TUMBY BAY - The years between the two world wars was their heyday, but it was still possible in the 1960s and 70s to come across people who could be loosely defined as drifters, dreamers and beachcombers in Papua New Guinea.

Of late they are harder to find but their children and grandchildren still pop up in unexpected and out of the way places.

As a sub-class of western society the drifters have always been difficult to define.

The allure of a life in the sun, away from the stresses and strains of modern life matched a disdain for money.

These were distinguishing features but not the whole story.

In most cases, however, the romanticised version of them as heedless sojourners on picturesque South Sea islands very seldom applied.

Anthropologists, in their cumbersome way, refer to them as ‘transculturites’.

Transculturites - people who have largely abandoned their original culture to enter the network of roles in another culture, adopting its customs, behaviour, ideas and values.

What interests anthropologists is the impact and influence these people have on their adopted cultures.

In most cases what they find is that the impact is largely positive.

My interest in the subject was piqued when I read about the death of an old Englishman called Rodney who had been living in a village near Port Moresby and whose funeral and burial was organised by the Korobosea Seventh Day Adventist Church.

I know very little about Rodney beyond the fact that he had once been a public servant and that his wife and children had been killed in a car accident.

Balimo town

However his death reminded me of a bloke I knew in Balimo.

He came from New Zealand and was a sometime crocodile hunter.

He came into the sub-district office one day and asked me to help him write his will.

As far as I could work out he owned nothing more than a very small and leaky boat and a shotgun.

Occasionally I dropped by to have a yarn with him and he’d offer me a jam jar of cheap claret.

When I asked about next of kin he referred to an aunt living ‘somewhere’ around Rotorua.

As for what he wanted done if he died, he said he should be buried on the nearest patch of dry ground to Balimo.

The last I heard of him he was living at Wawoi Falls much further up the Middle Fly teaching the locals how to play soccer.

In a strange way I think I envied him.

Since then I’ve come across a few more South Sea sojourners, most notably in the Cook Islands and the remoter islands of Vanuatu. They are invariably men.

They range from lazy literary types to others running useful but shoestring public services like medical clinics. Most of them have happily married into local families.

I’ve got friends who chide me about my occasional anti-materialistic rhetoric and explain that it is impossible to live in the modern world disconnected from capitalism and all it involves.

My retort is a kind of agreement but with the caveat that, be that as it may, one doesn’t have to like it.

I suspect I’m not alone in that regard.

Unfortunately I haven’t got the courage to be a beachcomber but, then again, I wouldn’t really object to being buried on the nearest patch of dry ground.