“Our isolated, but happy home.”
How chaplain George Hunn Nobbs described the Pitcairn-Norfolk community's new life on Norfolk Island, writing to the Bishop of Lincoln after the 1856 migration.
— George Hunn Nobbs, Norfolk Island
Source: George Hunn Nobbs, Autograph Letter to the Right Reverend Christopher Wordsworth, Bishop of Lincoln — University of Hawai'i at Manoa Library collection
More Proverbs from Norfolk Island
The wind from the east is the wind from home.
The easterly trade wind is remembered as a nostalgic reference to Pitcairn Island, the ancestral homeland of Norfolk Island's Pitcairn-descended community.
He'll see so good, he'll see round a corner.
A humorous exaggeration remembered as one of the sayings of islander Charles Henry Evans (born 1886), still recalled today under the nickname "Dar thing fe Chat's" — part of Norfolk Island's tradition of cherishing individually name-tagged sayings.
Whatever you can do today, do it well tomorrow.
A line from islander Archie Bigg's Norf'k poem "Morla el do", encouraging care and quality over rushed effort.
He makes my heart flip over.
A figurative Norf'k expression for falling in love, borrowing the nautical word "kepsais" (capsize) to picture a heart overturned by affection.
Stuck together like a fastboat to a whale.
Describes two people, usually lovers, who are inseparable — drawing on the whaling-era image of a small boat fastened tight to a captured whale.
That's a real fastboat story.
Norf'k for a comic, "whale-sized" exaggeration — used to gently tease someone for stretching the truth for a laugh, part of the island's dry, nautical humour.