Bob Langdon, the first executive officer of the Pacific Manuscripts Bureau, 1968-1984, established his reputation as a Pacific Specialist with the publication of his history of Tahiti, <i>Island of Love</i>, in London in 1959. As a journalist with the <i>Pacific Islands Monthly (PIM)</i>, 1962-67, he travelled extensively in the Islands on assignments producing investigative articles, many on obscure aspects of Pacific history. It was in the <i>PIM</i>, too, that Bob first published his account of the marooned Spanish sailors on Amanu in the Tuamotu Islands. This discovery became the basis of his studies of European castaways in the Pacific Islands, prior to Captain Cook, which appeared in his books, <i>The Lost Caravel</i> (1975) and <i>The Lost Caravel Re-explored</i> (1988), and in his many articles published in scholarly journals.
The first volume of Langdon’s autobiography, <i>Every Goose a Swan: An Australian Autobiography</i> (Sydney, Farm Cove Press, 1995) takes the reader up to 1959 when, as a journalist in Adelaide, Langdon was attracted by an advertisement for a ‘Journalist-printer wanted for Polynesian islands’.
Volumes 2, of Langdon’s autobiography, Ts., 107pp., Chs.46-65, and Epilogue, gives an account of Langdon’s work as a journalist on the <i>Pacific Islands Monthly</i>, his recruitment to the Pacific Manuscripts Bureau by Harry Maude, his experiences at the Australian National University, his expeditions to the Pacific islands, his work for the Australian government’s South Pacific Cultures Fund, and his pusuit of his unorthodox views on the migration of the Pacific Islanders.
