It was fine with me whichever damned gull decided it owned the whole house!

Notes on island life

I’ve been thinking about islands. Mostly Tove Jansson’s islands of Bredskär and Klovharun. But also the island where I grew up, Flinders Island. I’ve been thinking about how Flinders continues to mark my place in the world, a bit like it’s saving me a spot in the line. I come back and take up my spot again, maintaining my position like a buoy on a net. My dad was Peter, and my mum is Pip. My grandparents, Joan and Max. I lived here and there. When I go back, I somehow belong and then when I leave, I’m ‘away’ as if I stepped into empty space, off the edge of the island. It’s strange and I think in a world where links with community are tenuous and not quite as specific as they used to be, kind of unique.

1.     Tove Jansson wrote two of my favourite books, The Summer Book and Notes from an Island. For much of her life in the early part of the 20th-century, she spent her summers in the Pellinge archipelago in the Gulf of Finland. She had shared the island, Bredskär with her mother and brother. Bredskär was the basis for the island in The Summer Book. She then purchased the island Klovharun with her partner, the graphic artist Tuulikki (Tooti) Pietilä. Tove and Tooti spent more than 30 years travelling to Klovharun in the summers.

Here's an extract from The Summer Book:

If only she were a little bigger, Grandmother thought. Preferably a good deal bigger, so I could tell her that I understand how awful it is. Here you come, head-long into a tight group of people who have always lived together, who have the habit of moving around each other on land they know and own and understand, and every threat to what they’re used to only makes them more compact and self-assured.

An island can be dreadful for someone from the outside. Everything is complete, and everyone has his obstinate, sure and self-sufficient place. Within their shores, everything functions according to rituals that are hard as rock from repetition, and at the same time they amble through their days as whimsically and casually as if the world ended at the horizon.

2.     Towards the beginning of Rutger Bregman’s excellent book, Humankind he tells the true story of a group of Tongan boys who were lost at sea and found themselves marooned on an island. He tells the story as a kind of rebuke to William Golding’s savage, selfish boys in Lord of the Flies.

Bregman says in an article about finding the story:

After trawling the web for a while, I came across an obscure blog that told an arresting story: “One day, in 1977, six boys set out from Tonga on a fishing trip ... Caught in a huge storm, the boys were shipwrecked on a deserted island. What do they do, this little tribe? They made a pact never to quarrel.”

I love this story. We’re not as greedy and self-centred as the megalomaniacs would have us believe. Interestingly, it’s also confirmed by this study, where most people were hyper-altruistic when making moral decisions and would go out of their way to prevent harm to strangers.

There’s an excerpt from a documentary about the boys on YouTube, here.

3.     According to the introduction to Jansson’s Notes from an Island, the island of Klovharun “was stark ­– the preserve of warring gulls and terns. Life here was precarious and austere. Yet both Tove and Tooti were energised by it. They relished the storms that would lash the granite rocks, marooning them for days, and the need to fish to supplement provisions and to collect driftwood for fires. As if to draw even closer to nature, they chose to sleep in a tent pegged to a platform on the rocks.”

Towards the end of Notes from an Island, when their boat has been destroyed in storm and Jansson and Pietilä are forced to leave the island. Jansson writes:

Then I started wondering why a meadow can’t just grow in its own mistaken way in peace and quiet, and why beautiful rocks can’t tumble about however they like without being admired, and more questions like that, and gradually I got mad, and it seemed to me that the vicious bird war could just take care of itself and it was fine with me whichever damned gull decided it owned the whole house!

Here's a short film about the island of Klovharun.

4.     Notes from an Island reminds me a lot of the Eden sister diaries collected in the Flinders Island Museum. The museum has been done up and expanded recently, but for many years it was a collection of found objects, Cape Barren Goose eggs, preserved snakes, paper nautilus and exquisite Tasmanian Aboriginal shell necklaces in the old school house. The Miss Edens were three sisters who lived on a small farm at Palana, at the far north of Flinders Island. One of the sisters (I can’t remember which one) kept a diary in a whole series of exercise books over many years. Mostly they are full of gripes. Short notes on a hard lonely life on the island:

Please God, give us some rain soon. The animals are hungry.

Raining and blowing like the mischief.

Boiling in the PM. Snares in the morning.

Saw a car go by today.

We had Melbourne to see us today, honey-mooners they were.

When we were children, my parents bought my sister and I a box of shoes from the Miss Eden clearing sale for our dress up box but we never used them. Their adult shoes were too miniature for our giant late 20th-century kid feet.

5.     The eradication of pests on Macquarie Island has been declared a resounding success. This is from a few months ago, but good to keep reminding ourselves that we are capable of restoring and fixing places and how special it is when we do. Also, when we do it, nature comes back fast!