But many years ago, according to local traditions, there was a large, inhabited island here named Lomanikoro that one day sank, leaving just a tiny lone rock behind. The first thing we encountered was a rock named Solo, on which stands a red-and-white striped lighthouse. Mata and I once travelled to the southern Fijian island of Kadavu. The past lives here in a way that Westerners simply can’t understand. And if you’re tempted to chuckle, have pause, for every Fijian has heard dozens of such stories. An unmistakable sign of the power of the unknown. The spirits of the people of undersea Vuniivilevu, sensing someone disrespecting of their presence, had crippled the boat. No one was in any doubt what had happened. To show our respect to the people of this undersea land - the people whom local fisherfolk insist can be seen moving around down there on moonlit nights - our boats slowed as they passed over Vuniivilevu, and everyone kept quiet.Įxcept one person, whose boat’s engine sputtered and died, only to be ignominiously towed into Suva eight hours later. To return to Suva, Fiji’s capital, we hired two small boats for a trip that remained inside the reef but crossed the site of the ‘sunken island’ named Vuniivilevu. Once we were on Moturiki Island, excavating at Naitabale and finding the 2,800-year-old remains of the earliest-known Fijian. Touch the rudder gingerly and you scratch the surface of the deep history of the Pacific.įiji’s most famous archaeologist is Sepeti ‘Mata’ Matararaba, who, over the course of nearly three decades, taught me most of what I know about its vanished islands. She met her end at the hands of mutineers who set Captain Bligh off on an open-boat journey of more than 3,700 miles, sailing through Fiji and dodging assailants in Timor. In one corner, you can touch the rudder of HMS Bounty, retrieved from remote Pitcairn Island after the rest of the ship was burned in 1790. If you ever find yourself in these Pacific isles, go to the Fiji Museum in Suva. Their people have knowledge and understandings they hesitate to share for fear you’ll judge them preposterous. But stay long enough, and you learn that this, too, is illusory. The noise and the smoke in the crowded cities lie at the opposite end of the spectrum to the effortless tranquillity of Fiji’s smaller islands, with their deserted beaches, unpolluted reefs and grassy hills. But that’s untrue.įiji is a land of contrasts. I once called it a geisha landscape: one so emblematic, so evocative of a place that an unwitting observer might easily be tricked into thinking its outward appearance hid nothing of note.
When the sun shines, the ocean landscape seems boundless, an unruffled turquoise both an open highway and a full larder.
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