While most people hope to go from rags to riches, for David Glasheen, 73, his riches to rags lifecycle has been the nothing short of a blessing.
Born to a wealthy Irish family who settled in Sydney’s Northern Beaches, he now lives in a shack on a remote island off Australia with only his dog for company.
Glasheen, a businessman, had a gold mining company in Papua, New Guinea, that once made him worth $28.4 million. He lost his fortune in the stock exchange crash of 1987, and that’s when things started to change.
His marriage fell apart soon after, and that’s when he started dating a woman who told him she wanted to move to a desert island.
He started looking for places they could go, which is when he found Restoration Island, a tiny landmass off northeast Australia’s most remote peninsula. They moved there in 1997, and while she decided roughing it wasn’t for her, he stayed and made the island his home.
There is no electricity, although he does get power from solar panels and has a generator as backup that powers his computer and allows him to use the internet. A few years ago, he finally got running water.
Except for an annual trip to Cairns, Australia, the closest city about 620 miles away. There he buys groceries like olive oil and rice, though he fishes for and grows all the food he needs.
What he is in short supply of though is intelligent conversation and human touch. He used to meet quite a few hikers and tourists on the island, but the number that comes through now has been reduced to a truckle of about 12 a year, so his main companionship is his dog Polly.
Ideally, he would like to find a female companion who is into his remote lifestyle, likes living in the elements, and is OK with the deadly wildlife that inhabit Restoration Island.
“I would love to find a partner who wants to live with me here, or a couple of ladies who want to come and visit a couple of times a year,” he told AP.
Living on the island, which he calls his “heaven on earth,” has many benefits, he said: there is no schedule, no requirements on his time, he doesn’t have to worry about terror attacks, and the scenery and wildlife all around him are breathtaking.
“I miss theater and live music—the sound of a real band. And just the social interaction of things like dinner parties with men and women together,” he told AP. “But my recollection of a lot of that is there was a lot of anger and bitterness there.”
His future as a castaway on the island is uncertain however. He said he secured a 50-year lease for the island from the state of Queensland before he came, but has been threatened with eviction over allegations that he is illegally squatting there. If he is forced to leave, he said he will move into a shipwrecked yacht off the beach, so he is not technically on the island.
He has no plans to move back civilization, but has thought about bringing some civilization to the island. At one time he toyed with developing a hotel complex there, but now is thinking about a small, eco-friendly, nonprofit health retreat instead.
“I have a lot of respect for the land. I am glad we never decided to develop the island because we would have destroyed it,” he told the AP.
