Having studied the Maori, I thought it would be interesting to see a Polynesian community at a much earlier phase of development… Tikopia was a second choice, because Durrard, the missionary, had done a little on its language… I went to see him, actually, in New Zealand, and got from him some photographs and so on… I gathered information about it from the Mission vessel, which used to call there about once a year, or every two years, and I discovered that it was obviously a very simple community, technologically, with very little, very isolated, very little contact with the outside world, and so I thought, ‘This is an opportunity to see what, really, Polynesian life was like’, away from contact. (p 57)

I set out for Tikopia from Sydney. I first of all took the Matalum, which is an ordinary passenger vessel, going once a month to the Solomons, and to Tulaghi, which was then the headquarters of the Solomons. And from there, I took the Mission vessel. And it carried me right the way round through the Solomons, the whole Eastern Solomons, on their regular tours which they did once or twice a year. Tikopia was very rarely visited. It's about five or six hundred miles from Tulagi. In the end, after quite some weeks, seven weeks, or something of the kind, we got to Tikopia…