This book was written under the pseudonym, Julian Hillas, a name used by Dashwood over numerous articles and in two other books, a novel, <I>I Know An Island</I> (London, 1933) and an autobiography, <I>South Seas Paradise</I> (London, 1965). The author was born in England in 1899 and died at Mauke, Cook Islands, in 1970. He went to the Cook Islands in 1929 and became a trading store manager, having earlier been a schoolmaster in England, a farmer in South Africa, a rubber planter in Malaya, and a midshipman during World War I. He was prominent in Cook Islands politics, being renowned for shrewdness, incisive speeches and lively wit.

An unpublished typescript novel of 182 pp. of single-spaced foolscap set in the Cook Islands. The title page indicates that it was written after <I>I Know An Island</I>. There is also an author's note, written at Rakahanga, his home in the mid-1930s. The note reads in part as follows: 'To the atolls and islands of the Pacific the storm tides of Civilisation have brought many strange objects, and seeds of greed and disease, carried by the angry winds of Progress, have infected the peoples of Polynesia. The swan-song of a race is now being sung, and the tragedy lies, not so much in the singing, but that it is so often mistaken for a paean of praise of those responsible for the calamity. In <I>White Natives</I> I have held up a mirror to faces and places, which although fictitious in themselves, might easily find counterparts in almost any group of South Sea islands.' It is understood from Pacific Publications that Mr Dashwood sold the typescript to Mr W.H. Watson of Rarotonga for a case of bully beef and that many years later Mr Watson unsuccessfully submitted it to Pacific Publications for publication.