My first overseas holiday took me to Fiji. As a six-year-old, I remember watching Looney Tunes at the Kidz Club and splashing by the glistening resort pools after a buffet breakfast. For all I knew, we could have been in Australia. Three years later, my parents took us to the neighbouring South Pacific Island nation, Vanuatu.
On our final day before returning home, we had a stopover on the island of Efate, the most populated of the 83-island archipelago, and home to the capital, Port Vila. We heard about these (now popular) cascades a short drive from the airport and had just enough time to venture for a dip.
Like most things, the biggest memory wasn’t the cascades spilling down the tropical landscape, but the experiences and learnings about myself, and the Melanesian world that I came to love.
Upon arrival in Port Villa, we were approached by locals offering to take us to the cascades. Before we knew it, we had set off in a funky old minibus with a stranger in the first foreign place I’d visited. I remember Dad shooshing me as I grumbled about how we couldn’t trust the driver.
As an uncultured kid from the insular suburbs of Sydney, I sulked and resented the situation my parents had put us in. On the way, we passed over potholed roads, tidy vernacular churches, and stalls selling fresh fruit. Our driver promised to wait while we followed the cascades up to the falls for a swim.
The Mele Cascade Waterfall didn’t disappoint and makes for an enticing alternative to duty-free shopping. To my surprise, the driver waited patiently for two hours by the bus, while we enjoyed the cascades.
On the journey back, the driver pulled over by the side of a little village and asked, in broken English, if he could give us a minute. Without comprehending the reason for the stop, my juvenile mind raced with irrational thoughts of being kidnapped. Two decades later, I now understand how fear controls and corrodes our capacity to intrust when faced with the unknown.
What I didn’t know was our driver had stopped off at his family home. A couple of brightly dressed children came bounding over to near the bus. We watched their father give them the money he’d received for our trip. The children gave a shy, but endearing smile as they ran the money back to their mother, who waved from a distance, bearing a newborn.
My trust immediately returned, albeit with a bit of guilt for my prior assumptions. Vanuatu could teach the world a lot about sincerity and generosity. I left that afternoon with a hunch I’d be back. While I never knew this man’s name, nor how he looked, it sparked my love affair with Vanuatu and the Melanesian region.
For the first time, I became aware of my Western perceptions. Today I work on Arrernte land in Central Australia, home to strong and resilient Indigenous nations. Like my times in Vanuatu, my new home is a place that deeply challenges the world I grew up in. To this day, I find this equally rewarding and confronting.
