PITCAIRN: PARADISE LOST
By Kathy Marks
HarperCollins
KEY POINTS:
Shortly after landing at Bounty Bay, a message was flashed over Pitcairn's radio telephones urging islanders to hurry outside because a plane was flying by. I joined them to look up into the Pacific sky.
Such is Pitcairn's isolation that even a rapidly disappearing vapour trail at 11,000m is a significant event in daily life.
That isolation is the backdrop to Kathy Marks' revealing book. She describes how a community founded by the mutineers from the Bounty, and then portrayed by Hollywood and ill-informed romantics as some sort of Pacific Utopia, descended into a society one island woman described as "sheer hell".
On a remote island largely ignored by the rest of the world, men related to Bounty mutineers bullied, raped and abused with impunity.
Their victims were also descendants of the mutineers - the daughters of the men's relatives and friends far too young and frightened to resist. When children did dare to complain to parents, they were usually beaten or ignored.
Parents were not the only ones to fail their children. Marks exposes a shameful litany of authority figures - diplomats, church leaders and teachers - from Britain, Australia and New Zealand who suspected Pitcairn's dark secrets but looked the other way.
"I just did my job and minded my own business," said one teacher trained in New Zealand to recognise signs of sexual abuse. (Charges of sex abuse against another New Zealand teacher were dropped because of his age and ill health.)
One island girl - now estranged from her family - finally did complain in 1999 of child rape. Britain, no longer able to duck its responsibility to its last remaining Pacific possession, ordered police to start the aptly named Operation Unique which led to prosecutions on Pitcairn and later in New Zealand.
Marks, Sydney-based correspondent for The Independent in Britain, myself and four others, became "the chosen six" - the only media allowed by British authorities to report to an astonished world from Pitcairn in 2004 about widespread sexual abuse of island children by adult men.
Marks brings credit to her profession: she was fair and fearless in her reporting from Pitcairn, and continues to be so in a book that looks well beyond the trials and into life itself in this secretive community. If there is a criticism, it is that she leaves too many questions unanswered, and provides too few photographs of an island most will never visit.
Marks' description of Pitcairn is sinister and threatening: teenage pregnancies were rife, men used violence only against women and children, girls were described by one abuser as "meat" and a convicted rapist goes fishing with the father of the child he assaulted.
Marks' book, however, is incomplete. The missing chapter relates to how she, and I, and the other three colleagues who stayed on (the sixth returned to New Zealand after two weeks) worked and lived on Pitcairn - a place so small that even away from court, at the post office, jaunting on a quad bike or fishing on the rocks below Down Rope you would rub shoulders with a man accused of sexually abusing a child.
The media shared a house which, at times, seemed like the set for a middle-aged version of that old BBC comedy, The Young Ones.
It was a hospitable place - certainly for the police, prosecution lawyers, diplomats and the few islanders supporting Operation Unique, all frequent visitors.
But our open door policy, I believe, may have contributed to a glaring media failure: none of us got the one interview that really mattered, with any of the accused men. Certainly, those men were openly hostile to us from the day we landed, but the level of our socialising with those they regarded as a threat did nothing to ease that resentment. Stories still remain to be told.
Nevertheless, Marks' book rightly salutes the bravery of Pitcairn's few heroes - the women who complained to police and then had the courage to re-tell their harrowing stories in court where they confronted their abusers.
But even as adults, Marks writes, those women were let down again - this time, by Pitcairn's legal system (the judges and lawyers - both prosecution and defence - were New Zealanders). One woman complained to Marks that the lenient sentence imposed against the abuser who destroyed her childhood was "like a slap on the wrist".
Pitcairn's prison will soon be empty of its inmates and converted into accommodation for tourists.
Marks' book, compelling as it is, will change little, especially among so-called "friends" of Pitcairn who viewed the trials as a British conspiracy to destroy the community.
On her website, Pitcairn Islander Meralda Warren describes her home as being "in the ninth year of its fragmentation", and writes of human rights and "the strength to hold our heads high".
Warren is writing about those she calls "the ones wrongfully accused" - sadly, not their abused victims.
* Ewart Barnsley covered the Pitcairn abuse trials for TVNZ.
