Beneath The Mountain of Birds

In the 1980s and early 1990s, freelance writer John W. Perry published numerous travel articles about Polynesia, Melanesia, and Australia in American magazines and newspapers. This collection of 23 articles contains 20 republished articles from those years and three never-before-published articles from the same time period, each with an added introductory paragraph. 


The articles recount backpacking adventures in Hawai‘i, following in the footsteps of the French artist Paul Gauguin in Tahiti, revisiting a Māori love story in New Zealand, touring a yam garden in the Trobriand Islands in Melanesia, and exploring Australia’s Aboriginal lands in the Northern Territory, among other mini-adventures.


Excerpts


“For me, the only real connection with Gauguin in Pape‘ete is the marketplace, still as picturesque and quaint as in Gauguin’s time. Each day is festival day at the market, featuring leis, pigs, ducks, and the fruits of paradise, including bananas, mangoes (a Gauguin phallic symbol in his artwork), and breadfruit.” –From (Tahiti) “The Island of Sensuous Delight.”


“The morning I arrived on the island of “two pigtails” a chalked blackboard beside the bar listed the day’s activities, which included putting golf balls on the reef at low tide (I declined) or watching a basket-weaving demonstration near the island’s flagstaff made from a ship’s mast salvaged from a wreck.” –From (Fiji) “The Angels of Heavenly Delight.”


“I circumnavigated the heap of yams in imitation of the Victorian child-traveler Alice in Wonderland who tiptoed around a mushroom that served as a seat for a hookah-smoking caterpillar.” –From (Trobriand Islands) “The Moon of Milamala.”


“As if in a child’s fairy tale, a pair of herons welcomed me to the island, each parading across the roof of my reef-side bungalow impatiently awaiting low tide to feed on crabs in the nearby tidal pools.” –From (Queensland) “Walking the Gates of Heaven.”



About the author:



John W. Perry is a semiretired Hawai‘i-based freelance writer. Perry has written more than 300 magazine articles on a diversity of subjects, from European flower history to Caribbean wildlife, from place-name etymology to Micronesian and Hawaiian history. In previous years, he also wrote for numerous American travel publications and airline in-flight magazines. In addition, he wrote 25 percent of the now-defunct Berlitz Traveller's Guide to Hawaii: "Perry, a longtime resident of the Pacific region, is a contributor to several North American and Asia-Pacific magazines. He lives in Honolulu and has traveled the South Seas on magazine assignments." Guam's now-defunct Islander: "Perry is a mysterious writer who reportedly lives in Honolulu surviving on history and beer." Pacific Travelogue, a special 1988 airline publication of Continental Micronesia (today United Airlines): "A confirmed islomane (one who finds islands irresistible), Perry's pastimes include reading 19th-century travel books and browsing in antique map stores."