Norfolk Island - bring the family

Norfolk Island wants to shake off its rocking-chair image. COLIN MOORE steps ashore to find out what the islanders have to offer the young and the young-at-heart.

The travel agent dining with me at a Norfolk Island restaurant is in some difficulty. We have been on the island for a day and she is a little perplexed.

"I don't know where to pitch this place," she says, struggling to imagine what travel market may be interested in visiting this dot where the Pacific Ocean meets the Tasman Sea.

"It's sort of colonial," is the best description she can find of Norfolk's manicured verdancy.

Four days of fact-finding later, she remains puzzled. "I am still not sure where to pitch it," she admits as we wait for Air New Zealand to fly us home. "I'd like to come back with my daughter and relax - but I'll have to do it before she turns 15 or she'd kill me."

But the agent has come to some conclusions. As an island destination, she suggests, it is similar to the Channel Islands - and they have now been discovered by young travellers.

The family group ahead of me at the airline check-in desk has no doubts about Norfolk's place in the travel market.

Among their bulging pile of luggage is a set of golf clubs, a bag of tennis racquets and snorkelling gear. Another trolley is stacked five-high with boxes of shopping goods.

Manurewa travel agent Bonny Lynch went to a Tourism Norfolk Island promotion night last year and was persuaded to book a private family holiday, taking her mother and another couple with their children.

The five adults and five children are effervescent after a week on Norfolk.

"Awesome," is the verdict of a 10-year-old who applies it to every activity from snorkelling and archery to watching a sound-and-light show in which a convict gets his hand cut off and another gets a lashing.

The women went shopping every day for bargains in the tax-free stores. But, stresses Carol Whatton, of Drury, the horde is not the result of impulse buying.

"We checked prices before we left home and made a few phone calls while we were here," she says. "Gold and jewellery are significantly cheaper, Italian crockery is a lot cheaper and so is European clothing and shoes. Basically anything imported from Europe is cheaper here than in New Zealand. Label sports clothing and the like is not.

"We've had a great time, it's been full-on the whole week. And we didn't even get to go fishing or four-wheel driving. We could easily have spent another week here."

I relay these consumer verdicts because, like the travel agent, I too am perplexed as to where to pitch this place.

Norfolk Island Tourism's New Zealand representative, Anna Ouwerkerk, says Norfolk's biggest competitor for New Zealand customers is probably the sister penal colony of Tasmania.

But Norfolk - which relies on tourism (and a few bushels of Kentia palm seeds) for its economic survival - wants to broaden the pitch. It wants to attract younger people, families and travellers looking for soft outdoor adventures.

Ouwerkerk's mission is to dispel the New Zealand perception that visitors to Norfolk have to at least be retired and probably using a walking frame.

The island, once the most gruesome of Britain's penal settlements and now home to 1800 people, mostly descendants of the Bounty mutineers, has a bubbling confidence fuelled by young returnees.

There is even talk of independence from the clutches of Australia, whose financial contribution to the island's welfare is considered minimal but whose interference in island affairs is considered an unnecessary impediment.

A more telling tale of island living is found in the latest edition of The Norfolk Islander where a member of the Legislative Assembly of Norfolk Island, who makes his living as a barrister, feels obliged to make a public statement in the assembly explaining his legal defence of a man accused of paedophilia.

Another story tells of public opposition to an entrepreneur's application to erect 50 accommodation units because of the development's "intrusion into the privacy of Islanders."

Norfolk Islanders remain the family of 193 people who arrived from Pitcairn Island on May 3, 1856.

It is a family united by heritage, family names and a quaint language. A family that often squabbles and is fiercely proud.

It's an honest existence and the only thing old-fashioned about it are values like friendliness. It is hype-free and down-to-earth. You need never lock a vehicle, and travellers like Carol Whatton and her family are so taken with the size of the servings at a Saturday brunch buffet they take photographs of the food.

And, best of all, a destination where the 20,000 tourists who visited last year - more than 80 per cent from Australia and around 13 per cent from New Zealand -are made to feel welcome.

How's that for a pitch?