Old Buckenham July meeting

Another far away Norfolk
At their July meeting, Old Buckenham WI were joined by twenty members of New Costessey WI. The link between these two WIs has been maintained since 1983 when some Old Buckenham members met up with Costessey members on a WI holiday and it is always good to meet up with them on an annual basis to catch up on news and activities during the year.
The speaker for the evening was June Marriage from Norwich. She was joined by her husband who showed excellent slides of Norfolk Island, a remote island in the South Pacific Ocean, east of the Australian mainland and which is now part of the Australian Commonwealth Territory. June and her husband became interested in (and subsequently visited) this island as a result of a get together in Norwich about fifteen years ago with people representing all the Norwich and Norfolk place names in the world.
Norfolk Island was first settled by East Polynesian seafarers in the 14th/15th century and they survived for several generations before disappearing. The first European known to have sighted the Island was Captain James Cook in 1774 on his second voyage to the South Pacific on HMS Resolution. He named it after the Duchess of Norfolk, wife of Edward Howard, the 9th Duke of Norfolk. It was subsequently colonised by Britain to serve as a penal settlement until 1794. The next settlement began in 1856 when descendants of Tahitians and the HMS Bounty mutineers arrived, along with Fletcher Christian. They had resettled from the Pitcairn Islands, which had become too small for their growing population.
The Pitcairners occupied many of the buildings remaining from the penal settlement and gradually established traditional farming and whaling industries on the Island. The population in 2011 was 2,300. Most islanders are of either European-only (mostly British)
or combined European-Tahitian ancestry, being descendants of the Bounty mutineers, as well as there being more recent arrivals from Australia and New Zealand. About half of the islanders can trace their roots back to Pitcairn Island.
Old Buckenham WI will have a busy time in September – the village fete on Saturday 1 September (which will include a dog show organised by one of the OB members) followed by the Annual Produce Show on Sunday 9 September. Members are also looking forward to the next group meeting on Thursday 20 September when the speaker will be David Whiteley from BBC Look East. The subject of his talk will be “It shouldn’t happen to a TV presenter”.