Norfolk Island

Norfolk Island is an eight by six kilometre paradise set in the blue waters of the South West Pacific Ocean about 1500 kilometres east of the Australian mainland. The island was secured by the British in 1788, just a few weeks after the settlement at Sydney Cove. It was abandoned after a few years, until 1824 when it became one of the most terrible and feared of England’s penal settlements. Norfolk’s historic buildings and scenic hills belie the bloody past. But the graveyards and the chronicles testify to the brutality and terror of those awful years. The Island was abandoned for a second time. But it was re-settled by the descendants of The Bounty Mutineers who moved there from the more isolated Pitcairn Island in 1856.