What force of nature keeps tourists, schoolkids and crazy birds coming back to Lord Howe Island? David Naylor found some answers on the flight back home

The island kids wait for their plane in a group outside the airport café. They are teenagers behaving like teenagers – acting the clown, acting tough, just acting.

The holidays are over, and it’s time to go back to school on the mainland 600km away. But this is a happy gathering and the kids smile easily.

Living on Lord Howe Island – billed as “the last paradise” and “the Pacific’s most beautiful island” – would make any grouch smile. In the museum, some of the oldest photos show people smiling or on the verge of smiling. That’s rare for historic photography, which nearly always portrays haunted or defiant faces. 

Unlike Pacific neighbour Norfolk Island, with its sad convict history, Lord Howe has few restless ghosts. It has always attracted people seeking a life removed from the mainstream, and they have worked hard, generation after generation, at keeping it both unspoiled and commercially viable. In its early years, feathers and onions paid the bills. Today, the main industries are Kentia palm seeds and tourism.

The Dash 8 aircraft fills quickly. The island kids are talking and laughing in the seats around me as the plane speeds down the runway. Then, as we take off and their island home falls away below, they are suddenly quiet. Not a word. Every one of them stares out and down, transfixed by a scene they must have seen many times but still can’t get enough of.

I sense a ritual in their quietness, perhaps a sharing of that empty feeling when a holiday at home ends and you leave for a life lived elsewhere.

The plane banks and circles around the island. I can see the breakers at the edge of the lagoon, arcs of beach, and mountains becoming dark green bumps in a vast sea.

I have been on Lord Howe only four days, but as the island disappears behind us, my head is full of panoramic images and encounters with coral, fish, turtles and birds. The offerings of the natural world – spectacular geography, colourful marine life, diverse flora and fauna – are its main attributes, along with relaxed accommodation and dining at whatever level you choose.

I’m lighter in body and spirit, thanks to the bike riding, climbing and hiking. And my experience was capped by superb dining at Beachcombers, Pinetrees and beautiful Capella Lodge.

The teenagers on my plane, as far as I can tell, belong to a permanent population restricted to 350. Many are families who have been here for generations – like the Andrews-Nichols-Kirby clan, whose forebears came to Lord Howe in 1842. Today their descendants, Pixie Rourke and Kerry McFadyen, run Pinetrees resort, originally a guesthouse the family has owned and run since around 1900.

Pinetrees has been renovated in recent years, but I stayed there for one night and enjoyed how it retains the cosiness of an old-style holiday guesthouse.

My other nights were in Earl’s Anchorage, a series of spacious self-contained luxury bungalows curving down a hill into bushland. Like most accommodation on Lord Howe, bicycles are provided for guests, and that’s all an able-bodied person needs to get around.

There are places the roads don’t go – like the mountains at either end of the island. Mount Gower is the highest, and I’m led to believe it’s a pleasant but long climb. I chose the easier, quicker tracks up Mount Eliza and Malabar Ridge.

In a glass-bottomed boat on the lagoon I looked down at the world’s most southern coral reef and saw fish I thought were exclusive to the tropics. Later, on a nature tour of North Bay, we saw turtles, snorkelled above spectacular coral and got up close to nesting terns.

We also spotted bar-tailed godwits. This crazy bird flies to Siberia for the northern summer, then comes back to Lord Howe for the rest of the year, homing in on its birthplace using some kind of bird-brained radar.

Perhaps, if man-made aviation was as reliable as the godwit’s, the transport history of Lord Howe would not be littered with plane crashes. Before the runway was built in 1974, Sunderland, Sandringham and Catalina sea planes occasionally ended up beached, sinking or floating upside down – with remarkably few people injured. But on the night of September 28, 1948, an RAAF Catalina lost altitude as it attempted an emergency landing on the lagoon. It struck Malabar Ridge and crashed into the trees, bursting into flames. Seven airmen were killed. Islanders rushed to the crash site and carried the two survivors to safety.

Much of the wreckage remains in the field under the ridge. I sat down among the broken wings and battered bits of engine, trying to reconcile the horror of that night with the tranquil beauty of the lagoon the Catalina only just failed to reach. In the sombre silence, I realised life on Lord Howe – contrary to its status as a holiday destination – was as real as anywhere else.

Belying their smiles, the local people take their island home seriously – not only in their commitment to the holiday business, but also their dedication to preserving the eco-systems through species protection, feral animal and noxious weed eradication, and innovative recycling and composting.

In the plane taking me home, the island kids have resumed their chatter – but I notice other passengers looking out at the Pacific Ocean with a lost, distant gaze. Like former NSW premier Neville Wran, they are likely among a growing band of people who can’t get enough of Lord Howe. They came here on holiday and now it’s in their blood. Like the bar-tailed godwits returning from Siberia, they will find themselves riding the current of their compulsion back to the isle of smiles, year after year.

Open Road July/August 2009