Island life: the ultimate self-sufficiency challenge

When you live on a little island in the middle of a big ocean, you have to make your block pay its own way in the most self-sufficient manner possible.

When you live on a little island in the middle of a big ocean, you have to make your block pay its own way in the most self-sufficient manner possible.

If there’s one thing lifestyle blockers know, it’s how to work hard, and how rewarding it is to live off your own patch of land. Romantic ideals of semi self-sufficiency are quickly tempered by the realisation that the cost (and workload) of owning and operating a small holding is not for the faint-hearted.

Picture then, the added challenge of making your living from the land on 34.5ha over 1000 kilometres across the sea from your nearest neighbour.

Norfolk Island is picturesque, warm and welcoming. Contented cows wander the roadsides, colourful birds dart between the trees, the lagoon is filled with iridescent coral and bright fish. There’s fine dining, quaint cafes and boutique wines and liqueurs, every tourist’s idea of heaven.

But if you’re a local land-holder, it takes a certain degree of innovation and courage to diversify to the extent where you’re providing for your family.

To be a land-holder on Norfolk Island requires a certain degree of innovatio and courage.

Norfolk Island’s grim past as a British penal colony is preserved through theKingston World Heritage Area.

Magnificent views from the James Cook monument and lookout. Cook discovered and named the island in 1774.

The hilly nature of the island provides agreat early morning walk work-out.