Aa Norf’k Wieh: a pacific epistemology for reconceptualising heritage management in Kingston and Arthur’s Vale Historic Area, Norfolk Island

ABSTRACT

Informed by critical heritage studies, Pacific theory-building scholarship and Indigenous research methodologies, this article introduces Aa Norf’k Wieh – a Pitcairn descendant epistemology for understanding the experience and management of living heritage in Kingston and Arthur’s Vale Historic Area (KAVHA), Norfolk Island. Central to Aa Norf’k Wieh is storytelling, reflecting the oral traditions of Pitkern-Norf’k. Aa Norf’k Wieh is captured in the article through the Indigenous research methodology of storywork, with personal family narratives revealing different ways of knowing, being, feeling, and doing heritage. Based on the storying of Aa Norf’k Wieh, the article proposes that, as a Pacific epistemic practice, Aa Norf’k Wieh has the potential to reconfigure how heritage value is understood by heritage managers, consultants, and scholars to produce more culturally just heritage management for KAVHA. The article posits that attention to this epistemology supports a shift from material- and values-based approaches to heritage management on Norfolk Island to a living heritage approach that centres Pitcairner descendants as the core community of KAVHA.

KEYWORDS:

• Norfolk Island
• pacific epistemologies
• Indigenous storywork
• living heritage
• heritage management
• Kingston and Arthur’s Vale historic area

Introduction

Heritage is a lived, deeply affective experience (Waterton 2014) that is felt in the present in ways that call on people, places, and memories of the past, and which works in consideration of future generations. Central to this understanding is the connection of the heritage experience to the concept of being-in-place (Schofield 2008) – a relationship to the heritage environment that is stimulated by the senses, acting as a catalyst for connection within and between the past, present, and future. When heritage is conceived as a sensory-laden, affective experience that cuts across time and space, the deep links between people and place become apparent, revealing the complexities of ‘living heritage’ (Poulios 2014). This is particularly the case for decolonising and Indigenous heritage projects which work to give voice and listen to ‘heart knowledge’ – knowledge ‘passed to others in the context of relationships and deep feelings of connection’ – and ‘blood memory’ – knowledge that ‘passes through generations’ and connects generations (Holmes 2000, 46) – as well as ‘the emotional centres of [] lived experience’ (Archibald, Jenny, and Jason 2019, 13). The emphasis here is on continuity – a central concept in the understanding of living heritage, defined by the continuity of: ‘the heritage’s original function’; the ‘community’s connection with heritage’; ‘the care of heritage by the community as expressed through (traditional) knowledge, management systems, and maintenance practices; and the continuous process of evolving tangible and intangible heritage expressions in response to changing circumstances’ (Poulios 2014, 21).

Understanding heritage as affective, political, and processual is core to the field of critical heritage studies, which seeks to tease out the discursive constructions and material implications of heritage (see, e.g. L. Smith 2006; Winter 2013). Informed by the field of critical heritage studies, this article approaches its subject from a decolonial Pacific lens. In particular, the article is inspired by Pacific theory-building scholarship and Indigenous research methodologies. The contemporary cross-Pacific research paradigm, which emerged ‘against a backdrop of broader discourses concerning postcolonialism and self-determination’ to advocate for Pacific ‘knowledge-seeking and knowledge creation’ (Tualaulelei and McFall-McCaffery 2019, 190, 196), offers Pacific and Pasifika researchers a multitude of approaches to critical inquiry that are ‘more authentic, respectful and meaningful to Pacific communities’ (Tualaulelei and McFall-McCaffery 2019, 197). In the context of heritage management, we contend that ‘there is value in approaching [its] social challenges in uniquely Pacific ways’ (Tualaulelei and McFall-McCaffery 2019, 199).

Specifically, this article introduces Aa Norf’k Wieh [The Norfolk Way] as an epistemological understanding of heritage rooted in the experiences of Norfolk Island’s Pitcairn settlers and their descendants and grounded in cultural values passed down from their Polynesian foremothers (Reynolds 2016). The article emphasises storytelling as central to the epistemological process, reflecting the oral traditions of Pitkern-Norf’k (Mühlhäusler 2020) and the ‘oral knowledges of Pacific communities’ more broadly (Tualaulelei and McFall-McCaffery 2019, 190). The emphasis on storytelling works to reveal how heritage is navigated by Norfolk Islanders – those of Pitcairn descent and others with long and deep connections to the island’s Pitcairn settlement – and what implications that may have for heritage management on the island. Articulating Aa Norf’k Wieh serves to amplify understanding of Pitcairn descendants’ broader sense of self and their collective, community-oriented conceptualisation of the world around them. In doing so, the article adds to a growing body of published work on Pacific epistemologies (e.g. Gegeo 2001; Hau’ofa 1993; Ingersoll 2016).

In turn, Aa Norf’k Wieh poses a challenge to current heritage management strategies on Norfolk Island which continue to be largely driven by an authorised heritage discourse that emphasises ‘age, monumentality, and/or aesthetics’ (L. Smith 2006, 3). This is most evident in the UNESCO World Heritage-listed Kingston and Arthur’s Vale Historic Area (KAVHA), part of the 2010 serial listing for 11 Australian Convict Sites, where the materiality of British convict heritage has been historically privileged in terms of conservation and interpretation (Cantillon and Baker 2022; Gibbs, Duncan, and Varman 2017). Although the World Heritage listing for KAVHA is based on a comparatively short colonial and penal settlement, the Kingston area of Norfolk Island has enormous significance to the current Norfolk Island community who recognise the space as a living heritage site (see e.g. Baker, Cantillon, and Evans 2023). Kingston, known to islanders as daun’taun [down town] or iin taun [in town], was used by the Pitcairners from the moment of their arrival on Norfolk Island in 1856 and has continued to be used by their descendants over subsequent generations (see e.g. Baker, Cantillon, and Evans 2021, 2022a, 2022b; Baker, Evans, and Cantillon 2023). Until recent times, and certainly in living memory, Pitcairn descendant families lived in KAVHA’s penal settlement buildings; descendants and other residents of the island continue to work in the buildings and use the site both recreationally and commercially. From a living heritage perspective, as outlined by Poulios (2014, 21), the Pitcairn settlers and their descendants can be considered the ‘core community’ that ‘created living heritage’ in KAVHA and who sustain ‘the original function’ of that heritage, retain their ‘original connection’ with this heritage ‘over time’, continue to understand their heritage to be ‘an integral part of … contemporary life in terms of … identity, pride, self-esteem, structure, and well-being’, and hold ‘a strong sense of ownership/custodianship for heritage’ that involves a belief that ‘caring for heritage’ is their ‘inherent obligation’ (see also Baker, Cantillon, and Evans 2023).

With its focus on living heritage, the article takes up Byrne’s (2014, 2–3) call ‘for a more democratic heritage practice, one that respects the existence of other ways of relating to old things’. Explicating a Pacific epistemology that is place-based and recognises Pitcairn descendants’ historical and contemporary presence supports a reimagining of heritage management on Norfolk Island underpinned by community stewardship. Aa Norf’k Wieh has the potential to reconfigure how heritage value is understood by offering insight into how KAVHA’s value can be reconceptualised from a non-Western, Pacific perspective. While many people on Norfolk Island are ‘involved in the life of heritage’ in KAVHA and have embraced Aa Norf’k Wieh, the article directs attention to Pitcairner descendants as the core community who are an ‘inseparable part’ of the island’s living heritage and its Pacific epistemology (Poulios 2014, 21). The article works to value and validate Pitcairner knowledge systems (Archibald, Jenny, and Jason 2019, 7), leading to a consideration of the transformative affect this Pacific epistemology could have on KAVHA’s heritage management moving forward for all who engage with the site.

Background

Norfolk Island is located in the South Pacific Ocean. The island’s closest neighbours are New Caledonia (800 km north), New Zealand (1,100 km south-east), and Australia (1,600 km west). It is the homeland of the Norfolk Islanders, whose ancestors settled there after arriving from Pitcairn Island (6,000 km east) in 1856, bringing with them their own language, culture, and traditions. The Pitcairners arrived on Norfolk Island as a distinct people whose way of life reflected their ancestral connections to the resilient Polynesian women and British men, including mutineers of the HMS Bounty, who began a community on Pitcairn in 1790 (Hayward 2006). Ten years after establishing the settlement on Pitcairn, of the original 15 settler men (9 British, 6 Polynesian), only one remained alive. It fell to the 12 Polynesian women to ensure the community thrived, that the children were fed and watered, clothed and housed. Reynolds (2016, 192), in reasserting the centrality of the Polynesian women of Pitcairn in the island’s cultural and social history, notes that two of the women, ‘Mauatua and Teraura[,] appear to have been the most active in … keeping the community running as children were born and the settlement grew’. They relied upon their skills and knowledge brought with them from their former island homes for their survival on Pitcairn, including the making of tapa cloth ‘for clothing, bedding and gifting’, with Reynolds (2016, 194) observing that the binding of the tapa ‘could be seen as symbolic of the binding of social relationships amongst islanders’. The Polynesian women taught their children and children’s children how to co-exist in a place so remote there was no alternative but to rely on one another. Both socially and culturally significant was the ability to do your best by each other, a sentiment that continues to be captured in the Norfolk Islander’s use of the motto inasmuch, a component of Aa Norf’k Wieh.

When Norfolk Island’s history of habitation is narrated, it is principally structured chronologically by way of ‘settlements’. In this regard, the island is described as having four discrete settlements: an enigmatic Polynesian settlement (c.1150–1450, see Anderson and White 2001; Specht 1984); a British agricultural settlement (1788–1814); a British penal settlement (1825–1855); and the Pitcairn settlement (1856–present). The primacy of the colonial narrative is evident in monuments and interpretative signage that celebrate the ‘discovery’ of the island by Cook in 1774 and which have referred to the British settlements as the ‘first’ and ‘second’ settlements, a ‘symbolic annihilation’ (Caswell 2014) of Polynesian wayfinding in the Pacific (see e.g. Eckstein and Schwarz 2019). Despite being the shortest of the settlements, the two British engagements on Norfolk Island loom large in the historical public record and play a significant role in situating the island as part of Australia’s ‘founding’ as a nation.

The Commonwealth of Australia has a long history of asserting control over the island. While Queen Victoria’s Order in Council from 24 June 1856 had declared Norfolk Island a ‘distinct and separate Settlement’ in relation to New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land, the Norfolk Island Act 1913 declared the island a Territory under the authority of the Commonwealth of Australia. However, legal opinion (see e.g. Ellicott and McLelland 1976) holds that the implementation of the Act could not alter the constitutional basis of Norfolk Island regarding it being a distinct and separate settlement. The revised Norfolk Island Act 1979 eventually offered a degree of self-government and included a preamble that explicitly recognised the importance of Pitcairn traditions (Wettenhall 2018). More recently, the Norfolk Island Legislation Amendment Bill 2015 removed the preamble and abolished self-government. A Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Communication memorandum to the Commonwealth Government Assistant Minister for Regional Development and Territories, obtained through a Freedom of Information request by the Norfolk Island People for Democracy (NIPD) and Norfolk Island Council of Elders (NICoE), stated the repeal of the preamble was necessary to disengage the island’s ‘Pitcairn stronghold’ (Gonschor and Nobbs 2021, 224). In the place of self-government, the Commonwealth of Australia implemented the New South Wales Local Government Act, creating a regional council (Wettenhall 2018). In 2021, the Commonwealth of Australia suspended the locally elected councillors from office, implemented a public inquiry into the Norfolk Island Regional Council, dismissed the councillors, and appointed an external administrator to manage the regional council’s affairs. The loss of democratic process is keenly felt by Pitcairn descendants, who consider democracy as a core cultural value following the implementation of the Pitcairn constitution in 1838. This constitution drew on the islanders’ established system of law, including universal adult suffrage (Farran 2007). For Federal elections, Norfolk Island is situated in the seat of Bean in the Australian Capital Territory; despite being subject to New South Wales legislation and having health and education services provided or supported by Queensland, Norfolk Island residents have no capacity to vote in state elections. As a consequence, Pitcairn descendants experience contemporary life as colonial subjects (Nobbs 2019). In 2023, the Commonwealth initiated a further public inquiry into local government models and equitable revenue sources to better support the island’s local council, resulting in the report Restoring Democracy (Joint Standing Committee on the National Capital and External Territories 2023).

The dismantling of self-government in 2015 ‘had major consequences for the management of KAVHA. The most evident … being that management responsibility, previously shared between Norfolk Island and the Commonwealth, was expropriated to the Commonwealth alone’ (Nobbs 2021, 44). From 1979 to 2015, during the years of self-government, the management of KAVHA was overseen by a Board consisting of two Commonwealth members and two Norfolk Island members with decisions ‘taken by consensus’ and with ‘[r]ecommendations and decisions … implemented by the [island’s Commonwealth-appointed] Administrator in consultation with the Norfolk Island Government’ (Nobbs 2021, 40). Recent displays of heritage activism in Kingston draw attention to the injustices of heritage management in KAVHA from Pitcairner descendant perspectives (see Baker, Cantillon, and Evans 2022a, 2022b). For example, in 2021 the NICoE and NIPD changed the locks on buildings in the Old Military Barracks, while in 2022 members of the group Norfolk Island Strong (2022) occupied an ‘ancestral home’ at No. 8 Quality Row. The Commonwealth of Australia (2022) regarded both actions as acts of trespass that could be prosecuted under s 89 of the Crimes Act 1914 (Cth). A joint statement from NICoE and NIPD (2022a) asserted that these ‘new management arrangements … dispossess or diminish the continuous usage, occupation and connection rights of the Norfolk people in respect of the historic Kingston area’. In mid-2022, the NICoE and NIPD (2022b) released a ‘proposal for future governance’ of the island. In addition to reinstating local elections and implementing a ‘population sustainability policy’, a priority in the first 12 months of the proposed governance transition is the re-establishment of ‘Norfolk Island/Commonwealth Government co-management arrangements in the historically and culturally significant Kingston and Arthur’s Vale Historic Area’. This desire was then reflected in the outcome of the Commonwealth’s public inquiry in 2023, which includes the recommendation that ‘the management of key historical sites of cultural importance to the local community be subject to joint management between the Commonwealth and the local community’ (Joint Standing Committee on the National Capital and External Territories 2023, xvii).

Recent scholarship in the field of critical heritage studies has explored Pitcairn descendants’ relationships with KAVHA as a living heritage site in terms of its management (see Baker and Cantillon 2021, 2022; Baker, Cantillon, and Evans 2021, 2022a, 2022b, 2023; Baker, Evans, and Cantillon 2023; Cantillon and Baker 2022; Cantillon, Evans, and Baker 2023a, 2023b, 2023c). The research on which that scholarship is based is centred on a concern for cultural justice – ‘the recognition and value of cultural objects, cultural institutions and cultural work, as well as issues of power, participation, access and representation’ (Cantillon, Baker, and Nowak 2021, 5) – implemented methodologically through the production of zines as community archive (Baker and Cantillon 2022). Emerging from that study is an understanding that peoples’ relationships with KAVHA ‘are informed by experiences of past and present heritage management and interpretation strategies in Kingston’, strategies which ‘are, in turn, connected to global heritage processes, with the authorised heritage discourse being a transnational force with local resonance for the experience of Kingston’s living heritage’ (Cantillon and Baker 2022, 110). This article draws on the first-named author’s doctoral research to extend these writings by considering heritage through Pacific, Pasifika, Indigenous and decolonial perspectives – where ancestral knowledge is positioned at the forefront of research (e.g. Goodyear-Ka‘ōpua 2015; Henry and Pene 2001; L. T. Smith 2012). As a decolonising project, this research seeks to ‘re-cover, re-cognize, re-create, re-present, and “re-search back”’ (Archibald, Lee-Morgan, and De Santolo 2019, 6) by centring the concerns and values of Pitcairn descendants on Norfolk Island with the intent of articulating a Pitcairn descendant epistemology for approaching heritage research, practice, and management.

Storyworking a Norfolk Island epistemology

This article is principally voiced by a first-named author who is a Norfolk Islander of Pitcairn descent and whose formulation of Aa Norf’k Wieh is further informed by interviews they conducted on Norfolk Island in 2019 with 89 participants, 63 of these being Pitcairn descendants. Additional context for the articulation of Aa Norf’k Wieh is provided by the authors’ research on the Australian Research Council-funded project ‘Reimagining Norfolk Island’s Kingston and Arthur’s Vale Historic Area’, which at the time of writing had engaged with 66 participants, including 43 Pitcairn descendants, by way of interviews and arts-based workshops. Central to both heritage-focused projects – the first-named author’s doctoral research and the Reimagining KAVHA project, which involves all three authors – has been a concern for providing ‘the right, the space, the voice’ for Norfolk Islanders of Pitcairn descent to ‘tell [their] own stories from [their] own perspectives’ as a way to decolonise knowledge (L. T. Smith 2019, xi). Ethics approvals for the two projects were provided by the Griffith University Human Research Ethics Committee (GU Ref No: 2019/223 and 2020/927), with all interviewees providing informed written consent to participate. While this article does not draw directly on these interviews, the contributions of participants from both projects provide the backdrop for the emergence of the storywork presented here and the article’s concern for a shift in heritage management practice in KAVHA.

Indigenous storywork is a culturally appropriate method for unpacking Pitcairn descendant epistemology and its potential implications for heritage management. As Gonschor and Nobbs (2021, 228) have detailed:

despite happening after European contact with Oceania, the 1856 settlement resulted in the first voluntary, permanent, and rooted population of Norfolk Island. There is no connection to the settler colonial history of Australia, under whose administration the island was not placed until 1914. Since the Islanders have their own unique mixed Polynesian-European language and culture, did not displace or oppress any people who lived on the island prior to their arrival, were later subjected to the colonial rule of a third country, and define themselves as Indigenous, the Norfolk Islanders meet all international requirements to be recognized as an Indigenous people.

As a decolonising methodology, storywork is concerned with giving voice to Indigenous peoples in ways that ‘seek[] to rectify the damage’ of colonisation and ‘reclaim our ability to story-talk, story-listen, story-learn and story-teach’ (Archibald, Lee-Morgan and De Santolo 2019, 7). As Linda Tuhiwai Smith (2019, xi–xii) notes in the foreword to the book Decolonizing Research: Indigenous Storywork as Methodology, ‘the richness of Indigenous stories is only beginning to be developed as a purposeful and scholarly way to create and share knowledge more broadly’. This article contributes to the current ‘renaissance in storytelling and teaching’ (De Santolo 2019a, 245) in which, methodologically, storywork ‘contests and challenges colonial research conventions’ (Archibald, Lee-Morgan, and De Santolo 2019, 8) in ways that are ‘vibrant, relational, and deeply connected to the land’ (De Santolo 2019a, 245).

In this article, storywork takes the form of ‘personal family narratives’ (Corr 2019, 199) told by the first-named author. As with other forms of storywork, these narratives are concerned with ‘the seeking of meaning in community’ (Archibald, Lee-Morgan, and De Santolo 2019, 11). As ‘lived experience stories’ (Archibald 2019, 18), personal family narratives have the potential to offer a rich, deep, and authentic perspective into Pitcairner knowledge and wisdom in ways that speak to self-determination and the expression of agency (Behrendt 2019; Cavino 2019). Storying plays a significant role in living heritage, involving connections between people as storytellers and places as the actual sites/spaces where those stories were and are experienced. From the context of First Nations people in Australia, De Santolo (2019a, 172) observes that storywork ‘activates and holds the most dynamic of our ancient practices in their rightful place – Country’, with storytelling offering ‘an expansive relational way’ of being- and becoming-in-place (De Santolo 2019b, 172). Similarly, the Māori storytelling process of Pūrākau is described ‘as a discursive geography, where stories not only define a place and space, but can also simultaneously produce and inscribe place and space with new meanings’ (Lee-Morgan 2019, 161).

Storywork, rooted in place and lived experience, functions ‘to remember, and to connect[,] critical events from the past to present concerns and to future scenarios’ (Lee-Morgan 2019, 160). Stories emerging from Indigenous knowledge pathways also serve to ‘offer hope’ in times of crises (Archibald, Lee-Morgan, and De Santolo 2019, 11). Back (2021, 4) asks ‘What might a hopeful orientation to knowledge be in our current moment? Where might we look and listen for hope?’ We would argue that storywork is a methodological ‘resource in the service of hope’ (Back 2021, 4) in the decolonising project. Back highlights the work of bell hooks (2003), who writes: ‘Hopefulness empowers us to continue our work for justice even as the forces of injustice may gain power for a time’ (cited in Back 2021, 5). As a ‘pathway[] of liberation’, storywork offers ‘the most powerful intergenerational manifestation of hope’ (Archibald, Lee-Morgan, and De Santolo 2019, 13).

Heritage, when approached by way of storywork, can be reimagined through revealing ways of knowing, being, feeling, and doing heritage differently, which then has implications for the understanding and practice of heritage management. The work of prominent Māori author Patricia Grace is illustrative here, with the novel Potiki drawing attention to Pacific and Indigenous epistemologies as distinct from those of the West. The colonisers ‘think differently in their heads and have different importances’ (Grace 1986, 99). Grace teases apart these differences by describing peoples’ relationship with place as interpreted through stories of Māori’s lived experiences with family and home, on and of the land. What Grace’s work reveals is the deeply sensory and affective negotiation of living heritage in everyday life. In doing so, the book raises questions around how Pacific peoples are governed broadly, as well as how living heritage sites in the Pacific might be managed in ways that challenge the authorised heritage discourse of the West, which prioritises aesthetics, materiality, and monumentality – as judged by ‘experts’ – along with the experiences of elite social classes (L. Smith 2006).

When considering what heritage encapsulates for Pitcairn descendants, Grace’s (1986) notion from her storywork of ‘thinking differently’ or ‘having different importances’ has deep resonance in the context of Norfolk Island which – like Pitcairn and the islands of the Bounty women (Tahiti, Huahine, and Tubuai) – is a Pacific island and the hoem [home] of Pacific Islanders. While the self-identification of Pitcairners as Polynesian has a complex history (see e.g. Mühlhäusler n.d., 121–124), it is now commonly held that Pitcairn descendants have unique ancestral links to spaces on Norfolk Island – their kamfram [ancestry, family history or heritage] – that shape their attachment to place – their hoem – in distinct ways (see e.g. Nash and Low 2015). The personal family narratives presented below touch on the deep affective ties that link Pitcairn descendants to the layered heritage landscape on Norfolk Island – Polynesian, colonial, and Pitcairner. For non-Pitcairn descendants, the stories perhaps capture ‘moments in time’ of a life lived on Norfolk Island. In this sense, storywork as methodology ‘illuminates experiences that those who do not come from that background might not otherwise be exposed to. It allows for the comparison of experience and a depth at which issues that are conceived at an abstract level … remain within a human context’ (Behrendt 2019, 177). Storytelling has another dimension for Pitcairn descendants and others with long and deep connections to Norfolk Island. For those readers, the first-named author’s stories would have a very different temporality, capturing a way of life in which the present encompasses the past and the future of becoming- and being-in-place. They may recognise in the storywork the way ‘ancestral wisdom and voice … ripple through and take shape in story’ (Archibald, Jenny, and Jason 2019, 13), embodying the living heritage of the Pitcairners.

The following section includes three personal family narratives. Each story includes words in Norf’k which are presented without translation or the use of italics as a purposeful Pacific strategy for the presentation of cultural knowledge which draws ‘attention to the richness and depth of Pacific languages’ and ‘challeng[es] the primacy of English’ in knowledge production (Tualaulelei and McFall-McCaffery 2019, 197). Such an approach acknowledges that direct translation of languages into English can have the effect of losing the vitality of meaning, unable to capture an individual word’s interconnectedness with other words and links to cultural values and intangible heritage and, as a result, contributing to the colonisation of Indigenous knowledge in the Pacific (Hemi and Aporosa 2021, 46). Storywork plays a part in ‘linguistic decolonization’, with language carrying its peoples’ ‘memory of the world’ (Thiong’o cited in Lee-Morgan 2019, 164), and every individual word being ‘the key to opening the door to the worlds and knowledge of our ancestors’ (Lee-Morgan 2019, 164). The use of translanguaging in the stories pays respect to Norf’k’s status as a UNESCO endangered language and the role of language as an important component of the intangible cultural heritage that constitutes Aa Norf’k Wieh. Not offering ‘word-for-word or direct translation’ from Norf’k to English within the storywork enables the first-named author ‘to convey their interpretation and reflection’ of Aa Norf’k Wieh in their stories without textual interruption to the narrative (Galla and Goodwill 2017, 69). Rather than through translation, meaning of the stories is explicated in the analysis of the three pieces of storywork, with readers who are not proficient in Norf’k also invited to refer to the language dictionaries of Alice Buffett (1999) and Beryl Nobbs-Palmer (1986).

Aa Norf’k Wieh: storywork as living heritage practice

The stories included below offer a glimpse into ways of being, knowing, and feeling passed on from one generation of Pitcairner descendants to the next. The first-named author’s personal family narratives are part of a tradition of storying on Norfolk Island that is central to heritage process and practice for Pitcairner descendants (Williams 2016). For older islanders, storytelling was a type of record keeping that produced deeply embedded attachments to people and place. The first-named author grew up listening and learning about her hoem and her kamfram through the passing on of cultural knowledge by elders who drew on anecdotes, parables, proverbs, or idioms (Williams 2016), often – if not always – delivered in Norf’k, to emphasise maenas [manners], kamfram, morals, and an ethic for living on a remote island. The personal family narratives presented in this article continue the tradition of storying kamfram, hoem, inasmuch, and answering the question ‘en huus yuu?’ [who are you?]. These stories are Aa Norf’k Wieh, holding in their words the spirit of a people. In storywork, heritage is evoked, affirmed, and enacted.

Daun Pop en Dots

When I was growing up, I spent a lot of time with my maternal grandparents. They had an enormous impact on my life, my sense of self and my identity. Pop en Dot instilled in me a sense of being part of something much bigger. Not just a family, but a community, an island, a people en auwas kamfram.

When the school bell rang of an afternoon, I would walk out, climb over the timber fence, and wait for my little brother before we would begin the journey daun Pop en Dots. We’d walk along the road towards Ball Bay, watching the cattle meander along next to us, chewing their cud, tails swishing back and forth.

We would pass Muddy Water and be filled with relief as we made it to Satty’s Corner. Finally, we’d spot our destination. The bank of red dirt en em yaka pointing to the finish line. Our cattle stop, perched under the big dark olives, branches hanging low, trunks twisted into shapes similar to an enchanted castle. Walking down the driveway, it would be uncommon not to find a car, or three, signalling the visit of an old friend or family member, generally accompanied by boystrous booms of laughter coming from aa raenda and echoing up the drive. Passing by the the hedges that screen the house from the wind, you’d wander under the whale bone arch, remnants of days gone by, with bougainvillea in a deep magenta bloom draped either side of the whale’s lower jaw – picking a flower on your way through the yard from one of the many coloured hibiscuses to take in for Dot. She loved flowers, any and every kind.

As you walked up the two stone steps en orn aa raenda, you’d breach the threshold and, with the ever-familiar sound of rubber hitting convict stone, bounce onto the lino floor. Greeted by all there waiting, each one with eyes or smiles to be met, acknowledged, welcomed. Looking left at the window – ‘Hei Pop’, returned with a nod en ‘Hei kiddo’. Then ‘Watawieh darling’ Dot would say as you’d walk across aa raenda to give her a kiss on the cheek. ‘Yorlye g’indeya wohsh yus haan den kam haew samthing f’ iit’, she would offer in a gentle yet matter-of-fact tone. ‘Yes thaenkyu, Dot’, as you’d drop your school bag on a chair, kick off your shoes at the door and walk through the kitchen. The same pattern every day, maenas first and foremost.

Once again fresh and free of the school grime, back into the kitchen where Pop would have something atop the wood stove or keeping warm in the oven. A faint smell of kerosine lingered, wood chip and tobacco were in the air too. Their scents melded into one. In summer, he’d often pull out a tray of fried fish. Caught and delivered that day by younger Islanders who had been out of a morning and considered the elders, no longer able to navigate the rocking of waves or slippery reef to fetch their favourite feed. Mouth watering, you’d select your piece, paired with a fresh slice of white bread, butter, en plenty salt.

We would sit and eat our helpings, chattering to each other until Pop would again remind us ‘Doh yorli tork wailst yu iten’ fish, jes wohch wathing yorli duuen’, in case a bone had been missed and our greedy mouth, too busy to notice, could make us choke. Settled, safe, comfortable, happy, and content before the next valley adventure – for once you’d finished your tea, off you’d go outside to play, build a cubby, make bows and arrows, peddle the pushbike up the dirt drive, cut palm leaves for cubby roofs, swing a flying fox, or set off to find bamboo for our fishing rods. The landscape vast, the opportunities endless. That was our way – Aa Norf’k Wieh.

In Daun Pop en Dots, greetings, manners, feasting, gifting, playing, laughing, care, and love are all captured in the family’s rhythms. The story highlights cultural values that set the pace of life on Norfolk Island for multi-generational Pitcairner families. Aa Norf’k Wieh is, in essence, the heritage of the Norfolk Islanders, encapsulating relations among and between people and place, the tangible and intangible, human and non-human, material and immaterial. A story of the everyday from childhood can speak volumes about one Pitcairn descendant’s deep-rooted sense of belonging, contextualised by familial connections (little brother, grandparents, family member) and community relationships (younger islanders, elders, old friends) embedded in place (Ball Bay, Muddy Water, Satty’s Corner) and brought alive by the sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and emotions of island life. While this story is not located in Kingston, it points to the connection between Daun’taun and the homes the Pitcairners went on to build ‘up country’. Many of these homes utilised convict stone quarried from the gaol buildings in KAVHA – structures associated with the cruel treatment of people in the previous settlement. The convicts’ hard labour still resonates when crossing the threshold into island homes like the one in this story. Daun Pop En Dots highlights how Aa Norf’k Wieh can echo through time and space – from cruelty, to kindness, kinship, and custody.

Orn’stoen

Even as a baby I loved the water. Wading in the shallows of Emily Bay, playing in rock pools daun Cemetery Bay, some even built by my Pop; I was always finding new places to explore. I learnt the names of our sea creatures and would go adventuring along the reef looking for whatever I could find. Wana, hihi, totwi kraab, welk, au, buhi, all hiding in their homes along the reef or in small pools coloured with rocks, coral, and seaweed.

When I was older I would go fishing with my Pop on the reef, catching aatuti, big eye, parrot fish. Some of the fish we’d be happy to give back to the ocean, like p’oev, baket, slepridohli, tafkord. We’d also palu for some naenwi to take home for my grandmother, Dot.

As I grew up, in eager anticipation of my catch, I would walk from my house on the hill at Flagstaff carrying my bamboo rod, fishing bag, and bait down to the reef by the Kingston pier and find a healthy-looking rock pool. There was one pool that orn sink saf was often full of letl naenwi or ‘dot’, waiting patiently for the sea to rise so they could make their way out to the deeper water. With only a cool breeze for company, daa bin wana mais fievret said f’ g’ fishen. Doing my best to lure them in, I would snitch the little naenwi out one by one, placing them in a smaller pool for safekeeping. When I thought I had enough fish to eat, it was time to clean them on a rock and make the journey home, back up the hill to Flagstaff, fishen baeg en orl.

When my Pop was older and not able to come fishing with me anymore, my Mum would take him for a drive on an afternoon. One particular day, they parked on the pier and looked out at a young girl fishing off the rocks. Pop said to Mum, ‘Si daa gehl daun deya, hau mach semes Clara Ike!’, to which my Mum answered, ‘Wael Clara Ike es hers griet griet graenmathas sesta’. Pop replied, ‘Oe aa’, as my Mum said, ‘wael es yus grandorta’, to which he exclaimed ‘daas Chels!?’

Orn’stoen takes us from the Pitcairner home of Daun Pop en Dots located ‘up country’ and daun’taun to the pier at Kingston and the rock pools of Cemetery Bay. It brings into focus the sea as a point of connection Pitcairn descendants have to their past, to their kamfram; it is a link to the mutineers and the Polynesian foremothers who travelled across the sea on the Bounty from Tahiti to Pitcairn Island, and to their descendants who travelled from Pitcairn Island to Norfolk Island on the Morayshire, disembarking on the Kingston pier in 1856. For the story’s narrator, a connection is drawn between the waters of Norfolk Island and multiple generations of a family line through to the first-named author’s great-great-grandmother’s sister, Clara Ike (‘daas Chels’, ‘Clara Ike es her griet griet graenmathas sesta’). The strength of familial ties is ever present in this story with the teachings of a child by her grandfather, the sharing of the fishing bounty with a grandmother and the care of a daughter for her ageing father. It is also a story that, through recalling names of fish and other marine life, reflects the Pitcairners’ reliance on the bountiful nature of the sea for survival, as well as an ethic of care for a sustainable marine environment (‘when I thought I had enough fish to eat’, ‘some of the fish we’d be happy to give back to the ocean’). Orn’stoen highlights how Aa Norf’k Wieh captures the teachings and cultural knowledge of Pitcarin descendants across generations, guiding islanders in practical ways how to live on an island, in a World Heritage site, and, foremost, respecting auwas [our] hoem.

Maach Lili

All Saints Church in Kingston is located within the compound walls of the New Military Barracks. As you enter the compound, crossing over the cattlestop from Quality Row, you are greeted with an extraordinary set of steep stone stairs that guide your eye up the enormous three-storey Georgian building. The basement level houses the Commissariat Store Museum, host to many artefacts from the various settlements on Norfolk Island. The second storey is always lain out from east to west with rows of pews, each one reserved for Pitcairner families who are members of the Church of England congregation. The third floor is accessed by a narrow corkscrew staircase, originally designed for military use but which today calls for a steady and gentle footing for anyone needing to visit the storage area for the former Norfolk Island Administration. Each piece of the building has its own purpose and wealth of history attached.

On the roof of the building is a sharp stone architrave that meets at a 90-degree angle above the imposing stone stairs that carry worshippers up to the Church’s entrance at the southern-facing exterior. As my Mum tells it, the look of the sharp sandstone architrave juxtaposed against a clear blue sky is the epitome of a summer’s day on Norfolk Island. With cattle lowing, waves crashing along the reef just metres away, birds calling, and the sun shining over Kingston, that image evokes for her a sense of serenity within a space that is brimming with life.

Mum asked her father, my Pop, once what he thought of when he saw the same stone architrave. Mum tells that he responded with concern and sorrow for the convicts who would have built it. For Pop, the convicts weren’t criminals but skilled tradesmen who had been stolen from their homes in Ireland and sent to these far-off posts of the British Empire to build the Crown’s legacy – harsh, cruel, and inhumane. A life, Pop felt, not one person ever deserved.

For Dot, my grandmother, the stone building of All Saints, so highly regarded and respected, brought back memories of being a little girl travelling by horse and buggy with her own grandmother, Ma Lina – the last Pitcairner to pass away on Norfolk Island – and her Aunt Ubba to clean the church, as her family had always done since arriving in 1856.

We continue this cultural practice today. Every year in March as the lilies bloom, my family goes down to All Saints on Saturday mornings. Working alongside my mum and aunts, I polish the brass plaques, candelabras, plates, and the font, re-arrange the flowers, sweep the floor, vacuum, dust the organ, and wipe down each pew. These tasks are accompanied by song, our voices ringing out as we sing along to a favourite hymn, with each of us joining in the chorus. I remember, as a child, that if my cousins and I were being particularly well behaved, every now and again we were allowed to turn on the microphone at the pulpit and say ‘watawieh yorlye’ to our captive audience.

Maach Lili highlights multiple connections with All Saints Church across generations in one family and across the historical layers of Kingston. For many Pitcairners, living heritage reflects an elaborate web of connection between people and place, space, and time. Evident in the narrative is the commitment to maintaining cultural traditions established in Kingston shortly after the Pitcairners’ arrival in 1856 (‘we continue this cultural practice today’) in ways that are conscious of and respect ancestors (‘brought back memories of … her own grandmother, Ma Lina – the last Pitcairner to pass away on Norfolk Island’). That respect also applies to those from the British penal settlement (‘concern and sorrow for the convicts who would have built it’) who were at the mercy of the Empire’s imperial machinations – machinations that reach back into the Bounty story with its connections to African colonisation, Caribbean slavery (DeLoughrey 2008), and British expansion into and possession of the Pacific and its people (Simmonds 2014). Maach Lili extends the understanding of care for people and the natural environment, established in Daun Pop en Dots and Orn’stoen, as an important component of Aa Norf’k Wieh. This piece of storywork reveals how that ethic of care encompasses built heritage as living heritage, with the penal settlement’s Commissariat Store converted into the Pitcairners’ All Saints Church soon after their arrival in 1856 and subsequently cared for on a monthly roster by generations of Pitcairn descendant families – a practice that continues to this day.

F’ noe baut wi bin es f’ si said wi gwen [to know where we have been is to see where we are going]

By way of storywork, this article has highlighted how Aa Norf’k Wieh as a Pacific epistemology situates tangible and intangible heritage as an essential aspect of the lived experience of islanders of Pitcairn descent, acknowledging the traditional and cultural ties between people and place – Norfolk Islanders and their hoem. The three stories included in the article highlight living heritage as an epistemic practice for Pitcairn descendants on Norfolk Island. Aa Norf’k Wieh is revealed through the stories to encompass feelings and actions that centre care, kinship, compassion, and custodianship in ways that acknowledge and respect the layered, complex connections between people and place, across time and space, which influence the everyday lived experiences of islanders within KAVHA as a site of local, national, and international significance. Moreover, the storywork presented in this article underscores Pitcairner continuity of connection with Kingston’s past in the present – the convict stone steps in Daun Pop en Dots; generations of rock fishing off Kingston reef in Orn’stoen, and the family home ‘Flagstaff’ which sits in KAVHA’s boundaries, built on land alloted to the first-named author’s ancestors in 1856 and home to five generations of Pitcairn descendants; and in Maach Lili, a family’s commitment to cleaning All Saints Church across generations and their affective connections to this building and for those who built it. Each story offers a new angle into understanding Aa Norf’k Wieh as the foundation for knowing, being, and feeling on Norfolk Island, emerging from cultural practices developed, enacted, shaped, and redefined over generations. The stories reveal Aa Norf’k Wieh as the way of life for Pitcairn descendants and others in the wider community on Norfolk Island who have come to embody, through experience and association, a way of being and understanding of what it means to belong on, to, and for the island. By defining Aa Norf’k Wieh through a Pacific theory-building, Indigenous research methodology and critical heritage studies lens, this article advances understanding of the living heritage of Pitcairner descendants on Norfolk Island, with heritage deeply embedded in the close familial ties and networks of Islanders and their kamfram. Aa Norf’k Wieh is the storying of the past in the present, with an eye on the future. Storywork captures how the past, present, and future weave in and out, up and over, making and re-making the intangible heritage that underscores island life and the need for a living heritage orientation to heritage management in KAVHA.

Foregrounding Aa Nof’k Wieh as a Pitcairn descendant epistemology for understanding heritage is a critical step towards encouraging culturally sensitive, culturally appropriate, and culturally just heritage management on Norfolk Island. The first-named author’s personal family narratives offer ‘a backwards glance’ in the service of ‘a future vision’ (Muñoz cited in Back 2021, 18) for a not-yet-realised form of heritage management on Norfolk Island that recognises and accounts for the ontological, epistemological, and social impacts (Caswell, Cifor, and Ramirez 2016) that current decision-making around KAVHA has on Norfolk Islanders of Pitcairn descent and others with long and deep connections to the island. Centring the Pitcairner perspective in heritage management practice would require a significant shift away from an emphasis on ‘the inherent value, meaning and materiality of heritage’ (Gentry and Smith 2019, 2) to instead privilege its ‘more-than-representational’ (Waterton 2014), intangible, sensory, and affective dimensions. One way this could happen is through a move away from the material- and values-based approach to heritage management in KAVHA to a living heritage approach that centres the core community by giving them ‘the primary role in the conservation process’ (Poulios 2014, 23). In the living heritage approach, the ‘core community does not simply participate’ in site management ‘but is actively empowered: it has the ability to set the agenda, take decisions and retain control over the entire [conservation] process’ (Poulios 2014, 23). At the very minimum, a shift to a living heritage approach would involve the introduction of mechanisms that would ensure Pitcairn descendants are meaningfully involved in the governance of KAVHA, which, as noted, is a recommendation in the report Restoring Democracy (Joint Standing Committee on the National Capital and External Territories 2023).

A living heritage approach to heritage management that is grounded in Aa Norf’k Wieh would also involve emphasising the island’s geographic locatedness in the Pacific and its cultural locatedness as part of the Pacific family. Doing so would serve to accentuate the distinction between Western and Pacific ways of knowing, being, feeling, and doing heritage. The intention here for incorporating Aa Norf’k Wieh in the future approach to the management of KAVHA is not to establish a Pitcairner way of doing heritage ‘to counter “western rational thought”’ but rather, as Winter (2013, 542) proposes, to suggest a knowledge pathway ‘that responds to and engages with pressing challenges’ in heritage management ‘by moving beyond the limited repertoire of epistemologies currently privileged’. Aa Norf’k Wieh draws the attention of heritage practitioners, consultants, and scholars to the rich relationship Pitcairn descendants have with KAVHA and challenges the authorised heritage discourse implicit in the material- and values-based approaches to heritage management. Greater recognition of Aa Norf’k Wieh by heritage professionals will be key to transitioning the approach to heritage management in KAVHA to one that embraces living heritage. This approach does not eschew conservation of material fabric, but is oriented to safeguarding the continuity of connection the core community has with the site – as illustrated by the storywork presented in this article – ‘in accordance with its own concerns, with the support of the conservation professionals and the broader community’ (Poulios 2014, 23).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council under Grant SR200200711.

Notes on contributors

Chelsea Evans

Chelsea Evans is a Norfolk Islander of Pitcairn descent and currently lives on Norfolk Island. She is undertaking a PhD in the field of critical heritage studies at Griffith University, Australia where she is also a Research Fellow on the Australian Research Council project ‘Reimagining Norfolk Island’s Kingston and Arthur’s Vale Historic Area’. Chelsea’s research foregrounds the different layers of heritage on Norfolk Island, with an emphasis on Norfolk Island peoples’ special relationship to place through an understanding of kamfram (heritage).

Sarah Baker

Sarah Baker is a Professor of Cultural Sociology at Griffith University, Australia where she is co-leader of the ‘Heritage and Well-being’ research stream in the Griffith Centre for Social and Cultural Research. Sarah is Chief Investigator on the Australian Research Council project ‘Reimagining Norfolk Island’s Kingston and Arthur’s Vale Historic Area’. She has published widely in the fields of critical heritage, archival and museum studies. Her most recent book is Popular Music Heritage, Cultural Justice and the Deindustrialising City (Cambridge University Press 2023).

Zelmarie Cantillon

Zelmarie Cantillon is a Vice-Chancellor’s Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University, Australia. Her research focuses on the intersections of heritage, tourism and cultural policy, with a particular interest in cultural justice and cultural infrastructure. She is the Chief Investigator on two current Australian Research Council projects: ‘Reimagining Norfolk Island’s Kingston and Arthur’s Vale Historic Area’ and ‘The Collaborative Museum: Embedding Cultural Infrastructure in the City’.