Lord Howe Island

Press, Volume CVII, Issue 31500, 14 October 1967, Page 4

Lord Howe Island

Lord Howe Island. By Alan and Valrie Finch. Rigby (Adelaide). 157 pp.

This thoroughly entertaining story of Lord Howe Island is the work of an English journalist settled in Australia, and his Australian wife. Lord Howe Island sits among 28 smaller islands and rocks that are the parts protruding above the sea of a ridge in the sea bed 436 miles east-north-east of Sydney. It is roughly midway between Sydney and Norfolk Island—a circumstance that was responsible for its discovery in 1788.

Governor Phillip had sent the colony's odd-job ship, H.M.S. Supply, on an exploratory mission to test Cook’s belief that “many good refreshments" could be got on Norfolk Island. Laying a direct course for Norfolk, Lieutenant Henry Lidgbird Ball found his way intercepted by several islands of which he took possession in the name of King George III; the largest he tactfully named Lord Howe’s Island, after the then First Lord of the Admiralty. The smaller of the two largest islands he named Lidgbird, after himself but he gave himself an enviously magnificent memorial when he called the tall rock structure lying 10 miles off Lord Howe Island,

Ball’s Pyramid. Surrounded by shark-infested waters and made hazardous to climbers by precipitous faces and crumbling sandstone, Ball’s Pyramid was not conquered by climbers until 1965, and then only by a well-equipped expedition, preceded by study and aurvey. Sir Francia Chichester became very familiar with Ball’s Pyramid during his enforced stay on Lord Howe in 1931. His description after he had flown by it to his repaired plane portrayed it u an unenviable object for climbers: “In several places about 200 feet below the summit, I could see elean through—4t was cracked right off! It looked as if very little were needed to topple it over." In the heyday of whaling under tail, a small settlement on Lord Howe made a living provisioning ships. After the provisioning business waned, exporting palm seeds became the main industry, and seeds from Lord Howe provided plants to pots in homes and halls all over the world. The palm seed business suffered a decline to demand to the 1930’5, and an additional blow when one of Lord Howe’S many shipwrecks—that of the Makambo —loosed a horde of rata on the island. Palma for decoration are returning to worldwide fashion and plants and seeds from Lord Howe are in demand again. But tourism to the chief industry

> nowadays; the island attracts and entertains about 3000 i tourists a year. However, tourism at this level would seem to .depend upon continuation of a flying-boat service from Australia. Flyingboats are going out of service, and the problem of building i an aerodrome on Lord Howe Is far greater than the problems involved in replacing the flytag-boat service to the Chatham Islands. Lord Howe’s fascinating history includes several attempts to make a penal colony of It Though having only a nominal governing structure and only tenuous connection with New South Wales and Australian Governments, Lord Howe Island had its political incidents and scandal. The authors give a chapter to Francis Chichester’s flight in 1931 from New Zealand to Sydney, on a three-cornered course that took in Norfolk and Lord Howe Island. Picking up an island speck was remarkable aerial navigation in those days and having made his landfall Chichester deserved something better when safely down than to have his aircraft blown over and damaged in the Lord Howe lagoon. Encouraged by the islanders, 1 Chichester set about a reconi struction job, and with their • help got Ms aircraft fit to fly • out to complete the journey Ito Sydney. Chichester has > described the nine weeks he : spent on Lord Howe with Its ’ friendly people as among the ■ happiest of his life.

Mr and Mrs Finch have consulted sources both distant and on the spot, and their writing displays lively appreciation of what they came across. The result is a book in which a wealth of interesting detail is attractively presented to the reader. The authors have steered adroitly between the heavy scientific work and the mere guidebook. One could wish at times that they had reread what they had written a little more carefully, and had refrained from interpolating occasional personal views—smart, no doubt, but irrelevant to the subject of Lord Howe Island. On the whole, however, the writers have done their subject proud. And the authors have been well served by their publishers whose production—dust-jacket, paper, type and pictures—is first-class; the publishers would be annoyed that the gremlin which hovers in printing works when special care is being taken, thought it fitting to interfere with the large type on page 125.