its strict geographical and political boundaries. This national suppression of wanderlust triggered in Judith her a love of atlases and the worlds they paint so painstakingly.    

This amazing little tome is a dreamer's Holy Grail, and an inexpensive ticket to worlds of rare wonder.

The Brave Ballantyne

I have read and re-read R.M. Ballantyne's The Coral Island (1857) every year for the last thirty-eight. There is no experience quite like it.

It had a profound impact on me in 1970, giving me an undying lust for adventure, and its impact has not diminished in the thirty-nine years since; on the contrary, every time I voyage once again into the deceptive, yellowed pages of its rich, vivid world, I am moved to tears of rapturous joy -- the joy of life's potential.

I use the word "deceptive" to describe the author's words because the book's true magic, weaved like time itself into the fibrous threads of its soft, scented pulp, is not immediately apparent.

Such is the remarkable penmanship of the great Scottish wordsmith.

The Coral Island is a celebration of life, and a reminder that we must seek to drive life, not let it drive us.

"With beating hearts we went forward."

Although Ballantyne's reputation has been dusted over by time and the unavailability of much of his published work, his legend is monumental.

Robert Louis Stevenson's affection for the South Seas and inspiration for Treasure Island is directly attributable to his reading of The Coral Island at fifteen years of age. In the foreword to Treasure Island, Stevenson acknowledged his debt to Ballantyne and anointed him with the title "Ballantyne The Brave".


He paid his respects to Ballantyne with the following poem in Treasure Island's foreword:

To the Hesitating Purchaser

If sailor tales to sailor tunes,

Storm and adventure, heat and cold,

If schooners, islands, and maroons,

And buccaneers, and buried gold,

And all the old romance, retold

Exactly in the ancient way,

Can please, as me they pleased of old,

The wiser youngsters of today:

So be it, and fall on! If not,

If studious youth no longer crave,

His ancient appetites forgot,

Kingston, or Ballantyne the brave,

Or Cooper of the wood and wave:

So be it, also! And may I

And all my pirates share the grave

Where these and their creations lie!

"One came in on the crest of the wave."

Eric Quayle, author of The Collector’s Book of Boy’s Stories, said this of Ballantyne's characters:

"(They) rescued helpless natives from a cruel death at the hands of cannibals, or dashed through smoke and flames to the side of the swooning heroine, or plunged without a moment's hesitation into the shark infested waters for the sake of an injured friend. And, at the end of their courageous display of selfless devotion to duty, they modestly refused to accept any thanks from the victims of the drama other than perhaps a firm shake of a gratefully outstretched hand of the one who had been snatched from the jaws of a fearful death.

"His snout rose above the water."

When the author passed away in 1894, the grieving schoolboys of Victorian England rushed to canonize their most admired writer of fiction. Writes Eric Quayle:

The immense popularity of the scores of books he had written for the young men of his day had created a legend regarding their author that made them eager to subscribe to what they hoped would be a lasting monument to perpetuate his name. Led by the boys of Harrow School, a movement started almost immediately when the news of his death reached England. They voted to raise a fund to erect a marble edifice so that later generations would remember the name of the man who had brought them so many hours of excitement and pleasure. Within a few months, over six hundred pounds ($1,440) had been collected in schools throughout the country, mostly in hard won pennies and sixpence from the pockets of teenage boys. Such a spontaneous gesture by the impecunious schoolboys of Victoria's Britain is without precedent and nothing of similar nature has ever occurred from that day onwards.

"A heavy hand grasped my shoulder."

William Golding's Lord of the Flies ('54), JM Barrie's Peter Pan (1904), and Danny Boyle's The Beach (2000) owe great debts of gratitude to Ballantyne, as do the countless writers and filmmakers who turned desert island fiction into its own sub-genre.

The edition I first read and continue to read was gifted to me indirectly by my great grandfather in 1909, and passed down the line until it found purchase on my mother's bookshelf.

I remember seeing its distinct spine one rainy Saturday afternoon and reaching up to grasp it.

By Sunday night, I had read it, and it had lit in me a lifelong compulsion to explore and experience remote atolls, coastal caves, uninhabited islands, and inaccessible escarpments.

What can be seen of Ballantyne's influence on me is captured in the sampling of photographs of adventures I have undertaken (see below); what is unseen (but heartfelt) is the curiosity and passion for everything exotic I now possess which the author bestowed upon me.





The book's preface, penned by the fifteen year old narrator Ralph Rover, who is shipwrecked on a deserted island with two other boys, sets the tone of the adventure to come, almost daring you to take the trip:

At first, the lives of the three boys are totally idyllic, and this passage conveys the mindset of youth in a strange, enchanted land:

For many months after this we continued to live on our island in uninterrupted harmony and happiness. Sometimes we went out afishing in the lagoon, and sometimes we went ahunting in the woods, or ascended to the mountain-top, by way of variety, although Peterkin always asserted that we went for the purpose of hailing any ship that might chance to heave in sight. But I am certain that none of us wished to be be delivered from our captivity, for we were extremely happy, and Peterkin used to say that as we were very young we should not feel the loss of a year or two.

This passage is an example of the book's incredibly seductive qualities, and the author's innate ability to draw the reader into an alternate world.

When the island is visited by pirates, an idyllic paradise becomes an arena of danger (and excitement, of course!).

"The sharp prow of the war-canoe struck us."

In his The Gorilla Hunters (1861), Ballantyne had wise words to share about the education of young boys, and addressed his ongoing themes of honor and friendship between men:

Boys [should be] inured from childhood to trifling risks and slight dangers of every possible description, such as tumbling into ponds and off of trees, etc., in order to strengthen their nervous system... They ought to practice leaping off heights into deep water. They ought never to hesitate to cross a stream over a narrow unsafe plank for fear of a ducking. They ought never to decline to climb up a tree, to pull fruit merely because there is a possibility of their falling off and breaking their necks. I firmly believe that boys were intended to encounter all kinds of risks, in order to prepare them to meet and grapple with risks and dangers incident to man’s career with cool, cautious self-possession...

"The pig and I went plunging over."

Regarded by some as a Christian Adventure Writer, Ballantyne's obvious Puritanism never gets in the way of a good yarn.

To me, what Burroughs is to Fantasy, Ballantyne is to Boys' Own Adventure.

He writes with a vigor, energy, and sense of wonder that is unequaled in adventure writing.

The book's vivid illustrations, scanned from the 1909 edition, are credited to Henry Austin.

If you haven't read The Coral Island, folks (boys AND girls), I envy you your first taste of its salty sea goodness.

The book's final passage, an adieu to a great adventure filled with innumerable joys and deadly dangers...

That night, as we sat on the taffrail gazing out upon the wide sea and up into the starry firmament, a thrill of joy, strangely mixed with sadness, passed through our hearts; for we were at length "homeward bound", and were gradually leaving far behind us the beautiful, bright coral islands of the Pacific Ocean.

... resonates in the farewell (to the island) sequence in Kinji Fukusaku's brilliant Battle Royale (2000).


I urge you to watch the scene again, then re-read the passage.

A later edition of the book appears in my film
Sensitive New Age Killer (2000)

Robert Michael Ballantyne, born in Edinburgh in 1829 into a publishing and newspaper family, wrote close to 80 novels.

He was an Apostle of Pulp (Christian Pulp, if you like) in every sense of the written word.