NOTORIOUS NORFOLK
Great minds don’t just think alike; they birth ideas into reality. So is surfing a natural evolution of sea-lovin’ adventurers?
Multiple discovery (or simultaneous invention) happens when different people make identical discoveries independently but more or less at the same time. If we leave “time” out of the equation, surfing is an eye-opening example of this. And we’re not rehashing the Hawaiian-Peruvian-first-surfers debate.
Instead, Norfolk Islanders have an intriguing history—a sport “which they appear to have developed spontaneously—surfing. Captain Cook had reported that surfing was unknown even in Tahiti at that time”1. But before we introduce “sliding” along the waves at Pitcairn Island on something Captain Raine describes later in 1821 as “resembling a butcher’s tray but round at one end and square at the other”2, let’s familiarise ourselves with Norfolk’s notorious existence.
Norfolk Island and Pitcairn Island lie 5,955 kilometres apart but were destined to be linked. These two volcanoes, non-identical twins, rose from the ocean floor simultaneously. Both tropical paradises remained uninhabited until the late eighteenth century, when Norfolk became one of Australia’s penal colonies, and Pitcairn hid Fletcher Christian’s Bounty mutineers along with their Tahitian wives.
In a twist of ironic fate, 67 years later, Queen Victoria bequeathed Norfolk Island to the Pitcairn Islanders in 1855, a year after the convicts were shipped to Port Arthur, and the colony was abandoned. Descendants of those convicts, who’d escaped the ship heading to Norfolk’s prisons, instead became its owners.
Traditional Custodians still reside on Norfolk and Pitcairn, two rocks on opposite sides of the South Pacific Ocean. They share bloodlines as well as a distinctive language derived from a blend of eighteenth-century North Country English and eighteenth-century Tahitian.1
Captain Raine’s ship’s surgeon documented the Pitcairn Islanders in 1821, before they outgrew their tropical paradise and relocated to Norfolk.
“The islanders amused themselves by taking a flat board about three-feet long, on the upper side smooth and on the under a ridge like a keel, and went out on a rock and waited till a large breaker came and when the top of it was close to them, away they went with the piece of wood under their belly on the top of this breaker and directed themselves by their feet into the little channel formed by the rocks, so that when the surf left them, they were only up to their knees in water.”1
Norfolk has a deep-rooted surf culture and may be Australia’s oldest surfing community. Although it’s a territory of Australia, like Hawai’i is to America, Norfolk has a unique independent identity. They have their own flag, traditions, culture, and language—Norf’k. But when Norfolk Islanders need to explain their citizenship, they’re Australian.
Unaware of Norfolk’s rich
