Whalermen

Norfolk Island

Remembered

From Ed Howard on Norfolk On a Wednesday late in each November, Thanksgiving Day is celebrated as a public hol iday on Norfolk Island. Nor folk is apparently the only place in the world outside North America that has adopted one of the United States’ most distinctive hol idays. It has been a fixture on the island for generations, having been introduced last

century by visiting whalermen

from New Bedford and Nan tucket.

It has come to be an import ant religious day on Norfolk.

The island’s churches are decorated with tall cornstalks at each pew-end, and small mountains of the best-looking produce from family farms and gardens are heaped up on the floor.

When the sermons and hymns are over the produce is carried outside and sold to all comers, the full proceeds going into the churches’ coffers.

Afterward there are island pic nics and dinners often with roast turkey and pumpkin pie.

Links between the US and five-by-eight-km Norkfolk are notable because they are unrelated to trade or com merce. The island’s tourist attracting shops in Burnt Pine

do carry a wide variety of American goods, from Kodak film to Fieldcrest linens and Anne Klein fashion jeans, but the volume is inconsequential by US standards. Mail to Nor folk shopkeepers from sup pliers in the Slates is

occasionally delayed by being

mistakenly routed to Norfolk,

Virginia.

Yet Norfolk’s sense of kin ship with the US is strong enough to have warranted a 1976 stamp series com memorating America’s bi centenary. An American whal

ing ship appeared on one

mindful of the days when as many as 20 whaleboats could be seen working the waters off Norfolk, and whalermen with names like Snell and Jackson came ashore and settled on the island. One of the stamps showed a church decorated for Thanksgiving. Another por

trayed an American warplane

over the island in World War 11, when US engineers desig ned Norfolk’s airfield. The air field was the beginning of the island’s basic tourist industry today. It was also the end of the historic ‘Avenue of Pines’, which had to go to make way for the runways. James A.

Michener told that story as one of his Tales of the South

Pacific.

Despite Norfolk’s commer

cial and political insignificance

three recent US ambassadors to Australia have paid visits to the island, as did recent Sydney Consul-General Norman Han nah. Ambassador Bill Crook, touched by the headstones of American sailors in the island’s picturesque seaside cemetery, floated the idea that US phil anthropic funds might be avail able to help groom the graveyard and restore some of the convict-era gravestones. He was very politely brushed off, island-style. Norfolk values its ties with the US, but wasn’t about to accept monetary aid from wealthy Yanks, thanks all the same.

Norfolk’s 200-mile fishing zone may introduce a new note into relationships between the two. Australia has claimed the zone as its own, but the Island has not conceded the unilateral claim. The waters include good

tuna fishing, of particular

interest to the US.