Book review: Pitcairn - Paradise Lost
Title: Pitcairn - Paradise Lost:
Uncovering the dark secrets of a South Pacific fantasy island
Author: Kathy Marks
Pages: 383
Publisher: Fourth Estate, Harper Collins, Australia
Date: 2008
I
bought this book before my stroke – in fact, before my ex walked out more than
a year before that – so I had nothing happening which could encourage me to
read it. I finally read it during the lockdown for COVID-19. I wonder if I
should have.
Kathy
Marks wrote a long true tale, but it told of paedophilia, incest, violence,
youth, older men, women who would never believe their young girls, and just so
many more stories leading up to the court case of rape and sexual assault.
Pitcairn
was a very small vacant island 230 years ago in 1790, when the sailor Fletcher
Christian and the other 8 mutineers from the Bounty arrived there with 6
Tahitian men, 11 Tahitian women and a baby girl, and that’s where they stayed. Most
of those who live there today are related to Christian.
By
1856 the population was 193, and everyone of them chose to move to Norfolk
Island, which was a bit bigger and a lot more friendly. However, 17 chose to
move back to Pitcairn even before 2 years, and 5 years later a further 27
followed them. By 1881 the population had increased to 96, and peaked at 233 in
1937.
In
2000 police investigations began against 7 Pitcairn male residents and 6 men
offshore who had been sexually abusing young girls – and, in some case, boys –
according to one particular woman. The police believed her, and approached many
of the women she mentioned (Marks listed 18 of them) who said, yes, they had
also been abused, and agreed to be witnesses. There were 55 charges on the
Pitcairn men and 41 charges on the offshore men, many of whom lived in New
Zealand. By 2004 the court case was set up in Pitcairn and 6 of those charged,
including Steve Christian who had been the mayor, were found guilty, and the
off-shore men were found guilty in the New Zealand court.
Members
of the Pitcairn community fully supported the men, including Meralda Warren.
She had been a ‘police officer’ on Pitcairn in 1996, but she didn’t have any
training. Within the 5 years of the previous police officer, Ron Christian, he hadn’t
made any arrests, nor had the earlier police officers of 7 years and 21 years.
Meralda felt she was just doing the job. Her brother, Jay, was a ‘magistrate’
in 1996 – and he had no training either. There are a few Pitcairn websites
which jubilantly follow Pitcairn’s history and present – many of those people
supported the men and didn’t believe the women. In the end the court did
believe the women, and it’s extremely sad that people from communities all
around the globe will put down the women who told the truth but they might not
support their own men for abusing children in their own community. The worst
people, to me, in Pitcairn were the pastor and his wife from the Seventh
Adventist church who never supported the young girls. Kathy Marks wrote
an essay for the Griffith Review #35 titled When bystanders fail,
which included them.
The
UK had paid for changes at the beach landing area and concreted the road up to
Adamstown. The men who were prisoners helped the roadworks and other
maintenance. Pitcairn became a tourist spot, again. The website titled Pitcairn
Islands Tourism says it (the website) has been around since © 2019. Another
one, titled The Government of the Pitcairn Islands, says that it’s a British
overseas territory – with only 67 population in 2011, and they only got
approval from the British Queen in 2010. It will be interesting to see if the
population grows much more.
Kathy
Marks wrote well. She works for the Independent in the UK and has lived in Sydney
since 1999. She is now “a reporter, feature writer and columnist”, according to
her own page in the back of this book.
References
Some
books to read:
1973: Pitcairn:
Children of Mutiny, by Ian M. Ball, Boston, Little Brown
1997: Pitcairn
Island: Life and Death in Eden, 1st Edition, by Trevor Lummis, Ashgate Publishing
1998: Serpent
in Paradise, by Dea Birkett, Anchor
2004: The Bounty: The True Story of the Mutiny
on the Bounty, by Caroline Alexander, Harper Perennial
2014: Pitcairn Island, the Bounty Mutineers
and Their Descendants: A History, by Robert W. Kirk, McFarland Co. Inc
Some
websites to look through:
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