BOUNTY DAY

If you were down at Kingston yesterday, on the occasion of our 150th anniversary of the arrival of the Pitcairners to Norfolk Island, you may well have felt as if you were in another time and place.
And you would be right.
Anyone watching those hundreds of Norfolk Islanders and their families, with a scattering of their Pitcairn and Tahitian cousins, could not fail to notice that this is a separate and distinct people, with their own unique traditions, heritage and history. A people whose culture has developed quite separately from that of Australians, and a people who are very proud of who they are and where they have come from.
It was plainly evident, too, that this was not another ethnic group living in Australia and preserving the culture and ways of their homeland. This was a separate people living out their culture in their homeland itself. And hundreds of Norfolk Islanders living abroad had come home to share in the celebration.
There was much to celebrate....one and a half centuries in a bountiful island, a strong and vibrant community that is rightly proud of its values, its spirit of self-help, its "Inasmuch" principle by which the community chooses to live.
Our Australian friends would be very blinkered and undiscerning if they thought those hundreds of Norfolk Islanders who paraded at Kingston yesterday would sit easily into their one size-fits-all mold.
Our Chief Minister told us:
"Dieh es d'taim orl aklan noe we gat kamfram. Staanap. Miek big faret.........Hoelap a hied en miek shus awas wieh es wathen wi kiip f'aklan."
(Right now, all of us know we have "comefrom" (class, family pride, breeding, roots).... Stand tall. Celebrate it and let the whole world know. Hold your heads high and make sure we hold on to our Norfolk way.)
And then in addressing the Governor-General and other visitors, he said:
"This is a momentous day to celebrate the 150th Anniversary of the arrival of our ancestors in this place, this beautiful and bounteous place, Norfolk Island. The arrival on an Island to nurture us, and we to nurture it and for it to be the home of our people, forever.
"We as the Pitcairn and Norfolk Island people, have grown from a very small number of only 29 in 1790, to almost 1,000 living in Norfolk Island today, with many thousands resident in other parts of the world, principally Australia and New Zealand......
Small groups of people throughout the world are vulnerable; many do not survive as a people.
But over the 150 years in this place we have shown vigour and tenacity, surmounted many difficulties, met many challenges and celebrated not a few milestones. Whilst others may have diminished, it’s quite clear we are not done yet."
What I would like to say to our Canberra politicians and bureaucrats is this:
We hope you enjoyed our celebrations. We know you say you admire our special traditions and heritage. But we need you to understand that our culture is not a performance or a street parade. It is not something we bring out and dust off for special days and events. It is not just something meant to give quaint amusement to spectators, and it is not a mere commercial commodity. It is something we live out every day and we draw strength from it.
Yes, you were in a special time and place yesterday. We were all proud to be a part of it. If you truly respect our cultural identity, please do not destroy our traditional rights and freedoms. Please ensure we survive as a strong, distinct and proud people.