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The New Zealand Railways Magazine, Volume 9, Issue 7 (October 1, 1934)

The Charm of Islands

The Charm of Islands.

Aparty of Aucklanders eager for the more or less romantic life on a luxuriant green isle of the ocean, where the Robinson Crusoe life will be reproduced on a community scale, intend settling on Sunday Island, in the Kermadec group to grow crops of kumaras and fruit for the Auckland market.

There is such a fascination in the idea of an island home, all alone in the great ocean where the flying-fishes play and the spouting whales came sailing by, that the possible disadvantages are apt to be overlooked. Sunday Island has a long story of ill luck. It is fertile enough, with a beautiful subtropic climate, but previous settlers had to battle with plagues of rats which devoured their young crops, and with now and then a hurricane and once in so often a volcanic eruption. The only settlers who hung it out there for long were the Bell family, whose occupation of the place prevented the annexation of Sunday Island by the Germans, before the British and New Zealand Governments made it a part of the Empire and of this Dominion.

New Zealand may be described as two large islands with archipelagoes of little ones. Some of our pleasantest homes are on the islands of the Auckland coast. The sheltered Hauraki, with its large islands, is as desirable a place for pleasure and permanent occupation as can be found the world over. Some are sheep-farms; some of them are favoured haunts of the summer boarder; all of them give anchorage in quiet bays to the flotillas of summer cruisers, power and sail. Some are rather too close to the town for the islander who likes a secluded life. Sunday Island, on the other hand, being between six and seven hundred miles from Auckland, is a trifle far away for the settler and his family who need doctor or dentist in a hurry.

Now and again one sees an island advertised for. Someone not so long ago wanted an island of about twenty-five or thirty acres, for a home. Our northern coasts might have provided the needed selection, different from mere mainland sections because it can be defined as entirely surrounded by water instead of by other mere sections or selections. There is a special and peculiar sense of satisfaction in possessing an island all your own, far away from the dust and noise and trespassing and burglaries of the mainland. Your time is your own; no trains or trams to catch; no whistles and roaring of motor-horns to spoil your slumbers; no hawkers knocking imperatively at the back door. You can eat oysters off your own rocks and defy the inspector. You may miss the bright lights and the cinema and the bridge-parties of the town, but if you are devoted to those attractions you will not be one of the islanders.