This was published 8 years ago
Tahiti, French Polynesia: A brush with a Pacific utopia
By Sue Williams
Artist Tania Wursig in residence at Le Meridien Tahiti.Credit: KARIM
Blindingly white beaches, sapphire waters, towering volcanoes coated in a deep forest green, muscular strapping men and achingly beautiful women ... It's not difficult to see how the sights of French Polynesia have been bewitching artists for generations.
Ever since the first bedazzled European sailors jumped ship to stay on what they reported back was paradise on earth among people they saw as icons of elegance and innocence, it's an island nation that's been inspiring painters, writers and photographers alike.
And today that's no less true. Tahiti and the nearby Tuamotu Islands as well as the far-flung Marquesas Islands, are all still magnets for visitors in search of some of the most breathtaking natural beauty on earth.
Paul Gauguin's Two Tahitian Women. The French man lived on the South Pacific island until his death in 1903.
"It's just the colour and flamboyance and the beauty of the people that can't be matched anywhere else in the world," says Australian artist Tania Wursig, who's been running artists' trips to French Polynesia for the past five years, and is the overseas artist at the art workshop in the Hotel le Meridien Tahiti. "The culture seems so intact and there's so much spirit behind everything the people there do."
Among the best-known of the past artists, of course, was the eccentric French post-Impressionist Paul Gauguin. He first visited Tahiti in 1891, fell in love with the sights – and particularly those of the women – and finally settled on the Marquesan island of Hiva Oa in 1901. He ended up doing some of his finest work on the islands. "Poetry emerges here of its own accord, and it can be evoked simply by allowing oneself to dream while painting," he wrote.
Now there's a reproduction of the two-level house he built, named the Maison du Jouir – the House of Pleasure – on the exact site where he lived, with the upper floor his bedroom and studio. Nearby is the cultural centre, opened in 2003 on the 100th anniversary of his death, with a massive collection of other artists' copies of his most loved artworks.
Tattoo art.
His grave is in the cemetery on the island, a modest plot lain with local stones, with his name painted in white letters on one, lying close to that of fellow Hiva Oa resident, Belgian singer and actor Jacques Brel, acclaimed, among many things, as a major influence on David Bowie and Leonard Cohen.
Gauguin's countryman Henri Matisse arrived in Tahiti and the Tuamotu Islands in 1930, in search of the special quality of the light, "a deep gold tumbler in which one looks", he said. The hotel in which he stayed in the nation's capital Papeete, with its view over the busy docks, is now a bank, but locals are keen to point out the site – and that the view hasn't changed much in the interim.
Writers have also historically been drawn to the Marquesas, the most remote islands in the world. American sailor Herman Melville absconded from his whaling ship in 1842 to live on the Marquesas and wrote his racy best-selling book Typee about his turbulent life there among the quizzical locals. He wrote a sequel, Omoo, and then his whale novel Moby Dick. Treasure Island author Robert Louis Stevenson sailed to the Marquesas and wrote his last book, In the South Seas, published posthumously in 1896, about his personal adventures and anthropology of the islands.
In 1911, US writer Jack London (The Call of the Wild and White Fang) sailed to the Marquesas for his book The Cruise of the Snark, and in 1931 Aldous Huxley even featured the Marquesas in his Brave New World, as an ultimate place of exile ... along with the Falklands.
Real-life adventurer and later Kon-Tiki expedition leader Thor Heyerdahl tested that out just a few years later, in 1936. He stayed on the Marquesas for a year to escape civilisation – and only just escaped with his life after battling to survive off the land without any medical supplies. His book Fatu Hiva tells the hair-raising tales.
Tahiti, the Marquesas, the Society Islands and the Tuamotus are just as much a feast of the senses today. With a lively traditional dance and music scene, and a major arts festival every four years that looks likely soon to be every two years, there are celebrations of beauty everywhere.
Even locals' bodies become the canvasses for some of the most stunning art, with an ancient tradition for intricate geometric tattooing that's revered around the world. Many of the mutineers from The Bounty even joined in.
Now the current global fashion in tattooing has been pinpointed as helping spearhead a new revival of the arts in French Polynesia although, for most visitors, that vision of a rediscovered Eden has simply never faded.
As Melville wrote:
"This Polynesia reft of palms,
Seaward no valley breathes her balms –
GETTING THERE
The cruiser-freighter Aranui 5 has a 14-night cruise from Tahiti around the Tuamotus, the Marquesas Islands and the Society Islands. Air New Zealand operates frequent flights from Sydney and Melbourne to Auckland, where you pick up a flight with Air Tahiti Nui to Papeete, the Tahitian capital. See aranuicruises.com.au.
CRUISING THERE
A 17-night package including the cruise in an ocean view stateroom, all meals, shore excursions, return economy flights from Australia and accommodation in Papeete before the cruise departs starts at $8689 per person twin share. To book, contact Ultimate Travel; phone 1300 485 846.
Sue Williams was a guest of Aranui Cruises, Air Tahiti Nui and Tahiti Tourisme.
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