Kathy Marks - Trouble in Paradise - Uncovering the Dark Secrets of Britain’s Most Remote Island

For my parents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Cast of characters

Christian clan

Brown family

Warren clan

Young family

Prologue

Part 1—On the island

1 A surreal little universe in the middle of nowhere

2 Mutiny, murder and myth-making

3 Opening a right can of worms

4 No amnesty

5 The fiefdom and its leader

6 The propaganda campaign starts

7 Key witnesses evaporate

8 The trials begin

9 Let’s make-believe

10 Judgement day

11 ‘You can’t blame men for being men’

Part 2—Viewing Pitcairn from a distance

12 How the myth was forged

13 Politics, poison and power plays

14 Britain’s ‘ineffective long-range benevolence’

15 ‘I just did my job and minded my own business’

16 Interdependence + silence = collusion

17 Making legal history

18 The final trials

19 Reaping a sad legacy since Bounty times

20 Lord of the Flies?

21 The last throw of the dice

Epilogue—Isobel’s story

Acknowledgements

Copyright

About the Publisher

Historical figures

Edward Christian (Fletcher’s brother)

Edward Young (mutineer)

Fletcher Christian (mutineer)

Harry Christian (hanged in 1898 for murder of wife and baby)

John Adams (mutineer and community leader)

Maimiti (Fletcher Christian’s Tahitian ‘wife’)

Matthew Quintal (mutineer)

Peter Heywood (mutineer court-martialled then pardoned)

William Bligh (captain of Bounty )

William McCoy (mutineer)

Media

Claire Harvey ( The Australian ; The Times )

Ewart Barnsley (Television New Zealand)

Kathy Marks ( The Independent ; New Zealand Herald )

Neil Tweedie ( The Daily Telegraph ; Press Association)

Sue Ingram (Radio New Zealand)

Zane Willis (TVNZ)

Officials and diplomats

Baroness Patricia Scotland (Former Overseas Territories Minister)

George Fergusson (Governor at time of writing)

Grant Pritchard (former Governor’s Representative)

Harry Maude (British colonial official in 1940s)

Jenny Lock (former Governor’s Representative)

Karen Wolstenholme (former Deputy Governor)

Leon Salt (former Commissioner)

Leslie Jaques (Commissioner at time of writing)

Martin Williams (former Governor)

Matthew Forbes (former Deputy Governor)

Richard Fell (former Governor)

Police and legal personnel

Adrian Cook QC (defence)

Allan Roberts (defence)

Charles Blackie (Chief Justice)

Charles Cato (defence)

Christine Gordon (prosecution)

Christopher Harder (former barrister)

Dennis McGookin (Kent Police)

Fletcher Pilditch (prosecution)

Gail Cox (Kent Police)

Graham Ford (court registrar)

Grant Illingworth QC (defence)

Gray Cameron (magistrate)

Jane Lovell-Smith (judge)

Karen Vaughan (New Zealand Police)

Kieran Raftery (prosecution)

Lord Hoffman (Privy Council)

Max Davidson (Kent Police)

Paul Dacre (defence)

Peter George (Kent Police)

Robert Vinson (Kent Police)

Russell Johnson (judge)

Simon Moore (prosecution)

Simon Mount (prosecution)

Vinny Reid (British Military Police)

Teachers and Church figures

Albert and Jane Moverley (teachers)

Albert Reeves (teacher; charged with indecent assault and rape)

Allen Cox (teacher)

Barrie Baronian (teacher)

Hannah Carnihan (teacher’s daughter)

Lyle Burgoyne (lay pastor and nurse)

Neville Tosen (pastor)

Pippa Foley (teacher)

Ray Coombe (pastor)

Rick Ferret (pastor)

Roy Sanders (teacher)

Sheils Carnihan (teacher)

Tony Washington (teacher)

Victims (pseudonyms)

Belinda

Carla

Caroline

Catherine

Charlotte

Elizabeth

Fiona

Gillian

Isobel

Janet

Jeanie

Jennifer

Judith

Karen

Linda

Marion

Susan

Suzie

Various

Bill and Catherine Haigh (communications expert and his wife)

Caroline Alexander (historian)

Dea Birkett (author of Serpent in Paradise )

Herb Ford (California-based director of Pitcairn Islands Study Center)

Maurice Allward (friend of Pitcairn Island)

Maurice Bligh (descendant of William Bligh)

Nigel Jolly (skipper of the Braveheart )

Ricky Quinn (step-grandson of Terry Young)

Pitcairn Island, a British outpost floating in a remote corner of the South Pacific, was until recently considered a tropical paradise. Seldom visited, it is a place of extreme isolation, with no airstrip and limited sea access. The rocky outcrop is inhabited by about 50 people, most of them descended from Fletcher Christian and his fellow Bounty mutineers.

The sailors fled to the island to evade British law, but for the next two centuries Pitcairn was, to all appearances, trouble-free—stabilised by religion, with negligible crime, and largely capable of running its own affairs. Just before the dawn of the new millennium, that perception was turned on its head.

In December 1999 several Pitcairn girls claimed that they had been sexually assaulted by a visiting New Zealander. By chance, a British policewoman was on the island, and one of the girls confided that she had also been raped by two local men in the past. An investigation into those allegations developed into a major inquiry that saw British detectives criss-cross the globe, interviewing dozens of Pitcairn women. Their conclusion was that nearly every girl growing up on the island in the last 40 years had been abused, and nearly every man had been an offender.

I first read about the investigation—codenamed, quite coincidentally, Operation Unique—in 2000, when snippets surfaced in the British and New Zealand media. At that time I was a relative newcomer to Sydney, where I am based as Asia – Pacific Correspondent for The Independent . The story had immediate appeal, combining Pitcairn’s mutinous history with a glimpse of life darkly played out on a far-flung island—an island that also happened to be a British colony, one of the final vestiges of Empire.

What struck me, even at that early stage, was that sexual abuse seemed to have been part of the fabric of life on Pitcairn. I tried to visualise what childhood must have been like for the victims, living there with no means of escape from their alleged assailants.

At the same time, certain Pitcairners—including women on the island—were loudly denying that children had ever been mistreated. They claimed that Pitcairn was a laid-back Polynesian society where girls matured early and were willing sexual partners. Britain, they claimed, was trying to cripple the community and force it to close, thus ridding itself of a costly burden. Who was telling the truth, I wondered: the women describing their experiences of abuse, or those portraying the affair as a British conspiracy?