Issue 1 – 40: the story of Escape Magazine of the Cook Islands
By Rachel Smith
It’s 2004 and Issue 1 of Escape – Magazine of the Cook Islands is out. On its cover are coconut palms, the brilliant blue of Aitutaki lagoon and a catamaran sail boat resting on the white sand beach of Tapuaetai, One Foot Island. It is quintessential Cook Islands from front cover to back.
Escape began, as many good things do, over drinks at Trader Jacks, when Chris Wong, then CEO of Cook Islands Tourism Corporation, suggested to Noel Bartley that he should consider producing a magazine for the Cook Islands.
Noel knew a good idea when he heard one. He’d been involved in the tourism industry for some two decades by then, producing postcards, calendars, photographic books and tourist brochures in Aotearoa New Zealand. Originally purchasing photography, Noel decided to take his own photos, building on an interest from his high school days. “I bought a camera and a lot of film, and I thought if I just keep taking photographs eventually there would be some I could use in my publications,” Noel says.
A few years later, Noel was asked by a friend to help select marketing images for Polynesian Airlines. A shoebox full of photos arrived at Noel’s office, none of which were any good. When the offer then came to travel to Samoa and take better photos, for Noel it was an easy yes.
It was the reputation for the quality of his work that initiated a phone call from Cook Islands Tourism Corporation in 1991. Noel flew out to Rarotonga for a meeting, and set to work creating that first brochure, which eventually became known as ‘the Cook’s Book.’
In 1994 he set up Scenix Marketing, a “one stop shop” for design and marketing across the Pacific Islands. The company combined Noel’s many skills; marketing and business, and experience in photography, writing and print management.
Scenix created, produced and shipped brochures and posters for clients such as Polynesian Airlines, Royal Tonga Airlines, and for the tourism bureaus of Solomon Islands, Samoa and Tonga.
Noel went on to establish South Pacific Publishing in Rarotonga in 2000, and when the idea for a Cook Islands magazine came about, the timing was right. Escape would be based on the format of a high quality in-flight magazine that was both informative and had good advertising; a publication that visitors would want to take home with them.
There was a lot of support from the tourism industry, with Escape adopted as an in-flight magazine for Air Raro from the beginning. And of course there were some doubters, those who said, we don’t need another magazine, to which Noel replied, “You haven’t yet had a magazine.”
From that very first issue in 2004, it was important that Escape was a publication for the Cook Islands, with local writers Florence Syme-Buchanan and Mahiriki Tangaroa providing content for the launch issue. “We needed to include the culture of the Cook Islands. The idea was the magazine should belong to the people of the Cook Islands – that it was their magazine,” says Noel.
To do this, Escape needed to be about all of the Cook Islands, to encompass more than the island of Rarotonga for which the country was the most well-known. For Noel it was a photographers dream, travelling to nearly all of the Pa Enua, often with a writer, Florence and later Rachel Reeves.
Issue 10 marked five years of Escape and as Noel noted in his editorial, “a …time to reflect on all the places I have visited and the wonderful people I have met along the way…Thank you for sharing your lives with us and enabling the telling of stories from this richly diverse little country.”
The pages of Escape filled with stories of art, music, things to do and see, where to eat and stay, recipes, books and a gig guide. There were stories of people and places, legends written and illustrated by students with a donation gifted to their school, stories of whales and kakerori, of sport on and off the water, and everything from Te Maeva Nui to Survivor Cook Islands on Aitutaki. There are stories that stand out for Noel after all this time – his travels on Norwegian tall ship Soren Larsen, via Aitutaki to Palmerston and Suwarrow; chartering a flight to write that first story about Pukapuka; Rachel writing about a reconnection with her grandmother’s home island of Atiu; visiting Manihiki with Florence and gaining a precious connection to the island’s people and history. All of this, says Noel, “underlined in a sense that it was for the people” and not simply a tourist publication.
The magazine was recognised for its success; in 2006 Escape won the Bula Fiji Tourism Exchange Chairman’s Award, noted by the Chairman as “the best tourist publication in the South Pacific”, and in 2016, South Pacific Publishing won the Tourism Industry Support Award at the Air New Zealand Cook Islands Tourism Awards. It was a perfect finale for Noel. He sold the business later that year, after 12 years of biannual publications and returned to Aotearoa New Zealand in 2019, ending 15 years of living in Rarotonga. With a break over the pandemic, current owners Kim and Bruce Taylor, commenced publishing a revitalised Escape magazine with their first issue in February 2022.
Over the 22 years there have been many writers and photographers, from or based in the Cook Islands, who have contributed to the magazine’s success, and while Noel may no longer be in the business, his extensive library of stunning photographs can still be found on the pages of Escape, and on social media promoting the Cook Islands as a destination. From Noel’s final editorial in Issue 22; “Way back in 2003, I had this crazy idea of publishing a magazine about the Cook Islands. Given that we had no international airline of our own and therefore no in-flight magazine that we could show the world and brag about how wonderful our country was, it seemed like a good idea.”
And with this the 40th issue, it was perhaps an idea more great than good.
