About 2,000 people live on Norfolk Island, an Australian external territory 1,400km off the coast of New South Wales. Remarkably, 10 of them – fully half a percent of the entire population – are currently in Birmingham representing the island at the Commonwealth Games. All 10 are participating in the one sport in Birmingham: lawn bowls.
A 35 square kilometre dot of land amid the vast Pacific Ocean, between New Zealand and New Caledonia, Norfolk Island was initially settled as a prison colony in the early 1800s. It was subsequently abandoned and remained uninhabited until 1856, when the community of descendants of the HMS Bounty mutineers – having outgrown the Pitcairn Islands, another British territory in the Pacific – relocated to Norfolk. Many Norfolk Islanders today are descendants of these settlers.
