Jeanette Aplin
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I found it by chance in the dictionary. ‘Islomania: an obsessive enthusiasm or partiality for islands’. I liked that. Perhaps I’m one, I thought – an ‘islomaniac’!
Of my adult life I’ve spent six years on Stephens Island, three on Dog Island, and thirty-two on D’Urville Island: more than 40 years on three islands which have shaped my life and attitudes, and probably my looks as well. However, I was born in Motueka in 1943. My primary schooling took place there and my secondary (undistinguished) at Nelson Girls’. I haven’t travelled far. But, if the world’s resources were not finite, and if I were magically given one thousand years, I’d spend them visiting other small rugged islands – Pitcairn, Skellig Michael, the Shiants, South Georgia. Could I include Madagascar? Instead, here on ‘our’ island, I read about these others, tingling at their mystery and romance. And, because I love to write and bring back faces from the past, I have written about my own experience of islands so that other people, so inclined, can get that tingly feeling too. My books so far comprise The Lighthouse Keeper's Wife (2001), The Lighthouse Children’s Mother (2007), and The Price of Bacon (2011). |
