Kingston exists because Britain wanted masts. Cook sighted Norfolk Island in 1774, saw forests of tall, straight pines and fields of flax, and reported a ready-made naval supply depot. Settlers landed in March 1788, six weeks after the First Fleet reached Sydney. Both industries failed: the pine timber snapped under load, and nobody sent out knew how to work the flax. Britain kept the island anyway, and from 1825 put it to a different use. Kingston became a place of secondary punishment — a prison for men already convicted once in the colonies — and for thirty years it was among the harshest in the empire. Convicts quarried coral-sand limestone on Nepean Island, 800 metres offshore, and built the town you walk through today: the Georgian officers' houses of Quality Row, the Commissariat Store, a hand-cranked grain mill, two gaols, a pier. Older still, under the dunes at Emily Bay, lie the stones of a Polynesian marae.
Kingston never fell into ruin, because a whole community was moved into it. On 8 June 1856, 194 islanders — descendants of the Bounty mutineers and their Tahitian wives — were landed at the pier and handed the emptied penal town. Their families still farm here, still speak Norf'k, and every 8 June they come ashore in period dress to re-enact that arrival. So the gaol walls stand on cropped grass where cattle graze, and behind them the lagoon, held flat by a coral reef, is where islanders swim, a few minutes' walk from the ruined prisoners' barracks. Pines throw long shadows across the shoreline cemetery, where convicts, soldiers and Pitcairn families lie in one field. Offshore sit Nepean and Phillip Islands, and from August the humpbacks pass them.