Norfolk Island's history: three settlements and a dispute over 1856

Who reached Norfolk Island before the British

People were on the island long before any European saw it. Parks Australia, which manages the national park, dates Polynesian occupation to between the 13th and 15th centuries and says it is still unknown why the settlement ended. Excavation found the main village site at Emily Bay, on the south coast, along with stone tools, banana plants and the Polynesian rat. The settlers probably came from the Kermadec Islands or from the North Island of New Zealand, and they brought the harakeke, the New Zealand flax, with them. Both Polynesian and Melanesian artefacts have been found, which leaves open a landing from New Caledonia as well. The rats outlived the people: fossil evidence suggests they drove the island's small lizards to local extinction long before 1788.

James Cook sighted the island on 10 October 1774, on his second voyage in HMS Resolution, and went ashore the next day. He found it uninhabited. His account of tall straight pines and abundant flax is the reason the island was settled at all, because in the 1780s the Royal Navy bought almost all its hemp and flax through Russian ports, and a Pacific source of masts and sailcloth looked like an answer. Sources differ on whom the name honoured: the Duchess of Norfolk in one account, the Duke or the Howard family in others.

Why Britain planted convicts on the island

Lieutenant Philip Gidley King landed on 6 March 1788, about five weeks after the First Fleet reached Sydney, with a party of 22: fifteen convicts and seven free men. The settlement grew to about 1,100 people by 1804, according to the parliamentary committee that reviewed the island's history in 2023.

The plan failed on its own terms. Neither the pine nor the flax proved suitable for masts or sails. What the island did well was grow food, and in its first years it was described as Sydney's food bowl. It had no harbour, though, and the landing places were dangerous. HMS Sirius, one of the First Fleet ships, was wrecked there in March 1790 while landing convicts and marines, and her crew was stranded for ten months. The wreck still lies inside what is now the Norfolk Marine Park.

As early as 1794 the Lieutenant-Governor of New South Wales proposed closing the settlement as too remote and too costly. The withdrawal began in 1805, with the first group of 159 leaving in February, and 554 more left between November 1807 and September 1808, most of them for Van Diemen's Land. The last residents were taken off in 1813. A small party stayed behind to slaughter the stock and pull down the buildings, so that no other European power would find a reason to land, and from 15 February 1814 to 6 June 1825 nobody lived on the island.

What the second penal settlement was for

In 1824 London instructed the Governor of New South Wales to reoccupy Norfolk Island as a place for "the worst description of convicts". The first party, 104 people, landed on 6 June 1825: 57 convicts, two officers, 33 soldiers, six women and six children. The colony's governors described the island as a punishment "short only of death", and the settlement became known for floggings, chains and the absolute power of its commandants.

How the record has been revised

The usual picture of the second settlement comes from a handful of convict memoirs and from Marcus Clarke's novel For the Term of His Natural Life. Archival work since then has tested it. A 2011 study built a database of 6,458 men sent to the island and found that more than half had never received a colonial conviction, that only 15% had been reprieved from a death sentence, that most had committed non-violent property offences, and that the average stay was three years. The same research found that floggings averaged 93 lashes under Alexander Maconochie, commandant from 1840 to 1844, who had a reputation as the reformer among them.

The convicts rose against their guards in 1826, 1834 and 1846, and every rising failed. Britannica puts the population of the settlement at an average of 1,500 to 2,000 convicts.

The administration also moved. Letters Patent of 24 October 1843 took the island from New South Wales and annexed it to Van Diemen's Land from 29 September 1844. After a change of policy in 1847 the settlement was wound down, and the last convicts left for Tasmania in May 1855, leaving 11 people on the island. The stone buildings they had put up at Kingston survived. Since July 2010 the Kingston and Arthur's Vale Historic Area has been one of the 11 sites that make up the Australian Convict Sites on the UNESCO World Heritage List.

How the Pitcairners came to stay

Pitcairn Island, where the Bounty mutineers and the Tahitians with them had settled in 1790, had become too small for its population. The islanders petitioned the British government for help, and in 1856 Queen Victoria in Council separated Norfolk Island from Van Diemen's Land and declared it "a distinct and separate settlement", administered by the Governor of New South Wales in a separate office.

The whole Pitcairn community left on the Morayshire on 3 May 1856. They landed on 8 June, 194 people after a birth on the voyage, though Parks Australia gives 196. They lived at first in the convict buildings at Kingston, then moved onto land grants of 50 acres a family. Some families went back to Pitcairn in 1858 and 1863, and newcomers arrived on whaling ships, which had been calling at the island since the Britannia in November 1793 and kept coming until the Andrew Hicks in 1907.

The Governor was given power to make laws for the island, and for its first forty years the settlement ran close to self-government, in the words of the Commonwealth department that now administers it. Public business went to the House, a meeting of every adult that decided by majority, under 39 rules modelled on those of Pitcairn. By the 1890s the rules had grown to 47. The Church of England's Melanesian Mission had its headquarters on the island from 1867 until it moved to the Solomon Islands in 1920.

The Order in Council of 1856 is the document the later disputes turn on. A former mayor of the island told the 2023 parliamentary inquiry that a belief has been handed down through generations of Pitcairn descendants that Queen Victoria gifted Norfolk Island to the Pitcairners. Every year on 8 June the island marks the landing as Anniversary Day, also called Bounty Day.

How New South Wales and then Australia took control

In 1895 London asked New South Wales to take over, after the Governor of Norfolk Island reported that "the experiment made in 1856 had failed" in the administration of justice. An Order in Council of October 1896 placed the island under New South Wales administration, against what the committee's history describes as vigorous opposition from islanders who wanted to remain a British colony. The old laws were repealed in November 1896 and replaced with 23 new ones. The Chief Magistrate, until then elected, became a government appointment, and a Council of Elders of twelve elected members took over roads and reserves. A further order in January 1897 vested the island's affairs in the Governor of New South Wales and looked ahead to annexation to that colony "or to any federal body" it might join.

The Council of Elders was disbanded in 1903 and replaced by an Executive Council of two elected and four appointed members. The Australian Parliament passed the Norfolk Island Act 1913, which received royal assent on 19 December 1913, and after British agreement in March 1914 the island became an Australian territory from 1 July 1914.

What Australian administration changed before self-government

Between 1915 and 1978 the changes were small. The Norfolk Island Act 1935 created an Advisory Council of eight elected members, and in 1957 a Norfolk Island Council replaced it. When the council was offered local government powers in 1960 it refused them, because the Administrator would hold a veto and the council would have to raise its own revenue. Politico reported in 2026 that the Australian government barred islanders from printing newspapers from 1935 to 1964.

The Second World War brought the airstrip. Australian, New Zealand and American servicemen built it in 1942, a New Zealand garrison known as N Force held the island until February 1944, and the field stayed in use after the war, which opened the island to tourism.

Islanders also tested Australia's authority in court. Samuel Hadley argued in 1939 that only laws made under the 1856 Order in Council were valid, and the High Court rejected the case. The Supreme Court of Norfolk Island rejected Henry Newbery's appeal in 1965, and in 1976 the High Court held unanimously in the Berwick case that Norfolk Island was part of Australia. A Royal Commission under Justice Nimmo reported the same year with 71 recommendations, the first of which asked the Commonwealth to decide whether it would abandon the island or keep it as a viable community.

What limited self-government did for the island

The Norfolk Island Act 1979 created a nine-member Legislative Assembly elected for three years, with a government drawn from its members. Its preamble recognised the descendants of the Pitcairn settlers, their "special relationship" to the island and their wish to preserve their traditions. Between 1979 and 1997 the island's government took on more of the work a state would do: the public service, public works, the airport, and later, in 1999, the management of land. It also ran immigration, customs and social security, which on the mainland belong to the Commonwealth.

There was no income tax. Revenue came from a local goods and services tax, import and fuel duties, a medical levy, telephone services, tourism and the sale of stamps. Submissions to the 2023 inquiry said the government ran a balanced budget from 1979 to 2011 and borrowed nothing for its running costs in its first 30 years.

Tourism, the island's main earner, was hit by the global financial crisis of 2009, and in 2010 the island's government asked Canberra for a loan. Chris Nobbs, a Norfolk Islander of Pitcairn descent, told the 2023 inquiry that the Commonwealth answered it would lend nothing unless the island paid federal taxes and joined the welfare system, and that the island agreed under protest. A Roadmap for "modified self-government" followed in March 2011. In October 2014 the joint parliamentary committee recommended repealing the 1979 Act, a recommendation the Legislative Assembly opposed.

The island's government called a referendum for 8 May 2015, asking whether Norfolk Islanders should have the right to freely determine their political status and be consulted before any change. The Guardian reported 624 votes for, 266 against and 22 informal, with only Australian citizens voting. The Australian Parliament passed the Norfolk Island Legislation Amendment Act six days later, on 14 May 2015. The Legislative Assembly was abolished on 18 June 2015, and the preamble that named the Pitcairn descendants was removed from the 1979 Act.

Why the question has stayed open

The Norfolk Island Regional Council took office on 1 July 2016, with Australian taxation, social security and immigration extended to the island the same day. It was suspended on 4 February 2021 and its councillors were dismissed on 6 December 2021 after a public inquiry into its finances. Its later story, and the promised assembly, belong to the politics of the island.

The committee that wrote the 2023 report observed that no governing arrangement on the island had lasted much longer than four decades, and that many of the changes had been, in the eyes of the community, imposed from outside. Islanders have answered in their own forums. On 1 January 2026, according to Politico, residents voted in an election organised by the Norfolk Island Council of Elders and a group called For The People Norfolk Island, which the organisers described as a vote to leave Australia. The Commonwealth department responsible says such groups have no basis in law. The two positions are the two readings of 1856, still standing side by side.