The Bounty Museum
The History of Norfolk Island (B)
Ball Bay, Norfolk Island
Ball Bay is a crescent lined with black boulders; the remnant of a volcanic cone breached by the sea.
Ball Bay Reserve is located on the south-eastern side of Norfolk Island. This Reserve is Norfolk’s second largest, with an area of 28.72 hectares and has spectacular ocean views and unusual cliff formations.
The original Ball Bay Reserve, which forms the major section of the Reserve, was proclaimed under the Commons and Public Reserves Act 1936 on 4 February 1937 for the purposes of recreation, landing and shipping.
Ball Bay Reserve has significant landscape, biological conservation, and historical values. The semi-circular bay is made particularly spectacular by the surrounding 80m high escarpment.
Some remnants of the forest that once covered the Reserve shelters rare or endangered species, including a small population of Norfolk Island Euphorbia, and two ferns, Hypolepis tenuifolia and Dicranopteris linearis.
The native forest remnants and mature native trees scattered though the Reserve provide a valuable foundation for re-establishing native forest on the whole of the Reserve.
Reference: Norfolk Island Public Reserves - Plans of Management
Ball Bay
Banana bunch
The word ‘plun’ for banana orginated on Pitcairn as an abbreviated form of plantain.
The use of the banana demonstrates many ways that we prepare and cook ‘plun’ from green to ripe yellow, to over-ripe and almost black! The two main varieties of banana is the fruit or sweet banana and the plantain. The fruit banana is eaten raw out of your hand when it turns yellow and develops a succulent sweetness with a soft, smooth, creamy yet firm pulp. The plantain, is a cooking banana, with lower water content, making them drier and starchier than fruit bananas.
“In de oo-ullden dayes when dem car get nuff feathers ulla horse hair fe stuff a mattress dem bin hawe’t te use-a rahooloo.”
In the olden days when people couldn’t get enough feathers or horse hair to stuff a mattress, they had to use rahooloo - dried banana leaves and stalks.
(Beryl Nobbs Palmer)
Bananas
References:
Rambler’s guide to Norfolk Island - Merval Hoare, 1972.
Marie’s Complete A-Z Guide to Norfolk (1986 edition) by Alice and Ed Howard.
A hollow Norfolk Island pine - similar to Barney Duffy's hiding-place.
The legend is that Barney Duffy escaped from the Norfolk prison and lived in a hollow tree for years; and that when he was finally caught he laid a curse on the two soldiers who found him, and they mysteriously drowned soon after. There doesn’t seem to be any documentary trace of this legend.
The Barney Duffy legend probably grew from the story of an absconding prisoner, for it was not an uncommon thing, in penal days, for men to take to the bush, which was more plentiful and denser than at the present time.
Barney Duffy was supposed to have avoided capture for seven long years. His hiding-place was said to be an ancient hollow pine near the coast not far from the chapel. One day two young soldiers, who had been fishing down on the rocks in that area, came upon Barney Duffy as he wandered a little way from his tree-home.
A hollow tree, said to have been Barney Duffy’s hiding-place, was burnt down some years ago. Local legend ties up the headstone at Headstone Point with the Barney Duffy story - it is said to have been erected to the two soldiers who captured Barney and met their death by drowning, as victims of his curse.
A 1840 map of Norfolk, printed for the House of Commons in 1841, shows “Barney Duffy’s Gully” running southwest from the slopes of Mt Pitt.
Barney Duffy
Norfolk Island is home to a fascinating fusion of land, water and seabirds.
The island’s isolation means that although Norfolk has relatively few land and forest bird species, a high proportion of these birds are found nowhere else in the world.
Over 20 species of seabirds can be readily seen from the coastal areas of Norfolk Island. The smaller islands of Nepean and Phillip and the smaller islets off the Norfolk coastline are important breeding habitats for most of Norfolk Island’s seabirds.
Some of the land birds which flew in from New Zealand or Australia hundreds of thousands of years ago have developed sufficiently different characteristics to be regarded as endemic species or as sub-species of their parent stock.
There were fourteen at the time of first settlement and of these five species are already extinct. Four others are classed as very rare or on the verge of extinction.
Extensive forest clearing, introduction of fierce tree-climbing predators such as cats and rats, and competition for food and nesting sites from introduced birds such as Red Parrots and Starlings, have proved disastrous for the natives.
References:
Norfolk Island National Park environment.gov.au/parks/norfolk
Norfolk Island: South Pacific island of history and many delights. Jean Edgecombe 1991.
Birds
Bloody Bridge - Norfolk Island
Bloody Bridge is the most notorious of convict-built bridges.
It consists of stone blocks built up over a culvert which takes a small creek from Music Valley under Driver Christian Road to the sea.
Legend relates that convicts, driven to desperation, killed their overseer and walled his body up in the bridge. Seeping blood stains revealed their crime.
Unfortunately, no official evidence supports this tale of murder and retribution.
Reference: Norfolk Island: South Pacific island of history and many delights. Jean Edgecombe 1991.
Bloody Bridge
The Bounty replica anchored at Kingston, Norfolk Island in January 1989.
A three-masted merchant ship, 91 feet long, built in 1784 and orginally christened the ‘Bethia’. In 1787 she was bought for Bligh’s voyage to the South Pacific, refitted as transport for breadfruit seedlings, and re-named ‘Bounty’.
The new name reflected the object of the voyage, which was to get breadfruit plants from Tahiti and take them for re-planting in the West Indies. They hoped to provide cost-free food forever for slaves in Britain’s plantations there.
Her captain was Lt. William Bligh. There were 45 other officers and men. Except for two gardeners who were to look after the seedlings, every man was hand-picked by Bligh. The Bounty may have been the first British Navy ship ever manned entirely by a volunteer crew.
She left Spithead two days before Christmas, 1787, ran into impossible weather attempting to go round Cape Horn, and went eastward around the Cape of Good Hope instead. They reached Tahiti after sailing 27,000 miles in nearly ten months.
After five months in paradise, they left, laden with breadfruit trees. Three weeks out Acting Lt. Fletcher Christian and some of the crew seized the ship, put Bligh and 18 others into a launch, and sailed off. Some on board settled in Tahiti, where a British ship captured them two years later.
Nine mutineers, with six Tahitian men and twelve Tahitian women, sailed onto Pitcairn and were never captured. They burnt the ship there on 23 January 1790.
Cannon balls, bits of copper sheathing and other remnants of her still lie there. One of her cannons and a big copper kettle are on Norfolk Island, as well as relics passed down the generations in the Pitcairn families.
Reference: Marie’s Complete A-Z Guide to Norfolk (1986 edition) by Alice and Ed Howard.
The HMAV Bounty
Bumboras - Norfolk Island
Full of pines and haunted by white terns... suddenly over a shoulder of hill, you look into Cresswell Bay. A few yards further down is an open place surrounded by pines and white oaks. A pretty stream - Rocky Point Creek - curves by; wild taro, growing in the water, holds up on slender stems dark green heart-shaped leaves, dull and heavily-veined. Taro flowers, seen in autumn, are pale orange, strongly scented and tightly folded.
~ Merval Hoare.
Bumbora Reserve is located on the southern coast of Norfolk Island, approximately 1km west of Kingston.
The reserve is 5.68 hectares in area and has significant community, landscape, and biological conservation values.
On the slopes above Bumbora Beach, contains relatively weed-free remnant open forest dominated by Norfolk Island pine and the north-western part of the reserve has been planted with Norfolk Island pines.
References:
Rambler’s guide to Norfolk Island - Merval Hoare, 1972.
Norfolk Island Public Reserves - Plans of Management
Bumboras
Burnt Pine - Norfolk Island
Burnt Pine is the main shopping area of the island, along Taylors Road.
Its boundaries are not officially stated, but as you drive from the airport, it begins when you see the shops and continues around the hospital corner, to end at the crossroads of Taylors Road and Queen Elizabeth Avenue.
Historically, Kingston became the centre of government and administration in the elegantly restored convict buildings. Burnt Pine spread out along Taylors Road, in the centre of the island, as the main shopping area.
Here you will find the Visitors Information Centre, Post Office, Liquor Bond, Telecom and all sorts of wonderful shops, including Norfolk Mall, banks (Commonwealth and Westpac), restaurants and takeaways, major hotels, motels and accommodation houses, newsagency, airline, car hire and tour agencies, the hospital, public library, radio station, Police Station, Rawson Hall, RSL, Leagues & Bowling clubs, tennis & squash courts, and gymnasium.
Burnt Pine
Open 7 days a week
10am to 4pm
Corner of Queen Elizabeth Avenue and Middlegate Road
EFTPOS Availabe & FREE WIFI
Bounty Museum
P.O Box 69
Norfolk Island
NSW 2899
Phone: 53961