No resorts, no cruise ships: Now’s the time to visit our most underrated island

Norfolk offers something increasingly rare in modern tourism: authenticity untouched by overtourism.

You won’t find large international resorts or cruise-ship crowds. Instead, you will find convict ruins wrapped in subtropical greenery and community celebrations where visitors are warmly welcomed.

One of those is Bounty Day. Each June 8, Pitcairner descendants, dressed in period costume and accompanied by hymns, re-enact the arrival of their forebears from longboats at Kingston Pier.

One of Australia’s somewhat mysterious External Territories, Norfolk Island lies 1600 kilometres north-east of Sydney in the South Pacific, between New Zealand and New Caledonia.

Remote yet accessible, with direct flights from Sydney and Brisbane, it has flown under the radar of most Australian travellers.

But if ever there was a good time to consider travel to Norfolk Island, it is now as the historic Pitcairn Register arrives on the island for the first time in 170 years, on loan from the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, England.

The register, which documents births, marriages and deaths from the burning of HMS Bounty in 1790 after the infamous mutiny of 1789, through to 1854, will go on public display at the island’s historic Pier Store as part of this year’s Bounty Day commemorations.

For Norfolk Islanders, it is far more than an archival curiosity.

“This is a foundational document of our people,” says Norfolk Island Museum Trust chair Pauline Reynolds, herself descended from both the Bounty mutineers and their Polynesian wives. “It contains what we call awas kamfram – our origins.”

That story remains one of the most extraordinary, and violent, in Pacific history.

After the mutiny aboard HMS Bounty in 1789, Fletcher Christian and eight fellow mutineers fled with a group of Polynesian men and women to isolated Pitcairn Island, more than 5000 kilometres east of Australia. The island became both a sanctuary and prison.

The register records not only births and marriages, but murder, alcoholism and social collapse.

Among its entries are references to a massacre between mutineers and Polynesian men in 1793, the island’s first distilling of alcohol and an attempted murder in 1799.

Yet from that chaos emerged a distinct community and culture that survives to this day.

In 1856, when Pitcairn Island’s growing population became unsustainable, Queen Victoria granted the entire community land on Norfolk Island, a former penal colony.

More than 170 years later, more than a quarter of Norfolk Island’s population can still trace their ancestry directly to the mutine