When she heard that Darralyn had spoken to police, Carol said, ‘I thought, what on earth is that girl thinking about? The silly idiot … Well, if that’s what she’s gone and done, I’ll have to stand by her.’ She went on, ‘I told the cops, not one of these girls went into this with their eyes shut. They knew exactly what they were doing. They weren’t forced by anyone. The women here are loose, and it’s not the men’s fault. What are they supposed to do?’
Carol then hinted at ‘some really bad stuff that I know about that’s happened on the island that’s a heck of a lot worse [than under-age sex] … That’s sick sex I’m talking about, between adults’. She was referring to adultery, it transpired, and as she uttered the word, Carol growled like an alley cat. ‘Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but to me that’s taboo,’ she said. ‘Some people don’t care. They don’t have morals.’
Like the others, Carol had a way of looking at you without meeting your eye. It was disconcerting. The women, with their permanently distant expressions, all seemed to be wearing masks. The outspoken ones laughed a lot, particularly at coarse jokes. They came across as both manipulative and naïve. They were not the type to be easily intimidated. They were feisty and opinionated: people who would be able to look after themselves.
But when conversation moved to the prospect of their male relatives being jailed, the women suddenly appeared vulnerable. ‘I wouldn’t want to be without the men,’ Meralda said softly. Carol interjected, ‘We’re lost as hell without them.’ Olive reckoned that, without the men, ‘you might as well pick Pitcairn up and throw it away, because no one is going to survive … We can’t look after ourselves.’ With the population already at crisis point, they claimed, if even a couple of men were locked up, there would be too few to crew the longboats and maintain the roads. Meralda questioned why Britain had singled out the able-bodied men. Olive said, ‘There’s no one who can replace them. They can’t bring outsiders in to run the boats. They’ve no idea what to do.’
Of all those present, Olive stood to lose most. Among the seven defendants on the island, she counted her husband (Steve), her son (Randy), father (Len) and younger brother (Dave). The six men facing court in New Zealand included her other brother, Kay, and her two other sons, Trent and Shawn. Like certain women in the room, Olive also had connections with some of the alleged victims. She lamented, ‘We live as one big family on this island, and nothing will ever be the same … Right now, with all this going on, maybe they should have hanged Fletcher Christian.’
We had been at Big Fence for several hours, and no one was showing any sign of moving. The women, it seemed, were willing to stay for as long as it took to win us over. When we got our cameras out, they smiled, repeatedly. We could take as many pictures as we wanted.
We had not, though, been offered so much as a glass of water. It was a hot afternoon, and my tongue was sticking to the roof of my mouth. After a few more photographs, the six of us left. We would never set foot inside Steve Christian’s house again. And some of those women would never again speak to us, or even acknowledge our existence.
The next day, two of those who had remained in the background invited us to talk to them privately. They did not wish their names to be used, and we met them on neutral ground; even so, the other islanders knew within hours that the interview had taken place.
The two were anxious to dispel the impression that Pitcairn was a hotbed of under-age sex. That had not been their experience when they were growing up, they claimed. I asked why they had kept quiet at Big Fence. ‘There’s no point in one little voice speaking up,’ one woman replied. She told us that the Pitcairners usually avoided confrontation. ‘If you’re opposed to something, you tend to defer. We all have to get along together. We’re a community. None of us can survive here on our own.’
The pair were already unpopular because they had not condemned the prosecution outright. One observed, ‘If you try to give a balanced view, you’re regarded as disloyal.’ The other had been called a ‘Pommy supporter’ and ‘puppet of the Governor’ while going about her business in the Adamstown square.
The women believed that the sexual abuse had to be stopped. ‘If it’s as bad as it’s been made out to be, then it needed to be addressed,’ said one. She added, ‘But I’m not condemning the guys. I don’t personally want to see them jailed. I feel very sorry for the guys. Yet we’re hurting for the girls. It’s a double-edged sword. We’re all related. We’re related to the victims. We’re related to the offenders. And whatever decision is made, it’s going to hurt everybody. The ripples are so widespread.’
One woman alluded to victims within her own family, and said that she admired the courage of those giving evidence. However, she went on, ‘I don’t know who’s done what to whom, and I don’t really want to know, because then I’ll have to live with that for the rest of my life. You go to bed at night, you can’t sleep for thinking about it. No one wants to take that on board.’
This off-the-record conversation, I remember, left me feeling like Alice in Wonderland. The women at Big Fence had promised us the real story. The two dissidents had given us another perspective. But theirs, too, was clouded by ambiguity.
Walking home, as we passed little groups of people chatting in the road, I was struck by a sense of life unfolding in parallel universes. On the surface, the island seemed innocuous, even banal. Then every so often you glimpsed something hard-edged and sinister. Which was the real Pitcairn?
CHAPTER 3 Opening a right can of worms
While exploring my surroundings in those early days before the trials began, I poked my head into the public hall, which doubled as Pitcairn’s courthouse. A familiar figure gazed back at me: Queen Elizabeth II, in a hat and pearls, clasping a bunch of flowers. There were, in all, three photographs of the Queen at the front of the hall, as well as one of the Duke of Edinburgh and one of the royal couple. On the same wall hung a Union Jack, together with a Pitcairn flag and a British coat of arms.
It was an overt display of patriotism of a kind rarely seen nowadays, and it was in striking contrast to the anti-British sentiments expressed at Big Fence, where most of the women seemed to agree with Tania Christian, Steve’s daughter, when she declared that ‘Britain can go to hell as far as I care.’
The reality was that, until Operation Unique started, barely a subversive murmur was heard around Adamstown. Pitcairn was Britain’s last remaining territory in the South Pacific, and its inhabitants were—as visitors often remarked—among Her Majesty’s most loyal subjects. Until not so long ago, ‘God Save the Queen’ was sung at public meetings, school concerts, even the twice-weekly film shows, while the British flag was flown on the slightest pretext. A number of islanders were MBEs, and several, including Steve Christian, Jay Warren and Brian Young, one of the ‘off-island’ accused, had been invited to Buckingham Palace.
Pitcairn’s origins were emphatically anti-British, of course; in Fletcher Christian’s day, there were few acts more heinous than mutiny. So it was an ironic twist when, a couple of decades later, the British Navy became the islanders’ guardian and lifeline. The captains of British warships that patrolled the South Seas in the 19th century, keeping an eye on that corner of Empire, felt responsible for the minuscule territory. They developed a sentimental attachment to the place and stopped there regularly, delivering gifts and supplies. They also found themselves settling disputes and dispensing justice in the fledgling community.
Russell Elliott,