Norfolk Island is an Australian territory nearly 1600km northeast of Sydney and roughly halfway between the northern tip of New Zealand and New Caledonia. It was settled in 1788 as a convict penal colony, beginning a turbulent existence for the tiny spec in the South Pacific Ocean that measures just 34.6 square km.
When I was taken on a family holiday to Norfolk Island in 1955, I was an impressionable child, and most of the experience left me underwhelmed. True, the flight in a DC4 was my first airborne adventure, and the landing on the airstrip that had been established by Australian, New Zealand and US servicemen during WW2 was something of a sensation. But I brightened up when I discovered a Triumph motorcycle, hitched to an old chassis with a box attached, which belonged to my uncle David Brown, who was married to my favourite aunt, Anne.
Uncle David, an electrician, had been sent to the island by the Australian Department of Civil Aviation to tend to the electrical needs, including the lighting, on the airstrip, terminal building and control tower, and the Triumph outfit was his family’s sole transport. Somehow I always had the impression that it was the only motorcycle on the island, but I now realise this was not the case.
Back nearly seventy years, Norfolk Island was still an outpost populatedand decendents of the Bounty mutineers. Although a part of Australia, it had, and still has, separate areas of administration which are the responsibility of Australian states and government departments. Whaling was crucial to the island’s economy, and would remain so until it ceased in 1962, and one of our first visits was the rather gruesome whaling station at Cascade Bay, with carcasses on the flensing deck and the blood red sea seething with sharks.
