Once Were the Happy Isles

This book relates the author's extraordinarily adventurous experiences - all absolutely true and without any exaggeration - of visiting, living, and working in the Solomon Islands, primarily as an Australian diplomat in the mid-1980s. Some of the experiences related in the book include: * A momentous 'first contact' encounter with isolated people. * Stories of mysterious happenings which remain unexplained to outsiders to this day. * Personal and inside accounts of the so-called 'ethnic tensions' from 1998 to 2003. * Surviving a plane crash. * Living in idyllic but very basic villages. * * Interwoven among the adventurous stuff, there are stories of some humorous and deeply personal moments affecting the author and his family.. Ongoing themes interspersed throughout the book include: extraordinary once-in-a-lifetime, life-changing adventurous experiences, heart-rending personal interactions and the juxtaposition of career ambition against much more meaningful people-based human development.