Pamela Stephenson: Treasure Islands

There was a time, back when she was doing Not the Nine O'Clock News, that I think I might have been a little bit in love with Pamela Stephenson. She was attractive on the eye, as bright as a button and alluringly unobtainable. She soon moved on, as the good ones always do, married Billy Connolly and had three children.

Between times she got herself a PhD, wrote two best sellers about her husband and is now a clinical psychologist practising from what must be a fertile client base in California. Some gal, this daughter of the Antipodes, and still of a mind to take on more.

On November 22, 2003, at precisely 7.10am, in an Auckland hotel, she had an epiphany of a "female spectre clad in pale Victorian garments". Pop! It came to her. It was Fanny, wife of Robert Louis Stevenson, no less, who voyaged with him around the Pacific in the late 1880s.

Our Pam could not let that go. "I have been a caretaker, mother and wife for over 20 years now and I am sooo ready for adventure." (The italics are mine). So last year Stephenson sailed out of Florida, a crew member on the 112ft, 300-ton, steel-hulled Takapuna, intent to follow faithfully in the wake of Fanny and Robert Louis.

The result is Treasure Islands, Stephenson's diary of nine months at sea on a boat that stopped over at more Pacific ports than you could shake an atlas at. The trip was exactly the island-hopping adventure she was dreaming of "inside [her] city-frazzled, teenage-whipped, career-addled brain" in 2003. The trouble is that some of her diary entries read like an OE of 12 European countries in 21/2 weeks with Crowded House blaring out of the Combi van stereo.

The book must not be confused with The Happy Isles of Oceania, grumpy old Paul Theroux's 1992 epic in which he attempted to put his life into perspective by paddling a lone canoe in blue lagoons. Stephenson actually knows how to have a good time, is chummy with the locals and crew, and is genuinely curious about what she encounters. As a "travel writer", let us say that she is an enthusiastic and bubbly beginner.

To her credit, she has extensively researched Fanny and Robert Louis' experiences in the South Seas and dutifully recounts many of them here. Unfortunately, they tend to be intrusive to her racy narrative.

The book is well illustrated with smiley-faces snapshots of the Kodak holiday variety.


* Hedley Mortlock is an Auckland reviewer
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