No man is an island

BEING a hermit just ain’t what it once was.

Glasheen

DAVID Glasheen never saw the stock market crash of 1987 coming. The Sydney businessman lost $10 million in a single day – he was in up to his neck with mining shares – and the aftermath cost him his marriage, his homes, the whole life he knew.

These days, he trusts the turtles to warn him of trouble ahead. “When there’s a cyclone coming they nest much higher up the beach than usual,” observes Glasheen, who for the past 18 years has been the sole resident of Restoration Island, a 40 hectare blip off Cape York which he shares with his dog Quassi, a pair of sea eagles, a colony of northern quolls and the odd saltwater croc.

The 68-year-old calls it his “Garden of Eden”. He collects bananas and coconuts, as well as native fruit such as wongai and yilti, and grows his own organic vegies. Fish and crabs are there for the taking. And a good feed of prawns can usually be had from his network of mates on passing trawlers (he repays such favours with a case or two of his home-brewed beer). He’s quick to point out, though, that life on a desert island is no holiday: there’s plenty of hard work, and getting sick is “not an option”. Then there’s the loneliness.

That’s offset during the dry season at least by a steady trickle of visitors – passing yachties and ¬kayakers, volunteers from the Willing Workers On Organic Farms scheme, and people curious about the island’s historical claim to fame (Captain Bligh and his loyal men found desperately-needed food and water here in 1789, during their 48-day journey to safety in an open boat after the Bounty mutiny).

A solar-powered internet connection also lets Glasheen stay in touch with people all over the world. He even posted his profile on a dating website a couple of years ago, which briefly garnered lots of media attention. (Nothing much came of it; hundreds of women responded but “half of them were crazy”, he says.) And old ¬habits die hard; he’s got an online CommSec trading account. “I still like to play the markets,” he says. “Uranium stocks mostly – there’s great value in them – but also iron ore, gold, silver...”