Transit of Venus: Travels in the Pacific

By Julian Evans

With the potent myths of the Pacific Ocean in mind, Julian Evans journeys ever deeper into a world of gin-clear lagoons, palms and sand, in search of both remnants of the fabulous kingdoms of the nineteenth-century European imagination -fed by an abundance of fruits, fish and guilt-free sex -and their twentieth century reality. Ever since Captain Cook first went to Tahiti in 1769 to observe the transit of Venus across the sun, the Pacific has offered this promise of Paradise, shadowed by a darker underbelly. With humour and honesty, Evans uncovers the modern reality: a brave new ocean where the islanders have money and booze, military coups and cold-war politi, atomic explosions and rising sea levels, but where, in the remotest atolls, beyond all our modernity and rationality, the old dreams continue to assert themselves.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eland Publishing
• Release date: Feb 3, 2015
• ISBN: 9781780600918

Julian Evans

Julian Evans grew up in Australia and London. His first book, Transit of Venus (1992), has been called ‘probably the best modern travelogue about the Pacific’. More recently his biography of the writer Norman Lewis, Semi-Invisible Man (2008), has been received with widespread critical acclaim. He has written for many publications including the Guardian and the New Statesman, and presented radio and television documentaries on writers including Robert Louis Stevenson, F. Scott Fitzgerald and José Saramago. He lives in south-west England.

Reviews for Transit of Venus

[zmagic69 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A travel book of an area of the world most people consider Paradise, but on this journey with Author Julian Evans that is not the case. The place I am referring to is the South seas but Julian visits the overlooked or in some cases the underside of these islands and the results are funny, sad, depressing. After reading this book I definitely know where not to go in the South Pacific.

[starbox_2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

"The Pacific is not just a third of our planet...it is the tide-beating heart of Earth, the canary in our coal-mine", 26 September 2015This review is from: Transit of Venus: Travels in the Pacific (Hardcover)Travelogue in which the author takes in most of the Pacific nations: sailing out from Sydney, he visits New Caledonia, Fiji, Samoa, Tonga, Vanuatu, Kiribati, Tuvalu and the Marshall Islands. For me, the disadvantage of covering so many places in a relatively short (270 p) work was that this reader ended up with a somewhat jumbled picture as to exactly what happened where.If you're expecting a romantic work of palm trees and beauty, this book doesn't contain too much of that: the author explains "the Pacific that most interested me was a post-nuclear ocean of bad politics, bad aid, bad faith: the more dystopian it was, the more I liked it...I consciously avoided most of the reputedly peaceful, friendly, unpolluted, apolitical or beautiful places."Certainly I feel I've learnt a lot about the Pacific, notably the Marshall islands, home of the Bikini atoll and ongoing US military testing. While the Americans are billeted on the US-only base of Kwajalein (with all mod cons), the native labour force are housed on a cramped and dirty neighbouring islet, malnourished on the refined foods shipped in by America. He describes the people, removed from their natural lives before the white men came: "Among the young men there was the same kind of jiggling of the legs that I had noticed with uraki, a repetitive muscular tic that went on constantly and reminded me of male polar bears in a zoo, pacing up and down...caused by removal from their snow caves and plains of ice."A vivid picture of the negative side to the islands of Oceania.