380 Pipes and a Rear-View Mirror

I happened to run into Naomi Hallett at St. Barnabas Chapel while touring two journalists around Norfolk.  Naomi wears several hats on the Island, including being one of the Church of England organists who play the magnificent 380-pipe Henry Willis organ.  The walls of the Chapel are constructed of big blocks of local limestone which create excellent acoustics for the organ’s soulful, resonate tones.

 

The Henry Willis Organ: two views

 

I always enjoy the look on visitors’ faces when they first enter St. Barnabas and behold its elegant beauty.  Jaws drop and eyes widen.  The stained-glass windows are by the well-known pre-Raphaelite artists, William Morris and Edward Byrne-Jones.  The pews are hand-carved from New Zealand kauri, the ends of each inlaid with intricate patterns of mother-of-pearl.  The extensive marble mosaic of the floors and chancel come from Torquay, England.  It’s a truly exquisite example of an English country chapel, made wholly the more surprising by finding it a small Pacific island.  It’s another reason why Norfolk’s history is so colourful.  But if they can also hear the Willis played, that moment becomes one of the unexpected highlights of their trip.

 

Interior, looking towards the altar.

The organ arrived on Norfolk in 1875, about the time the Chapel’s construction began, and was installed by the Chapel’s consecration on December 7, 1880.  Until the 1950s, some young boy was charged with hand-pumping air through its bellows.  Albert Buffett was one of those former kids and recalls if the organist wanted more volume, he had to pump faster.  I guess it was suppose to be an act of devotional duty, but I imagine for an 11 year old it would have been like inflating a house. 

Something as prominent as the Willis, and as central to a service, would naturally hold a significance on a Sunday that only the most confident musician could match.  And their names still resound in the community.  To this day, I cannot see the Willis without imagining Tim Lloyd at the keyboard, a place for decades you would have found her on most Sundays.  It was Tim who installed a rear-view mirror above the keyboard to better monitor wedding ceremonies behind her.  Others mention Aunt Daisy Buffett and Anne Swift, before her.  And there are a number of organists alternating Sundays today.  Naomi is one of them. 

One of the things I love about Norfolk is its hospitality and informality, and it’s shared with everyone.  Naomi and I meet at the Chapel once a week, she to play and I to sing.  We do it solely for our pleasure and don’t take for granted at all how privileged we are to be able to enter such a historical space and fire-up the organ’s bellows, for fun.  However, when I mentioned to the journalists that visitors were welcome to play it, as well (as long as they knew how), and from whom to get the keyboard key, they simply couldn’t believe the community’s benevolence and trust.  But these acts of good will almost never go unrewarded in some fashion.  Twice I’ve had a visitor on a tour so proficient on a pipe organ they’ve ended-up giving a free concert during their holiday.  No one was more delighted than they to fit a recital into their itinerary.  You say you don’t play a pipe organ, but, perhaps, only a ukulele?  No problem.  Naomi’s brother, Donald, has a group of ukulele players meet at his house every Saturday.  Come join.

My two favourites.

 

- Rick

Spring Forward

It’s springtime on Norfolk Island.  The surest signs are when you first notice the rose-coloured petals emerging from the buds of the bush peach trees.  This happens about the same time each year that the white terns return.  I saw my first one alight on a pine in my backyard yesterday.  Soon the skies will be filled with them.  Oh, and the flying ants, another certain (and blessedly brief) sign of spring.  More on that later.

Photo by Dave Wiley

The white tern (Gygis alba) is a photographer’s delight.  The feathers are a snowy white, broken only by the jet-black of its eyes, bill and feet.  They have the ability to hover and if you catch them with the sun in the background, just so, you can see some beautiful gossamer silhouettes through the plumage.  Lazy people like them, too.  I’ve spent countless hours watching them from my verandah fly in incredibly tight aerial formations and have always considered it time well-spent.  These aerial exercises are especially intricate when the parents are teaching their chick how to fish.  But right now, they’re busy pairing-up and courting. 

That I’m aware, no one has tagged the white terns, so we don’t fully know where they winter.  But the birds are such an indelible part of our summer sky, it’s almost reassuring when you first notice their coming back.  Many of us believe the terns return to the same limb each year to raise their young.  This could be coincidental, but there are some limbs which will invariably have a chick on it and usually at the same place on the limb as the year before.  There is also the occasional case in which one of the parents has been killed nurturing the chick.  There will be feathers below, sometimes a carcass; usually the result of a feral cat.  It’s been my experience that that limb will no longer be used to nest, suggesting they may pair for life, as well.

Photo by Barb Mayer

The white tern has a couple of unusual characteristics.  Notably, it doesn’t actually build a nest, but will lay an egg in a shallow depression of the limb, with one or the other parent taking turns with incubation.  When the egg hatches, the chick for the first several weeks of its life needs to instinctively know not to move.  Occasionally, one will and fall prematurely from the tree.  Another characteristic is the parents don’t regurgitate food, but will feed the chick entire, small fish fry.  It’s not uncommon to find small fish that have fallen from a parent’s beak in the most unlikely places.  I had the opportunity of being on the top of Mt. Pitt with a visitor who had the look of almost Biblical wonder when he picked up a fish atop our second highest peak.  I hated to disappoint him.  Actually, I wish I hadn’t.  Who knows what new religion could have ensued?

Photo by "Island Life"

It’s difficult talking about white terns without mentioning an ominous phenomenon.  For some reason, to my eye beginning six years ago, their numbers have plummeted.  My guess is at least by half.  There may have been a trend we didn’t notice, but it seemed to occur between one year and the next.  They just didn’t come back in anywhere near the numbers expected.  Some people have speculated that it may be due to habitat-loss where they winter.  There was also a severe windstorm from Australia that year about the time the terns would have been in the vicinity.  Another concern is climate change, and a disconnect somewhere with a food source.  In any event, the population doesn’t seem to have yet rebounded.  The skies will still be filled, but there’s a noticeable absence, as well.

We’ll have the white tern until sometime in late May.  It happens every year, of course.  It’s also a sign that winter is approaching and the firewood had better be split.

- Rick

A Genuine Bastard.

Ungeria floribunda is its taxonomic name.  Common name: the Norfolk Island Bastard Oak.

The very presence of this now rare tree on Norfolk speaks to how much of this beautiful island we still cannot explain.  Not only is the individual species, floribunda, unique to Norfolk Island, but the entire genus, Ungeria, is, too.  This is astounding.  For a relatively young, small and remote land mass, it defies explanation.  I love it.

By way of comparison, in addition to the iconic Norfolk Island pine (Araucaria heterophyla), the Auracaria genus includes some 18 other species ranging from South America across the Pacific to Australia and New Guinea.  These species numbers and broad geographic range reflect Auracaria’s long and diverse evolutionary history.  Similarly, the genus, Cyathea, contains two separate species of tree fern unique to Norfolk, one considered the tallest in the world, and over 400 other species spread across the globe.  Ungeria floribunda, however, the Bastard Oak, is the only species in its genus and the entire genus is found naturally-occurring only here. 

Bastard Oak

Attempts to explain this circumstance are complicated by Norfolk’s relatively young geologic age (estimated to be some 2.5 million years since the last volcanic eruption) and evidence (from Peter Coyne) suggesting it has been isolated from other land masses during all of this period.  Beginning with a naked volcanic landscape, you could expect some species to variously reach Norfolk and diversify within this short time span.  But to have an entire genus, this higher unit of time, seemingly just pop-up or somehow be the last to survive stymies even the most imaginative scientific mind.  “Kaa waa”, would be the local phrase.  Who knows?

Taxonomic names are useful both to systematically identify one plant or animal from another, and to indicate its evolution over time.  Common names, on the other hand, can reflect the local lore and be much more colourful, as well as easier to remember.  I’ve heard two explanations of how the Bastard Oak got its name.  It does have an oak-sort-of-look to its leaf.  The other explanation is it’s the only one in the family that doesn’t know its pedigree.  In any event, its mystery delights me. 

By the way, while reviewing Peter Coyne’s field guide, Norfolk Island’s Fascinating Flora, I think I recognised a plant in my backyard which Peter suspects may have become extinct.  If I’m correct, it’s the wild cucumber, Sicyos australis.  I won’t be able to confirm the species until it flowers.  But I wrote Peter with the good news and the even better news that I’ve since stopped trying to kill it.  It’s a creeper and no one could identify it, so I considered it just another introduced pest.  That I know, I have one plant left.  We’ll see.

- Rick

Cheryl Poulson's eye.

I recently had Cheryl Poulson on a tour.  She called me from Governor’s Lodge wanting to go on a photographic tour.  My answer was, “of course”, if we could find at least one other person.  There are a minimum number of people on a tour to make it worthwhile.  We scheduled a tour date, didn’t find another taker, and went anyways.  I’m glad we did.  It was worth it to me for the experience.  I think Cheryl had a good time, too.

Cheryl is a professional photographer.  She had also been on Norfolk for six days, which meant she had already seen the usual and basic.  We talked about her interests, what subjects she wanted to shoot – birds in the National park, mostly, but she was open – and we took off. 

To paraphrase F. Scott Fitzgerald, and I don’t too often, photographers are different from the rest of us.  They see what we don’t and can spend a day being delighted with one thing after another.  One of the first places we visited was Aunt Amy’s, an uninhabited island home built sometime in the 1880s.  I wasn’t sure if it as an image was what she had in mind.  It fascinated her, from every angle and every lens. 

Aunt Amy's

Aunt Amy Christian was one of the Island’s first entrepreneurs, starting what was called the “Clothing Club” in the late 19^th- century.  A portion of the house was a shop and women would gather by horse-and-buggy to buy goods, exchange community information (usually about someone not present and always incorrect), and make clothes.  Then it would be a long ride back home.

Bloody Bridge from below.

If you’ve been a visitor to Norfolk, you no doubt have seen Bloody Bridge from the road.  (We’ll discuss how it got its name some other time because I don’t believe it’s true.)  Another view of Bloody Bridge is from the valley beneath as the stream empties a short distance into a stretch of coastline called Duffy’s Whale.  You have to straddle a low fence to get to the trails leading to the shore, and you’d want to follow a local the first time, but once you’re there you have a seldom-seen view of Nepean and Philip Islands in one direction and Gannett Point in another.  Es goodun fe lookorn.

Because a theme of my tour company is small group size and we travel in a van, we have the opportunity for conversation along the way.  It turns out Cheryl didn’t get into photography until she retired.  That was Day One and she’s since developed herself into a master.  One characteristic of that accomplishment, I think, is she’s able to anticipate her shot, to make her camera see what she does, and not have to delete so much.  (Just joking, but I imagine even masters on occasion delete with the same kind of puzzlement and relief as the rest of us.)

I’ll tell you now, after almost four hours, we never made it to the National Park.  I felt I had let her down a bit in not managing our time better.  But there was so much to do and see, and at each stop she would find an angle or focal length I would never have thought to use.   To wit, this is the best photo of the “other side” of St. Barnabas Chapel I have seen.

Back side of St. Barnabas Chapel - Poulson Photography

Like most of our visitors, Cheryl expects to return.  There’s definitely more for her to see.  I’ll take her to Monty’s, for one, near Crystal Pool, and perhaps to nearby Philip Island, where the vivid colours of the geology will make her hands tremble.  I hope to be able to feature her Norfolk photos on my website soon.

It was a great day.  I had a great time on my tour.  Thanks, Cheryl.

Norfolk Island Flora and Fauna Society.

            I had the members of the Norfolk Island Flora and Fauna Society at my house for a meeting last week.  It was at my house because the A & H Hall, the usual location, had no power and I knew because of a tour earlier that day that my house could handle guests.  I have my grandparent’s Kauri-wood dining table which can easily handle the seven people who arrived.  It’s a great table for dining and conversation, poker and meetings.  The 2006 High Court case of Bennett vs. the Commonwealth, which sought clarification of Norfolk’s constitutional relationship with the Australian Commonwealth, got its start at planning meetings around this table.  But that night, to me, it was the people around the table more than the topics that most impressed.  I was sitting with what constituted the history of the modern ecology movement on Norfolk, going back in some cases more than 50 years: Beryl Evans, Honey McCoy, Margaret Christian, Peter Davidson, Leigh Christian-Mitchell and Rob Ward.  Also around the table was Ginny Maidment, Community Laison officer for the Commonwealth, to offer advice on grantsmanship. 

            Beryl, together with her late husband, Owen, is the quintessence of environmental consciousness.  From their own pocket, they developed what amounted to a bona fide ornithological research centre on nearby Philip Island.  Philip is a bird sanctuary, some 1 x2 miles across, surrounded by steep coastal cliffs and is still not easy to access.  This was Beryl and Owen’s stomping grounds beginning over 30 years ago.  They made the terrain traversable in order to study close at hand the Island’s sea birds.   When I first went to Philip some  15 years ago, beginning with the vertical cliff just meters from the landing, virtually everywhere I’d need a rope and a hand or foot hold trying to reach the interior plateau I’d find one, and Owen and Beryl would have put it there.  The rope guardrails atop the south-facing 300 meter high cliffs, Owen and Beryl placed.  Making Philip their second home for months on end well into their 70s, they did it solely for their love of knowledge, which they would share freely with anyone who asked.  Beryl still does.  My favourite Owen story along these lines is, when I was newly arrived and trying to imagine ways of getting outside support for their work, I asked why he didn’t start publishing his findings.  Owen’s answer was he wasn’t finished yet.  My favourite Beryl story is when I was writing an article about them for the (now defunct) Pacific Island Monthly magazine and learned she had discovered two species of moth, but couldn’t remember where she had left the piece of paper to tell me the taxonomic names.  Two wonderfully unassuming characters.

            Honey is much the same: a tireless worker driven by her passion and concern for the ecology of the Norfolk archipelago (Norfolk, Philip and Nepean islands).  Among many other things, Honey has made the rehabilitation of Philip a priority.  Because of the introduction of rabbits to Philip in the 1790s, the island has been virtually denuded of vegetation for most of the last 150 years.  Fortunately, the rabbits were exterminated in the 1980s, which has allowed colonising plants (and thus windbreaks) to establish.  On her way to discovering several species of plants unique to the Island, Honey has for several decades slowly but steadily been re-establishing native plants on Philip.  Perhaps half of the island is now covered in some kind of vegetation, in part because of Honey’s nurturing.

White Tern

            Margaret’s knowledge has resulted in her publishing the definitive field guide to Norfolk Island birds.  This is a genuinely weighty task to contemplate, let alone do.  Her book is now an essential tool in the field.  She seems to get great delight, as all these folk do, in watching bird behaviour each year and in collecting anecdotes of various odd and colourful events across the Norfolk landscape over time.  Margaret has become the “go to” person when members of the community see something unusual and want to share it or find an answer.  But maybe the true answer person is Peter, who is also the Island’s Conservator of Reserves and head of Forestry.  Peter like the others is a keen observer of natural phenomenon, but he adds an additional measure of scientific training and technique to his conversation.  It can be a nice overlay to the grassroots observations of “lay” natural historians.  Peter, however, knows to defer when some of the older ones are speaking.

Springtime for two White Terns.

            Rob is Honey’s son.  Rob doesn’t yet know how much his mannerisms are like his mum’s.  That includes a concise mind, great earnestness, broad interests, and a true economy of expression.  Rob can demonstrate, as well, that humour needs few words.  A fly on the wall of their household would have learned a lot and occasionally wondered why it was laughing.

            I’m going to enjoy getting to know Leigh better.  In our small community, we know most everyone, but not necessarily well.  This is probably a good thing, but not always.  Leigh and I would chat a bit when we’d see other, but now I’ll see a serious side.  My left side is my serious side, which she’ll find out.

            There was a point at this meeting when President Margaret asked if anyone had “observations”.  People started sharing many of the things they had seen and learned of our natural environment since they last met - the return of the migratory white terns; assessing whether the “Tarla Bird” really does eat the embryos of nesting petrels; the condition of the tall  grass on Philip – which was like listening to doctors exchange diagnoses and treatment after hours.  These are the people who genuinely derive pleasure from nature and who are pained at the prospect of environmental degradation or of losing another species.  They still  meet, they still try because they’re optimists.  How many meetings do you actually walk away smarter?  It was cool.

(Photos courtesy of Norfolk Island National Park)

- Rick