Sharks – munchies – have never been seen on the shallow and translucent waters about the Lord Howe beaches, but many less threatening creatures are. Dazzling fish – big silver drummers, parrot fish, scarlet emperors – will gratefully feed from your hand. At nightfall, people gather to see the mutton-birds, the sooty shearwaters, as they shout and fly from the sea to their burrows on the shore.
Fit climbers, with the help of roped tracks, can seek the colony of woodhens that live on the flank of Mt Lidgbird. They are the only birds of this kind in the world. A pair have also nested in the green garden of the Wilson family home at Oceanview. The Wilsons are one of Lord Howe’s staunch families. They take guests at their comfortable house but Kevin Wilson, one of the brothers, says, ‘The mainstay of this island is tourism and the whole of Lord Howe can only accommodate 400 visitors at a time. When the summer goes, after Easter say, it can be . . . well, difficult.’
Living in a place as remote as this has never been easy, romantic though it may be to the mainlanders’ eyes. Once Gower, Lidgbird and Ball had put their navigation marks on the eighteenth-century maps, and named the island itself after the English Admiral, there were few settlers. There had been no sign of any previous habitations. Early and optimistic colonists, individuals who came ashore and lived rough lives, provided vegetables and fresh meat for passing ships. Whalers – some from as far as Nantucket Island – who sailed on voyages lasting years, came to anchor there with a sigh of relief.
The present islanders have sketched out a family tree beginning with Margaret and Thomas Andrews who arrived aboard The Rover’s Bride in 1842 to live permanently. They brought up their family on Lord Howe and – incredibly – one of their sons Albert, having lived in such a narrow place in the middle of a wide sea, with all its dangers, was drowned on the Titanic in 1912.
Nathan Chase Thompson, a roving whaler captain from Somerset, Massachusetts, landed on the island with a twelve-year-old Pacific princess called Bogue in 1853. The apply named Chase had found the girl, from the Gilbert Islands, adrift in a small boat accompanied by two servants Boranga and Bogaroo. She was fleeing an arranged marriage. On Lord Howe the man from Massachusetts decided to settle down. He built a house and married Boranga, and when she died twelve years later he married Princess Bogue – pronounced Bockoo. They had two boys and three girls. Their descendants are still on the island today.
The Wilson family have lived in the same house on Lord Howe since the First World War. ‘Gower Wilson was known as the Father of the Island. He was named after the mountain,’ said Kevin Wilson. ‘In 1936 he went to Sydney to collect a new boat. He set sail but was never seen again.’
Roy Wilson, an uncle, was awarded the George Medal in 1948 for helping to rescue two airmen from a Catalina flying boat which became disabled and crashed in the paddock just below the house. Seven airmen died. There is a memorial stone marking the spot.
Below the tragic place is a jetty and I walked down in the early morning. The island was green with sunlight. The fortnightly freighter Sitka from Yamba, New South Wales, was unloading her cargo. The islanders had searched the world for her – a vessel with a shallow enough draught to come into the reef and to the jetty. They finally found her in the Baltic – an ice-breaker.
On the Saturday night they had a concert in the community hall. It was wonderful – gloriously amateur, the curtains closing in jumps, a deafening pop group (‘We haven’t got a name’) followed by a demonstrative church organist who threw himself across the instrument as if he were swimming the crawl. Kevin Wilson did an hilarious dog act with his basset hound. There was community singing with songs from the First World War and the Boer War. It was old-fashioned and sincere, a real island evening.
‘We’ve always had lively concerts,’ remembered Monique Morris, who had lived on Lord Howe all of her eighty years. Her family, the Austics, are prominent members of the ‘family tree’. Known as ‘Monnie’, she liked to sit and play and sing at the piano. For me she played a song she wrote about the sadness of an islander leaving the island. It was called ‘Comes the Day’.
Monnie was one of the inhabitants who can remember the extraordinary day in 1931 when a small seaplane – a Tiger Moth with floats – landed in bad weather in the bay and by next morning was a seemingly total wreck. The pilot was Francis Chichester, an intrepid flier long before he was a yachtsman. ‘But he was making a record flight,’ Monnie recalled. ‘And he wasn’t going to give up. So the men hauled the plane ashore and everybody set to and mended it – rebuilt it. It took weeks and Francis Chinchester was here the whole time. Fortunately all the men were good boatbuilders. Eventually it was finished and, hearts in our mouths, we saw him take off in it. It flew! And he made it to Sydney.’
It is difficult to imagine a more pleasing place than Lord Howe. It has noble scenery, it has lagoons so clear you can see the bottom from the aeroplane. The sand is white and the hinterland a mixture of the flamboyant tropics and deep, comfortable, meadows. But, in the end, it is people who make an island. This is a place to which I want to return.
LORD HOWE ISLAND situated latitude 31°28’S and longitude 159°9’ E; area 6.37 sq. m (16.5 sq. km); population approx. 290; Australia
Phillip, Churchill and French Islands
Three in the Bay
I scarcely know a place I would sooner call mine than this little island.
LIEUTENANT JAMES GRANT, RN, of Churchill Island
Phillip Island, Churchill Island and French Island, lying in the cup of Westernport Bay, off the city of Melbourne in Australia, share the distinction of having been discovered by a doctor in a rowing boat.
In the Australian summer of 1798, John Hunter, the Governor of the settlement of Port Jackson, reporting to the Duke of Portland in far-off England, said, ‘The tedious repairs which His Majesty’s ship Reliance necessarily required . . . having given an opportunity to Mr George Bass, her surgeon . . . to offer himself to be employed in any way he could . . . I accordingly furnished him with an excellent whaleboat, well-fitted, victualled and manned to his wish, for the purpose of examining along the coast to the southward of this port, as far as he could with safety and convenience go . . .’
The surgeon and his crew in fact voyaged 600 miles in their craft of twenty-six feet, an epic journey lauded by the explorer Matthew Flinders as having ‘not perhaps its equal in the annals of maritime history’.
At the journey’s westward extremity Bass saw the low, placid islands lying close together in the bay and, beyond, an exposed ocean. ‘By the mountainous sea which rolled from that quarter we have much reason to conclude that there is an open strait.’ There was. It was named after him, the Bass Strait.
On an autumn day of blowing grey clouds I stood on the shingled beach where Bass first landed on Churchill Island. There is a red rock at the water’s edge with the name ‘Bas’ (minus the final ‘s’ which has presumably worn away) cut into it. It is, by tradition anyway, the surgeon’s own incision. Local children have since embellished it with initials and pithy comments.
Churchill Island got its name from John Churchill ‘of Dawlish in the county of Devon’ who gave a later party, under Lieutenant James Grant of the barque Lady Nelson, vegetable seeds, the stones of peaches and nectarines and the pips of apples ‘with an injunction to plant them for the future benefit of our fellow men, be they Countrymen, Europeans or Savages.’
The seeds, together with some potatoes, wheat and Indian corn, were sown (with the aid of a coal shovel) on the island and in the following December, Jonathan Murray, now in command of Lady Nelson, went ashore and found the harvest. ‘I never saw finer wheat or corn in my life,’ he reported, ‘the straw being very nearly as large as young sugar-cane.’
The sailors cut the corn and fed it to young swans, whose descendants still cruise the island. It was the first crop to be harvested in what became the state of Victoria.
Churchill Island today is kept virtually untouched, recognizable from the initial colony of the ea
rly 1800s. It is joined to the much larger Phillip Island by a narrow causeway and Phillip Island in turn to the Victoria mainland by a bridge originally opened during World War II but rebuilt today. French Island, the third of the group, lies in chosen isolation, with no bridge, few roads, and only home-generated electricity for its sixty farming inhabitants. The islanders once had the consolation of a public house called the Never Never Inn but it is now closed.
French Island has its nuggets of strange history, including the origin of its name. When Britain and France were at war in the early nineteenth century, a French scientific expedition in two vessels, Le Naturaliste and La Géographie, was allowed unmolested passage in Australian waters. On 10 April 1802, men from Le Naturaliste went ashore on the largest island in Westernport Bay, named it Ile des Français and took home two of the black swans which nested there (and had never been seen in Europe) as a present for Napoleon’s Empress, Josephine.
Today’s French islanders live in a place of quiet, where koalas carry their young through the gum trees and where the potoroo, a midget member of the kangaroo tribe, sleeps through the hot days. The sacred ibis picks its way through the salty shallows, the whistling kite and brown falcon roam the air and the white-breasted sea eagle nests with pelicans as neighbours.
The islanders used to grow and roast chicory and some of their kilns still stand, although the industry has lapsed. Now they graze sheep and cattle and harvest sea grass, useful in the insulation of houses. They keep a barge to bring their necessities ashore and to take them to and from the mainland. The roads joining the settlements (their names telling their history – Perseverance, Energy, Star of Hope) were once maintained by convicts from the prison on the southeastern coast. Now even they have gone home, although the prison is still in use as guest accommodation.
Unlike George Bass, I almost overlooked the islands together. Although I had been in Melbourne I had concluded that, lying so close inshore and with a bridge connection to Phillip and Churchill Islands, they would be merely an extension of suburbia. It was not until I had explored the Great Barrier Reef and returned to Sydney that I realized, in the excellent Mitchell Library of that city, just what I had missed. Hurriedly I returned to the southwest.
Phillip Island, it is true, does have holiday homes and retirement bungalows (many on stilts so they have a view of the sea) and commuters cross the bridge in their cars each day. But it has an old-fashioned charm, part pastoral, part marine, with its places called Cowes, Ventnor, Newhaven and Rhyll by the homesick English settlers of the early years. Across the bridge, however, the geographical associations are altered, for its landfall is called San Remo.
Off these Australian southern-island coasts, with their sober homes, tidy beaches, and where the Isle of Wight Hotel looks out with genteel benignity on the sea, are tide-washed seal rookeries with 5,000 honking inhabitants. Penguins waddle ashore to the sand dunes each night in a noisy and comical parade, there are pink pelicans on the rocks and koalas in the gum trees.
It was silent autumn, a dun day, with the visitors of summer gone from the streets and the beaches. You could feel that sense of relief which comes to all such places when the hot days are finished and the inhabitants settle back into winter. A time of contentment and quiet. On the beach below the pine trees at Cowes, a boy ran in solitary enjoyment; a boat was being loaded in a leisurely way at the pierhead; gulls sat on the sea-wall so close together they looked like a layer of snow. There was a tanker out in the bay. The mainland was lost in early afternoon mist and tea was being served in the hotel. I felt it was a good time to be there.
The Isle of Wight Hotel, which faces the wooden L-shaped jetty at Cowes on Phillip Island, has all the aplomb of a genteel English seaside establishment. The original building was burned down in 1921, and with it the chair of Captain Tilson of the Speke, a vessel that has its story forever intertwined with that of Phillip Island.
She was one of the largest (and one of the last) steel-hulled sailing ships ever built, launched at Milford Haven in Wales in 1891, a monster of just under 3,000 tons. She arrived off Phillip Island after twelve days of gales and tremendous seas in the Roaring Forties, as they call the rough latitudes. The weary Captain Tilson mistook one lighthouse for another and piled his ship ashore at Kitty Miller Bay where, at low tide, the vestiges of the hull can be seen, standing on end and looking, pointed upwards and with diamond-shaped holes, curiously like the ruins of a church.
There was no loss of life and the islanders, in common with their like in all parts of the world, began enthusiastically to dismember the frame. The wreck was sold for twelve pounds. The timbers were used to build a barge by a man called Kennan, the captain’s chair went into the lounge of the hotel and the ship’s bell went to the Presbyterian Church. It still hangs outside the old church building today (a new copper-roofed structure has been added to the rustic original and the church is now called the Uniting Church). The bell is still sounded for services. The anchor is in the grounds of the Phillip Island open-air museum.
Spars and masts went to make gates and the beams of houses but the figurehead mysteriously disappeared, a strange occurrence for a lady 9 feet 4 inches in height. Some schoolboys discovered it, mouldy and cobwebbed, behind a decrepit shed in 1940. They told their schoolmaster at the Cowes State School and ‘Lady Speke’ was rescued. The pieces were put together, but the mounting with its acanthus scroll was missing. The boys went down to the wreck, which had lain below the tide mark for close on forty years – and found the original mounting still clinging to the corroded ironwork.
Reassembled and repainted by the school ‘Lady Speke’ looked both shiny and regal, all 9 feet 4 inches of her, magnificently bosomed, clad in a flowing white dress with blue cuffs and collar, and carrying a bunch of daffodils. She was exhibited in the island library and then – horror! – someone suggested that ‘Lady Speke’ might, in fact, be a man! More people came to stare. Speke, it was point out, was the man who explored the source of the Nile, so could that be an Egyptian robe, not a dress, the figure was wearing? Perhaps those were not daffodils it was carrying, but a papyrus plant, grown in Egypt for paper making. And were there not bristles on that chin?
There was even a search made through the records of the distant shipping company, Leylands of Liverpool, who said that their ships were always called after a local place, in this case Speke Hall, a sixteenth-century Lancastrian mansion. But many were still unconvinced. Surely those were bristles?
On Churchill Island is another controversial marine relic – a cannon and a neat pile of cannon balls, sitting dumbly in the garden of the old house there. The story is that the cannon came from an American Civil War ship Shenandoah in 1864, although this has been so much disputed that scientific and historical expertise has been called for and intricate reports produced, which are not concluded yet.
Whatever the result, the story of the Shenandoah itself is loaded with adventure and romance. She was built as a merchant vessel called Sea King on the Clyde in Scotland in 1863, a stern-screw clipper of 1,180 tons. She sailed out on her maiden trip to Bombay, loaded with copper – and vanished. It was reported that she had struck a reef and sunk. What really happened was that the vessel had been purchased by the Confederate Navy and sailed silently to Madeira where she was fitted out as a warship and renamed Shenandoah. Under Lieutenant James Waddell she roamed the oceans hunting down Union ships, an epic voyage of thirteen months, during which she sailed an amazing 58,000 miles and touched port only twice. During the hunt through every ocean in the world, except the Antarctic, she sank thirty-two Union ships and captured six others.
In January 1865, she arrived in Port Melbourne where, under the terms of International Law, she was entitled to stay only long enough to take on food and water. But her fame had preceded her and the people of Melbourne, and particularly one Samuel Amess, a leading councillor, had other ideas. Amess, born in Fife, Scotland, was lucky in the Australian goldfields, and purchased, among other properties, Churc
hill Island (where he introduced hares, quail, pheasants and Highland cattle). He led the citizens in fêting the Confederates and lauding their exploits. At Ballarat a ball was given in their honour, attended by 2,000 people, and another 8,000 visited the ship in Port Melbourne in one day. Eventually the romantic raider sailed, almost a month after arrival, with forty-two Melbourne volunteers in her crew.
Once the news reached London there was consternation. Had not the Colonial Secretary warned all British possessions to abide by the strict international regulations when dealing with belligerents? A stern rebuke was sent to Melbourne, followed by a £50,000 fine from the Geneva Convention, which the British Government found itself obliged to pay.
Amess was not concerned. He became a popular mayor of Melbourne and when he retreated to his house on Churchill Island he could admire the fine, muzzle-loading cannon which, so one story goes, Lieutenant Waddell of the Shenandoah presented to him in gratitude for his, and the city’s, hospitality.
PHILLIP, CHURCHILL and FRENCH ISLANDS situated latitude 38°29’S and longitude 145°16’E; area 142 sq. m (370 sq. km); population approx. 2,700; Australia
Great Barrier Island
The Great Small Place
Of bird song at morning and star shine at night.
I will make a palace fit for you and me.
Of green days in forests and blue days at sea.
R. L. STEVENSON
At Mechanics Bay, Auckland, the yellow amphibian waddled like a duck into the water, chugged along the harbour and then clambered into the sky above the Sunday sailboats. It was a mild afternoon of the southern autumn. We flew across the distributed islands of the Hauraki Gulf, each one down there like a relief map, some with trees and buildings, some empty, sullenly volcanic. Then across the cape of the Coromandel Peninsula in view of the town of Thames. Coromandel . . . Thames . . . The most poetic names are so often borrowed from somewhere else.
My World of Islands Page 20