We found an island with a temperate climate, blue skies, and lush growth, but at the same time, we found, as the book description suggests: ''A place full of shadows and wrongful deaths''.
In the first chapter of Dark Paradise, the author weighs into the ''colonial brutality of the British''. Then he singles out the Americans, Turks, Israelis, Portuguese, Belgians, Japanese and Winston Churchill for similar attention.
Macklin goes on to suggest victory in World War 2 ''allowed it [the British Empire] to sanitise its centuries of cruel colonial oppression''. Nowhere is this more evident, he indicates, than in the history (or rather the lack of it), of Norfolk Island.
The book covers the bloody intertwined histories of Norfolk and Pitcairn islands. It goes from Norfolk's discovery by James Cook in 1774, (''a flawed colonial hero'') to its later establishment as a penal colony in 1787, to Pitcairn Islanders seeking refuge there in 1856 and to the murder of Janelle Patton in 2002.
To paraphrase Winston Churchill's assistant, (Anthony Montague-Browne, not Churchill, as is wrongly attributed in the book), Norfolk was an evil hellhole revolving around ''rum, sodomy, the lash, and missionaries''.
Devolution of power on Norfolk was given over to ''petty civilian bureaucrats, cunning convict overseers, and sadistic floggers''.
The islands of Norfolk and Pitcairn are still steeped in controversy. In the author's note, we read that many of those who assisted in the research would prefer not to be publicly identified for fear of retribution. Authors of other works preferred not to have their contributions acknowledged.
The island is ''a place full of shadows'' indeed and fully described in this fascinating albeit horrifying read.
- Ted Fox is a Dunedin online marketing consultant.
