Those Easter Island statues continue to cast their spell over me. I’m not alone in my fascination with those magnificent stone carvings, known as Moai,  lost, somehow, in the remotest part of the Pacific Ocean – apparently abandoned by the native population when life became unsustainable there. I had read all those theories about how the original Polynesian settlers had created a sophisticated culture cut off from the World but who had deforested their home so that they could never leave it again. I should’ve known, of course, that we in the West are good at “blaming the natives.”

The magnificence and the desolation of these abandoned statues has provoked many romantic theories about Easter Island, or to use its proper name, Rapa Nui. The probable reality, according to recent research revealed in English Archaeologist Dr Jago Cooper’s BBC4 documentary, Easter Island: Mysteries Of A Lost World is an old old story.

The tragedy of Rapa Nui is another example of Western colonialism’s brutal and insensitive interference. It was, Dr Cooper believes,  a mixture of European diseases, Roman Catholic cultural imperialism and the slave trade that really did it for the Rapa Nui people who were doing perfectly well without the Europeans or the Americans until they were “discovered” in Easter week, 1722.

One of the historians in the programme was a direct descendent of Rapa Nui ancestors, 

Time for some music, I think:

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My novel, Stephen Dearsley’s Summer Of Love, was published  on 31 October 2013. It is the story of a young fogey living in Brighton in 1967 who has a lot to learn when the flowering hippie counter culture changes him and the world around him.

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