Life Without The Boring Bits

by Colleen McCullough

  A groundswell in England changed all that. “Do-Gooders” were accumulating power in Westminster, and transportation as a punishment was deplored. So were the hideous practices reported as everyday occurrences in Norfolk Island and Macquarie Harbour.

  And so, by 1850, it was agreed that Norfolk Island would be closed. The second penal attempt was also a failure.

  There were many differences between the relics of the first try and the second. The buildings of the first were uniformly perishable, and had disappeared, whereas the buildings of the second were solid stone, and many. The jails, the barracks, the offices and the stores buildings were all surrounded by high stone walls. There was a herd of cows and a mob of sheep. Swine in sties. Hens in runs. Ducks and geese. The second try had been a huge undertaking, and those who ran it insisted upon good food as well as port, cognac, claret, rum and beer.

  There were commodious houses for the officers, and the governor’s residence, roomy and well tended, sat atop a knoll with a magnificent view.

  In 1850, all that was about to be abandoned.

  Time now for an essential digression upon a word that few persons understand, including many who use it regularly. Indigenous. Australian bureaucrats and politicians take it to mean a populace resident in a land for 40,000 years, this being the length of time the Aborigines have inhabited the continent of Australia. But that is not its true meaning at all. The Maori, who are indigenous to New Zealand, have only been there for 700 years. One is racially Australoid, the other Mongoloid. So it isn’t a question of race any more than it is the length of time a land has been occupied.

  In a United Nations convention for indigenous peoples held some years ago in Geneva, I listened, amazed, to the official representative of the Dutch government say that although Holland had no indigenous people, his government sincerely sympathized with their lot. I had to bite my tongue. He sat there, dear man, without the faintest idea that he himself was an indigenous person. He had made all the usual assumptions Caucasian Europeans make about indigenousness: that to be indigenous means you can’t be white, or belong to a “civilized” race. You have to be colored, at least slightly primitive, and dispossessed of your lands by the white man. Yet the fact remains that the Dutch are indigenous to the Netherlands. They are the same people who once called themselves the Frisii and the Bructeri, and inhabited the lowlands between the Rhenus and the Amasia Rivers.

  The indigneous people of Britain were probably driven in great numbers to Ireland; indigenousness is harder to prove in Great Britain.

  The Oxford English Dictionary attributes no importance to being the first in a place: it simply says that to be indigenous is to occupy a place naturally.

  Indigenousness is not dependent upon a people’s skin color, or color of hair and eyes; the Sami of Lappland are very blond. A people may not even be the first in a place, but it must occupy that place naturally. The word has no degree: one is indigenous, or one is not indigenous. No middle ground, no shades of grey. Nor, according to the United Nations, can an external authority pronounce upon it. The only ones concerned with indigenousness are those who are indigenous. So a government cannot say a people is not indigenous when (a) it has declared itself indigenous and (b) is accepted as indigenous by its fellow indigenes.

  The key word is naturally. If the object or purpose of occupying a place previously unoccupied is to establish and run a prison, and if persons desirous of settling in it are not allowed to do so, then that settlement is not natural. Its activities do not revolve around the natural activities of a group of persons settling in a new place. On the contrary. No one in the twenty-first century would attach the word “natural” to any nineteenth century penal institution, or aspect of it.

  Neither the first nor the second penal establishment on Norfolk Island can be called natural. The second in particular was artificial in the same way as any other high security prison built in virgin territory, as still happens in California, a place in constant need of more high security prisons. Under no kind of circumstances is a settlement natural when it has only one purpose, to sequester society’s pariahs, when its servitors come and go according to orders, and no one dreams of it as a homeland.

  By 1850, however, the British Crown had decided that the people of Pitcairn’s Island would be given a new homeland, Norfolk Island. It was eminently suited to accommodate a small, yet whole and entire, populace. It had an infrastructure that could at least be put partially to use, and it would cost the Crown virtually nothing while endowing a deserted island with a stoutly British people. All important considerations.

  Pitcairn’s Island was a very long way away from anywhere. It had been wrongly marked on the charts, which made it an ideal hiding place for a group of renegades. Mutiny on a British Navy ship was the ultimate crime, and carried an automatic death sentence. That the officers and men of the Bounty were inflicted with a captain who, later in his life, would have two more mutinies and a history of perpetual trouble and discontent wherever he was, made no difference. Colder men wouldn’t have given Bligh a sextant when they sent him off in their largest boat, but these mutineers were young and — worse — desperate for love. They had all formed strong attachments to native women in Tahiti, and were determined to return there.

  So, in 1790, a year after the mutiny on the Bounty, the mutineer Fletcher Christian, twenty-four years old, with five other mutineers, sixteen Tahitian women and nine Tahitian men, found Pitcairn’s Island and decided to stay there. It was to be their homeland for sixty-six years: it was terra nullius when they settled there, and they loved this crag as people love a homeland.

  It lay 3,300 miles east of Norfolk Island in the southwestern Pacific: the closest landmass was Chile in South America and the closest Polynesian settlement on Rapanui — Easter Island. In area Pitcairn’s is so small it makes the fifteen square miles of Norfolk Island seem gigantic — two square miles. But here, using what tools Bounty had carried, they carved out a place that sheltered and fed them, and in time became a people filled with what the American anthropologist Harry L. Shapiro called “hybrid vigor.” They developed a language peculiarly their own, and two astonishingly modern laws: the first, that all women were entitled to vote on an equal footing with men; and the second, that all children must be schooled. They were godfearing, kind, and peaceful. When their presence on Pitcairn’s Island was discovered in 1815, they were already full masters of their tiny island world, and when in 1825 the Royal Navy visited them, they were impressive. In 1838 a visiting ship’s captain gave them a list of “laws” to which they adhered from that point on; it was, in effect, a constitution.

  But by 1850 the settlement on what was now known as Pitcairn Island — the apostrophe and the “s” had been dropped — was creaking at the seams. One hundred and ninety people lived there, and it wasn’t big enough to support them.

  With Queen Victoria on the throne and Prince Albert behind her, the climate in England was very different than it had been even in 1825. A pseudoscience called eugenics was all the rage, and certain important people suddenly saw, one, the saga of the Bounty mutineers as romantic, and, two, an extremely rare chance to observe the evolution of a new people unaffected by modern changes and unacquainted with modern living.

  It is referred to in the literature, of which Ric has a room stuffed full, as “the Experiment.” As best one can reconstruct its purposes, they were to place this untouched people-in-the-making upon a new homeland as remote and far off the sea lanes as possible. Norfolk Island was the best among the candidate islands considered.

  The letters that went back and forth between persons like the Bishop of London and various members of Cabinet as well as colonial governors sigh wistfully for the chance to witness a Pitcairner’s first sight of a sheep or a cow, never having seen either, let alone obtained food from it. Romanticism was rampant.

  It took at least six years to get the scheme moving, given the distances involved in the exchange of letters, orders, afterthoughts, new i
nstructions.

  When the proposition was eventually put to the Pitcairners, “We Accepted” says their motto. Upon the payment by the Pitcairners of £4,000 for a ship, the Morayshire was commissioned to take the now-193 persons of Pitcairn westward across the South Pacific to their new home and homeland, Norfolk Island.

  The main document was an Imperial Order-in-Council, and it virtually gifted the Pitcairn immigrants with the whole of the new homeland; it also stipulated that they were to be left to govern themselves.

  The provisos of the Order-in-Council give the game away, of course; the Islanders were guinea-pigs, and the Experiment was to observe what happened during their ongoing evolution as a people, as a society.

  This is a tale of one broken promise after another, including to the present day, 2011. It is a tale of a man or a small group of men neither resident on Norfolk Island nor committed by blood to Norfolk Island, taking the fate of a people and manipulating it for their own ends, never admirable or the right ends. It is a tale of that universal truth: people yearn to have power over another people deemed inferior or insignificant.

  The Pitcairners arrived on Norfolk Island on June 8th, 1856, and hadn’t dried the sea water off their feet before the promises were being broken. Their most precious piece of paper, the one that gave them all but some landing places, was taken from them — no photocopiers in those days! They were stripped of many hundreds of acres, many of the buildings. I will only say here that the trickery was so apparent that a group of Youngs sailed back to Pitcairn immediately, angry, disillusioned and unwilling to participate in the Experiment. The confiscated paper has never come to light, its existence strenuously denied by the Crown; it was, of course, destroyed. Whether this was as the result of a decision made by the Governor of New South Wales (who now had a second hat, Governor of Norfolk Island), or it emanated from London, will never be known, but it is highly likely to have been a decision by the Governor of New South Wales, who was horrified that Pitcairn women were allowed to vote. For us in our day and age it is nigh impossible to imagine the outrage most men felt at the very idea of letting women vote — they were cattle, inferiors, undeserving of masculine prerogatives. Governor Sir William Denison suffered a degree of umbrage unimaginable to us, and took his ire out on the unfortunate Islanders in every way he could. What he could not do was strip Islander women of their right to vote; that was entrenched as part of the Experiment. So he took as much of Norfolk Island’s 10,000 acres as he dared.

  One hundred and ninety-three people had sailed from Pitcairn: 194 arrived on Norfolk — a baby was born en route. With them, the Islanders brought everything that makes a people a people settling in a place to live there naturally. They brought sewing baskets, innumerable relics of the Bounty from its rudder to its own sewing box; they brought their pet cats, their prayer books, their slates and teaching apparatus, their few precious books; they brought all their people from oldest to youngest, including that one still in utero; they brought their language, their customs, traditions and skills.

  Finally, in 1856, Norfolk Island became a homeland. It was a place with a natural settlement of genetically unique people. In 1993 the Norfolk Islanders of Pitcairn stock declared themselves indigenous to Norfolk Island as a homeland, and were accepted into the indigenous community at Geneva.

  Despite the malign attitude of a series of Governors of New South Wales, the Islanders thrived in their new homeland, though a second group returned to Pitcairn eighteen months after the arrival due to more broken promises. Always bearing in mind, you who read this, that I am still speaking of the British Crown; New South Wales was a British colony. And always the shadow of the voting women cast its pall across official attitudes to the Islanders. Men? They were undeserving of the name, they were dominated by what one governor, Viscount Hampden, described as “petticoat government.” Today, of course, the Islanders can claim without any fear of argument that they were the first European-organized government to give women the vote.

  Going back to Pitcairn times, the Islanders earned what little income they gathered from whaling, but in the old-fashioned way that stood in no danger of depleting a species. Their few barrels were sold to passing whalers, and the money was cared for with remarkable shrewdness. It was never spent, just added to. When, for instance, charter of a ship to take the people to Norfolk Island was bruited and a figure of £4,000 was named, the Islanders paid it out of what they had saved living on Pitcairn. Living on Norfolk, it increased faster. The money a family kept for its own use came from selling fresh produce and meat to the ships that occasionally called in.

  But gradually it was borne in upon London that the Experiment was being endangered by the warmth and generosity of the Islanders. Sometimes a visiting ship left without one crew member: the Islander girls were gorgeous, though, alas, virtuous. If a man became enamored of an Island girl, he had to marry her and stay on Norfolk Island to raise a family. An Englishman named Rossiter was engaged as a schoolteacher — a cruel one, the stories say — and married an Island girl. Pardon Snell, an American from Little Compton, Rhode Island, jumped a whaler, married, and stayed. Isaac Robinson, whose career was so checkered by the time he arrived on Norfolk Island that he was something of a man of well-traveled mystery, serves as a wonderful example of just how far female suffrage went. Robinson got two Quintal girls, sisters, pregnant, but could only marry one — which one? was the question. So the two girls, Kezia and Hannah, were allowed to decide who would marry this bald, elderly Lothario; they decided that Hannah, only sixteen years old, would need him more. Isaac Robinson duly married Hannah Quintal. Three years later, Kezia died, so the Robinsons took her orphaned child, Alice, as their own.

  Bataille was a French horse trader; Blucher was a German. But as the news of these marriages percolated back to London, displeasure reigned. The Experiment was endangered, perhaps ruined, by a constant influx of new blood. Worse than that, the new blood tended to be foreign — Americans, French, God forbid, Germans! Added to which, these foreigners were gifted with land because their wives were Islanders and had equal suffrage, equal rights with men on the subject of land as well as votes.

  In 1896, the Governor of New South Wales struck. He stripped the Islanders of their right to govern themselves. From that time on, they were under his autocratic control.

  Life became intolerable. One governor sent a friend and his son to administer Norfolk Island; they robbed the Islanders of every penny they could lay their hands on. Complaints fell on perpetually deaf ears. If any emotion surged uppermost in an official breast, it was that universal truth: a whole people to oppress, discriminate against, insult, ignore, and, most of all, despise. Non-men who allowed women to vote!

  The Islanders took to sending petitions to London. It was a clever move, in that any petitions sent to London via the Governor of New South Wales were torn up; petitions sent direct were at least read by some persons in London. And, if it did nothing else, it served to remind London that there had been an Experiment, and that its guinea-pigs were bitterly unhappy.

  Now we come to the year 1901 and the birth of the Commonwealth of Australia, until that date merely a collection of separately administered colonies existing on a continent three million square miles in extent. New Zealand was supposed to be a part of the new nation, but wisely ended in declining; Western Australia did not want to belong and was talked into it, a decision that many modern Western Australians deplore. Norfolk Island wasn’t even mentioned; it continued to be a British Crown colony.

  The constitution of the Commonwealth of Australia is a rather peculiar document, given its relatively late genesis: the People are mentioned only once, in its Preamble, and are apportioned no rights. The many clauses all pertain to the rights of states and the rights of parliamentarians. Nor has a bill of rights for the Australian people ever been formulated.

  The average Australian citizen knows nothing of the story I am writing, so I would like to point out here and now that when I say “Australi
a” I do not mean its people. They, like Norfolk Island, are all too often government’s victims. I must also mention the city of Canberra, where the Australian federal government resides in splendid isolation. A ziggurat of 350,000 persons, Canberra’s sole industry is government, and its population one of civil servants. The average wage in Canberra is considerably higher than anywhere else in the nation.

  In 1914 a panic flashed through the South Pacific because the Germans had been making colonial inroads in Micronesia and Melanesia. In those days Norfolk Island was urgently strategic: it was the only piece of land between New Caledonia and New Zealand. Even though it had no harbor or safe anchorage, the military possession of the Island’s 15 square miles was a threat. As a result, Norfolk Island was placed under the authority of the Commonwealth of Australia as a dependent territory. When Australia asked to annex it into the Commonwealth, the Islanders protested so strongly to the Crown that Australia’s request was refused. To this day, Norfolk Island has not been annexed. No matter what fancy name Australia puts upon it, it is still a dependent territory.