NORFOLK ISLAND.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVIII, Issue 20880, 23 May 1931, Page 1 (Supplement)

NORFOLK ISLAND.

BY M. A. LATTER,

HOME OF EASE AND PATHOS.

Purple is the sea, and glass-green, and very piercing and melting shade of blue, rom" black indigo to a butterfly's wing. 31ack the rocks and promontories that 'un out insidiously into the white foam, lose pink the small neighbouring island >f Philip. Pale gold the sand of Norfolk :sland, grey and sinister the ruined irehes and walls of its ancient convict mitdings; and tall everywhere, straight igainst the sea-wind, cool and dark, ,he thronging pines, whose stately march :arries them over hill and valley, down jven on to the glittiring shore. As you lie in their shade, cool in the hottest weather, scarlet and blue parrots, with long drooping tails, fly above you, and doves of emerald and bois-de-rose pick their way in the grass near your feet. Opaque volumes of reddish dust conceal the road as the flying Islanders urge their emaciated horses at a full gallop along it, between high hedges of rose and white oleander. These brownish people—descendants of the Bounty mutineers and their Tahiti wives—are gemle and courteous, iazy, improvident and charming. They came here nearly eighty years ago—Christians and Quintals, McCoys, Youngs and Adamses —after the convict establishment was broken up and dispersed. Some of them returned home-sick to Pitcairn, but the greater number remained, and took possession of what was then a highly cultivated settlement. Norfolk Island, which measures only five miles by three, has seventy miles of convict-made roads (they say that if a tree was to be cut down the unhappy slaves had to make a road to it), and Kingston, the port, was a flourishing little township, containing, besides the great barracks and prisons, with their stone enclosing walls, turrets and watchtowers and slits for guns, a street of beautiful stone-built and shingle-roofed Georgian houses, known as Quality Row. Here, the Governor and other people of importance lived. The Roofless Houses. Why these' houses are nearly all roofless and ruined now is a question which it is not tactful to enter on with an Islander; but the story, as I heard it, was this. The Pitcairners, one hundred and ninetyfour of them, coming at the invitation of the Australian Government to occupy the lately vacated houses, considered them their own property. Rents were unknown to them; and when the Government suddenly and foolishly imposed a nominal rental they indignantly refused to submit to the imposition. " Pay, said the Government, "or go!" The Islanders remained, passive resisters. Pay, or we unroof your houses," was the next alternative; and the houses were unroofed, and the inmates' had to leave them—but not before they had set fire to every one! , I went with some Island friends one day to the funeral of an Islander. We drove down from the highlands to the little hospital by the sea—one of those ancient and dignified stone-built houses. My friends were both relatives of the dead woman, as indeed all- the Islanders are akin. They went into the house to see her: Groups of dark-eyed people chatted, smoked and laughed on the wide verandah. Dust-covered sulkies, drawn bv shadowy Island. horses, drew -ip by the low stone wall. Four young men brought the bier and set it down at the gateway, th« shining collars of two clergymen shimmered in the recesses of the verandah, some women brought sadlooking wreaths, already drooping in the hot sunshine; and we waited still. Careless of Time. . It is an Island attitude, into which mainlanders fall with surprising readiness, that time is of no importance and punctuality a name. An hour after the time fixed there was a little stir on the raised.verandah, the watchers formed two ranks by the door, and the coffin, with its draggled flowers, was borne on the shoulders of the young men down the path and along the grass-grown road to the churchyard. It was a rough, rectangular wooden box, covered with some black material, and bordered at the top with common white lace. Norfolk is a cheap place to die in; coffins are supplied free. . We fell in behind the procession. In •the hillside churchyard there are no paths. We made our way over rough, thick, grass, interwoven with a mauve convolvulus; among gravestones of old and passionate memory—to the baby children or young wives of officials, to warders murdered by maddened prisoners, to soldiers executed —and came to the raw heap of upturned yartli. Vivid-green, low-growing trees, flattened by the sea-wind, stretched like a sloping table to the hill which, beyond the grassy track leading to " Bloody Bridge," rose steeply on the shore side. To the right, like coloured glass, were the waves of the brilliant and vital sea, the glowing island; and behind, the ruins and remains of cruelty, agonies, barbarity, lusts for' which there is no name—the abandoned convict settlement. . . Sorrow and Song. A woman softly uttered the first notes of a hymn, and all of perhaps a hundred, and thirty people assembled there joined in, singing in parts. They sang as the birds do, without effort, and as purely. No strident village voice asserted itself above its fellows, but man and woman together breathed sweet harmonies seriously, perfectly; it was a lovely sound. Those who had lately laughed and gossiped sang now like angels; with i.nerlaced arms, with heads leaning on each other's shoulders, with tears running down their cheeks. The little assembly—with that poor body for centre—bedizened in the ians and strips that humanity collects to its defence, making its brave effort to glorify the last indignity of nature, stood there, and there dispersed; its nucleus vanished as though the mysterious ocean—nur.her of life, more eager, more live than all j , humanity—having deposed on the shore a morsel of sea-wrack, with her mighty pull, with her moon-drawn force had taken and resumed to herself that unsightly drift, to mingle again with the springs of the world. ■wg jj "—~