HOWE AMAZING
It’s an established fact that people who honeymoon on Lord Howe Island invariably return to celebrate their important wedding anniversaries there. Generations of families spend their Christmas holidays at the same resorts every year and they bring their families and friends to witness their significant-decade birthdays as well.
That’s because Lord Howe, an 11-kilometre-long dot in the South Pacific 660km east of Port Macquarie, is the kind of destination you want to share only with your closest family and friends. It’s a precious patch of paradise that you want to keep to yourself to ensure that it’s preserved forever. Flying into this World Heritage-listed island just shy of two hours by air from both Sydney and Brisbane, the first land you might sight is Balls Pyramid, a 550-metre spearhead of sheer basalt cliffs. It’s best known as a diving and fishing haven and for the small colony of phasmids (giant stick insects), previously thought to be extinct, that was found there in 2001.
A few minutes and 26km to the north is the island proper with the cloud-shrouded twin peaks of Mount Lidgbird (777m) and Mount Gower (875m) and the calm waters of the lagoon protecting the world’s southernmost reef. Then there’s the overwhelming sense of being enveloped by green, from paddocks of lush, green pasture to the carefully mown roadside verges and the natural forests where more than 100 endemic plants, including the kentia palm, grow.
But Lord Howe is not just physicallythe main activities, unless you count the twice daily arrival of the plane and the launch of the weather balloon from the meteorological station where visitors are welcomed. To buy property, you have to be a local — that is, born on the island, or a resident for at least a decade. The locals take their role as custodians very seriously. Apart from the usual council duties of maintaining the airport, power station, fire tender, SES, hospital, waste recycling, parks and reserves and keeping firewood stacked beside all the barbecues, the Lord Howe Island board, with four islanders and three government-appointed mainlanders elected for three-year terms, regulates all tourism and development. They voted not to have mobile phone coverage, they decide what kind of businesses can operate, and when a baby is born they signal its arrival by hoisting a pink or blue nappy up the flagpole outside the island’s government house.