Vanuatu - Mystery Island

By David Ellis
Read More : Vanuatu - Mystery Island (Part 2)

It's got no running water, electricity, roads, shops, phones, internet nor TV, and half of it is a grass airstrip that runs from the beach on one side to the beach on the other.

No one even lives here, yet over 65,000 mostly-Australian tourists flock here every year, 99 per cent by cruise ship, finding they can walk around this uninhabited, remote and sunny South Pacific island in just 45-minutes.

Officially it’s called Inyeug, but to day-tripper cruise ship passengers, and some hardy adventurers who actually go there for longer holidays in almost Robinson Crusoe fashion, its Mystery Island.

The most-southern in the 80-something of Vanuatu’s island chain, the history of Mystery Island – as it’s most-generally known as – is as colourful as its surrounding waters and reefs.

Laying a kilometre or so off the larger Aneityum Island, Mystery Island was chosen in the 1850s by Australian blackbirders (those who kidnapped island men to work on Queensland’s new and bourgeoning sugar-cane farms,) as a safe haven from which to work their trade.

This was because the superstitious and cannibalistic Aneityum Islanders feared Inyeug was inhabited after dark by ghosts; as there was no way they were going to stay there once the sun went down, it meant those blackbirders were able to live there free of any fear of under-darkness attack...

Australian traders were also arriving on Aneityum around the same time, as well as Canadian missionaries hoping to convert the heathen islanders to Christianity, one in particular a fire and brimstone Presbyterian named John Geddie, building a massive stone church almost the size of many of his homeland’s cathedrals.

It was the biggest church in the South Pacific, and could seat a quarter of Aneityum’s then-4000 population.

But the missionaries, the blackbirders and the traders also brought with them European diseases for whom the islanders had no resistance.  Within a half-century Aneityum’s -population had been decimated by Western diseases to just 500, and never recovered.

The foreigners slowly drifted away due to ill-health or waning years themselves, with the Reverend Geddie dying in a Sydney hospital and his church falling into disrepair until being finally destroyed by a tsunami in 1875; Aneityum and its off-shore Inyeug reverted to almost-forgotten isolation.

Fast-forward a century to the 1980s when the one-time Italian migrant ship Fairstar began making cruise forays into the South Pacific from Sydney, her skipper Captain Luigi Nappa always captivated by the picturesque 1.5 square kilometre Inyeug garlanded with foaming reefs and sandy beaches.

He made regular attempts to put passengers ashore for picnic days, but most-times was thwarted by big swells and difficulty in getting passengers ashore through the reefs in Fairstar’s lifeboats; Nappa also wanted to give Inyeug a more romantic name – with his irrepressible PR, the late and colourful Ron Connelly coming up with Mystery Island.

“I called it that,” Connelly once told me, “because it was forever a Mystery whether we’d get our passengers ashore – never mind whether we’d get them back!”

Not so today. The bigger ships of P&O drop anchor off Mystery Island (Inyeug) for 65,000 guests a year to go ashore by ship’s boats for days of swimming, beachcombing, snorkelling, and buying shells, fresh fruits, carvings and necklaces at a market set up by the Aneityum people who come across on “ship days.”

And this month P&O in conjunction with Ausaid’s Enterprise Challenge Fund gave them a brand-new 40-seat covered barge called Island Breeze, that will allow them to ferry cruise-ship guests across to the larger Aneityum to take part in two tours they’ll run there from November.

The first will focus on the life of the Reverend Geddie and his church, and conversely the second on the original heathenistic culture of the Aneityumese,  plus fire-walking, traditional cooking and local customs.

Many of P&O’s cruise passengers actually return to Mystery Island for a longer stay; the totally self-catering Mystery Island Bungalows has a Double-bed Bungalow that costs $66 a night, Beach Bungalow with two single beds ($33pp per night) and a Guest House with a double and 3-single beds costing $160 per night.

There are two flights a week from Port Vila; email accommodation@vanuatu.com.vu

NEXT WEEK: More about Mystery Island, why there’s an airstrip there – and a royal who dropped in for a picnic.