The island paradise Australians forget - and it's right on our doorstep

The island that time never tamed - and why you should go now.

Norfolk Island feels like a postcard slipped from another century. Picture by Kate Cox

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Norfolk Island feels like a postcard slipped from another century: emerald headlands, glassy coves, pines spearing the sky.

People wave from behind windshields, cows wander where they please and hellos come easily.

But beneath the postcard prettiness lies a surprisingly dramatic history. Twice a penal colony, later home to Bounty mutineers and their Polynesian families, this tiny island is equal parts beauty and grit, laughter and lore.

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Arrival: keys in the ignition, cows on the road

"When you arrive, your hire car will be in the airport car park," our itinerary promises. "The keys will be in the ignition."

Experience the natural wonder of Norfolk Island, just 2.5 hours from mainland Australia.

And that's exactly how it plays out.

If there's a smoother welcome to a country, I haven't found it.

We climb into our khaki hatchback - wheels are essential here, even though you can cross the island in under two hours - and barely make it out of the car park before stopping for a mixed family of golden and black, impossibly fluffy chickens waddle across the road.

Norfolk Island is dotted with beaches, including Ball Bay. Picture by Kate Cox

(A small chicken interlude: they are everywhere. At dawn, a chorus of crows and clucks ripples across the island. A local tells us a recent genetic study tried to determine whether they arrived with the First Fleet - with inconclusive results.)

Then come the cows - wandering the roads with the unbothered swagger of creatures that legally have right of way. Which they do: a legacy of 1856, when the resettling Pitcairn Islanders were gifted hundreds of cattle. Here, you fence to keep cows out, not in. Some of them seem bigger than the island's boxy little cars, which makes sense when you realise everything here had to arrive by ship, hoisted ashore with effort and hope.

Locals celebrating the annual Bounty Day. Picture supplied

Why everyone waves (and you'll soon join them)

Within minutes, we've joined the island code: one finger lifted from the steering wheel, a silent hello to every car, cyclist or walker. Courtesy, but also community. My husband jokes about how strong local pointer fingers must be; by lunchtime, we are waving instinctively, inducted into this tiny fellowship of friendliness.

It feels like a place sitting lightly between worlds. Technically part of Australia since 1914, yet the movement for greater self-governance is alive, as seen in the independent flags fluttering from verandahs. You land at an international airport, but exit straight onto quiet country town roads, past schoolkids on bikes, a scatter of pubs and cafes, a yoga studio - and, incongruously, 1980s-era duty-free stores. Craig's Knitwear. Frank's Shoes. Two rival duty-free stores run by Max and Benjamin. It's charming and slightly surreal - like wandering through a photo album labelled Before the Internet.

Surf breaks meet historic ruins on Norfolk Island. Picture supplied

Tourism skews older - we meet a couple celebrating their 67-year anniversary - but young families, hikers, divers and stargazers will find their rhythm, too. As one young local couple tells us, "Everyone's lovely. They also just pop by ... a lot. With eskies. We eventually built a fence."

Here, gentle ribbing is affection. "If French is the language of love, Norfolk is the language of laughter," says historian and mutineer descendant Maree Evans, who has lived here most of her life. On an island where family trees overlap like Norfolk pines, nicknames keep everyone straight. The phone book lists "Speed" (the slow butcher), "Cooda" ("coulda, woulda"), Chinny, Chubby, Cocky and so many more.

The brutal history beneath the beauty

Norfolk's beauty sits atop a brutal history - and that tension is precisely why you should come. It is bloody interesting, and bloody.

Ruins, pines and snorkelling on the shores of Emily Bay. Picture by Kate Cox

The island was a British penal settlement twice: from 1788 to 1814, and from 1825 to 1855. During that second, infamous phase, roughly 6000 convicts passed through this tiny speck in the Pacific.

The island gained a fierce reputation - some called it the "Hell of the Pacific" - for its brutal conditions, harsh labour, isolation, starvation and severe punishments. Chaplain Thomas Beagley Naylor wrote that the men's physical condition was "as wretched as his moral", while NSW governor Sir Thomas Brisbane called it a place where prisoners were "forever excluded from all hope of return".

Violence simmered. In the 1846 Cooking Pot Riot, sparked by the removal of prisoners' cooking rights, four men were killed. The ringleader, the so-called gentleman bushranger William "Jackey Jackey" Westwood, was hanged, declaring: "I welcome death as a friend ... I have been treated more like a beast than a man." He is buried with 12 others at Murderers' Mound, where bones surfaced when the seawall eroded.

Clear-bottomed kayaking at Emily Bay, across the road from the Norfolk Island ruins. Picture by Kate Cox

Kingston - an astonishingly well-preserved part of the Australian Convict Sites World Heritage listing - is where you'll find all this. We stand by the oldest working boatsheds in Australia and watch surfers glide above the wreck site of HMS Sirius, flagship of the First Fleet. An anchor was recovered here just four years ago.

This is from where Maree, who runs the museums, leads us to the ruins of the Civil Hospital. "One of the worst places," she says quietly. "They treated dysentery with sea-salt enemas and bark infusions, while men were literally being poisoned by the water. It was bad. So bad."

A family history like no other

After the penal settlement closed, 194 Pitcairn Islanders - descendants of the Bounty mutineers and their Polynesian wives - arrived in 1856, after outgrowing tiny, remote Pitcairn.

Seven things you need to know about Norfolk Island

1. Pack reef shoes, walking shoes and curiosity
2. Heritage sites and museums are essential to understand the island's story
3. No public Wi-Fi - download maps before you leave and pick up a local SIM on arrival
4. Cars stay unlocked, keys in ignition - really
5. Wave at everyone
6. Cows have right of way
7. Limited supermarket, higher grocery prices (but the duty-free alcohol is cheap!)

They had already weathered infighting, jealousy, violence, drink, religious awakening, murder and madness. Now they faced mid-winter chill and rugged forest rather than the balmy Eden they'd expected.

Yet, they stayed, and their story still ripples across the island; indeed, it's impossible to miss, not least because so many locals trace their ancestry to five mutineers: Christian, Adams, McCoy, Quintal and Young. (They did seem to marry within familiar circles; as Marie Christian-Bailey jokes on the excellent Pitcairn Settlers Tour, "My husband told me it was ok because it's not inbreeding, it's linebreeding.")

You hear that legacy in the lilting local language, see it at the Cylorama - a 360-degree painted panorama of the Bounty saga - and read it on shopfronts, street signs and the lichen-softened headstones at Norfolk Island Cemetery.

The island paradise Australians forget - and it's right on our doorstep

That cemetery is where the island's story lands hardest. Australia's oldest European burial ground, still in use, combines mutineer descendants, convicts and colonial officials, their fates bluntly recorded: drowned while bathing at Emily Bay; shot by a fellow soldier; struck by a whale. Colleen McCullough, who lived here for decades, lies here too. Her stone reads simply - perfectly - WRITER.

Birds, bays and the quietest national park you'll ever see

One-fifth of the island is a national park: lush palms, ancient pines, the kind of landscape that invites binoculars and patience. Captain Cook charted Norfolk's coastline, and from his namesake lookout, the Pacific stretches like silk.

A masked booby chick on Norfolk Island. Picture supplied

We meet a lady who has been there two days, impressive camera in hand, stalking the perfect photo of a masked booby. One soars just as she lowers her lens. "Dang it," she laughs. It's a paradise for bird nerds, but even if you're not one, it's easy to get swept up in the feathered fanfare here: the Norfolk Island green parrot, the Morepork owl, the golden whistler. And seabirds dancing on the wind: tropicbirds, boobies, noddies, terns.

At nearby Emily Bay, kids fling themselves off a floating pontoon while their parents fish from the shore. Snorkellers drift over coral gardens. We skim the lagoon in a clear-bottom kayak with Peter and Fran Berry from Crystal Clear Kayaks. They moved here with their children after googling "islands to live on if you're an Aussie citizen". "We'd never heard of Norfolk," Fran laughs. "Now we don't want to leave."

Clear water is a feature of Norfolk Island's bays. Picture supplied

The unexpected: extraordinary food

We came for the history and the scenery. We didn't expect to eat so well.

On a clifftop at sunset, we join the weekly Island Fish Fry - Polynesian dancing from the "Bounty Beauties", storytelling from descendants, plates of fresh fish, coconut bread, and pilhi, a traditional pudding of very ripe bananas and root vegetables.

A plate of food at the weekly Island Fish Fry. Picture by Kate Cox

Next is Homestead, where Kurt and Jill Menghetti chase near-zero food miles and produce a degustation that stops conversation, and features the best pork belly I've tasted.

Then there are smooth flat whites at Prinke; cold beers at Salty Beer Garden; almond croissants at La Perouse; and a lingering afternoon at Two Chimneys Wines with Rod McAlpine, where the vines are young but the stories run more than two centuries deep.

Overlooking the vines at Two Chimneys Wines. Picture supplied

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Before we drop the car back at the airport - keys still in the ignition, doors unlocked, as always - we squeeze in one last dose of history at the charming, slightly eccentric Bounty Museum, the little place on the corner we've driven past a dozen times without quite managing to stop. Inside, it's bursting with a delightfully chaotic archive of an island that has lived many lives. If you're into history - bleak, bitter, complicated, inspiring, family, Australian, maritime - it's all here. Alongside: four pianos, dozens of old radios and telephones, lanterns, school relics, ship models, old bottles and Bounty novels stacked like treasure

One lady tells us as she departs: "There is so much to see and nowhere to sit."

But in its own charming way, the Bounty Museum mirrors Norfolk itself: unexpected, layered, funny, unsettling, utterly fascinating. A place full of answers and just as many questions - and the kind of place where, somehow, leaving the keys in the car feels like the most natural thing in the world.