We got to talking and he invited us back to his house after the afternoon siesta for a drink. I was doing some work at the local museum and he professed an interest in island culture.

His house was a ramshackle affair of bush and permanent materials sitting just up from the beach on the eastern lagoon. There were kids and dogs and pigs wandering around outside and the airy inside was furnished with an eclectic mix of old furniture upon which sat vast piles of books.

He offered us each a glass of black rum watered down with tank water.

We went back to yarn with him several times before we left the island. He was a Frenchman who had washed ashore decades before and never left.

He was a modern day beachcomber, part of the disenchanted flotsam that still occasionally lands on the island beaches and takes root in the fecund soils. He was also one of the happiest souls I’d ever met.

Arthur Williams reminded me of him when he responded to my recent story about going back to the haunts of one’s youth.

Arthur quoted the legendary beachcomber/writer James Norman Hall, viz:

"…I heard as in a dream the far-off clamour of the outside world . . . but there was no reality, no allurement in the sound. I saw men carrying trivial burdens with an air of immense effort, of grotesque self-importance; scurrying in breathless haste on useless errands, gorging food without relish; sleeping without refreshment; taking their leisure without enjoyment; living without the knowledge of content; dying without ever having lived..."

Hall was one of those gifted writers who extolled the virtues and recorded the idiosyncrasies of lazy island life. His books sit on a shelf in my study along with the works of others like him, including Frederick O’Brien, Louis Becke, Robert Gibbings, George Farwell, Lewis Lett, Judith Tudor, Arthur Grimble and Beatrice Grimshaw.

Hall (1887-1951) was an American who had served during World War I in the British Army as a machine gunner and in the French Foreign Legion as a pilot.

After the war he joined Charles Nordhoff, with whom he had served in the Lafayette Flying Corps, and sailed for Tahiti.  Both men were reacting to what they saw as the mundane and boring materialistic western world. They were part of Hemingway’s famous ‘lost generation’.

They only intended to stay in the islands for a year but ended up living there for the rest of their lives. They both married local girls and collaborated on eleven books. They both also wrote independently.

My favourite Hall’s book is his non-fiction autobiographical My Island Home, published a year after his death in 1952. In it he captures island life in all its exquisite beauty.

As my wife and I discovered, there are still people like Hall tucked away in the backwaters of the South Pacific, including Papua New Guinea. In the latter case you can mostly find them in the New Guinea Islands or on the north coast in places like Wewak and Madang.

A few of them are not that old but most of them seem to be kinds of latter day hippies without the collective imperative.

In most cases they have been absorbed into the scenery. Their total lack of ambition fits in well. A few have problems with booze and some of them are bitter individuals but most are happy souls and they contribute in many ways to their adopted societies.

Above all else, I think, they remind us of what is of real value in life.

Long may they prosper.