For twenty-five years my life has been a great adventure, but with age has come an inevitable cynicism. Nonetheless, I consider myself privileged to have known these islands and their peoples in the twilight of their innocence. For the natural worlds and the traditional lives depicted in these pages are passing now with an inordinate rapidity and when they have gone, they will be lost forever. The rain forests disappear apace, their obvious assets as providers of food and repositories of traditional medicines notwithstanding. The run-off into the sea of silt and mud from denuded forests smothers the coral and the reefs die.
Cash economies replace self-supportive subsistence fishing and gardening.
The permanence of change, fueled by ever-increasing exposure to a Western material culture, has become the insidious reality. Yet even now, this tropical chain of living islands still bear those remnants of a former unsullied beauty, but sadly it is a beauty that will never be experienced by those soon to be born. Finally then, as it must be, my photography is a subjective pictorial account of such times and places, peoples and events as once were but are no longer. But the images here reflect a more distant antiquity than the brief time that has elapsed since the photographs were made. Read about the personal experiences of other travellers, winged into us via cyberspace.