The channel can still be seen at low tide, and the bent iron posts in the reef that mark its course remain buffeted by the surf. The Resolution only made one return voyage to Kingston, the hope invested in its building not matched by the commercial realities of maritime trade. The cliff shook and vibrated with each blast, but the Lone Pine remained standing. They used dynamite to blast a channel through the reef just in front of the Lone Pine so they could get the boat out. The Lone Pine was already a lone tree by that time. It was a conscious emulation of Captain Cook’s vessel in which he named the island, and also a statement about their ability to survive and prosper in this remote place. They felled their Norfolk Island Pine and other timbers and cured and shaped them for the boat, which was named The Resolution. One hundred and twenty years afterwards later generations of Islanders built a ship in the bay below the Lone Pine. They built a causeway out to the wreck to rescue its cargo, and the causeway ruins can still be seen when the tide is low, even from a distance of one kilometre away at the Lone Pine. It took a few years for the wreck to break up, slowly disintegrating under the pounding seas. Unfortunately, the colourful and complex system of signal flags could not save that ship from a storm, and the Sirius became stuck on the reef in rough seas. They had a ship named after a guiding star, HMS Sirius. The settlers always had trouble getting in across the reef and through the lagoon. It didn’t take long before they began to cut down the forests, and the slopes under Flagstaff changed from green too brown. It stood out against the greenery of the forests, as did their signal flags of yellow and blue. Eventually, the boats landed on the little beach that used to exist under Flagstaff, and after setting up camp they ran up their flag of red, white and blue. A bit like Captain Cook and the Comte de la Perouse had before them. When the British came in 1788 they sailed around and around the island for days, trying to find a place to land. The view from Lone Pine now looks straight across the lagoon to the pier and Flagstaff Hill. Today, the Lone Pine is the last survivor of the primeval forest in this part of the island. There were many more trees around then, on the cliff and out on Nepean Island, with the spore from the cones on the female trees taking root each season, sometimes in the spaces made when ancient trees fell in a storm. Birds roosted and nested in the Lone Pine’s branches, and generations of terns fertilised and nurtured the rocky soil around the Lone Pine’s base. Whales passed by year after year, but only the sound of the waves and the wind broke the silence of the bay. No one saw the Lone Pine in its youth, its firm young branches becoming greener and darker as they thrust towards the sky. They never returned, and the bay fell silent for the next 400 years. Then one day the villagers packed their canoes with their possessions and sailed out to sea. Children played on the beach, men made harpoons from turtle shell, women prepared taro and tended banana groves, dogs barked: the sounds of the village drifted across the bay to the young Lone Pine. The marae at the centre of the village was just behind the dunes, and the glow from fires in the evening danced across the pine forest and was reflected in the water lapping at the cliffs below Lone Pine.
Women harvested flax for making cloth from the nearby swamps, and men fished the waters. Canoes crisscrossed the lagoon or lay on the shore in front of the village. The Lone Pine was just a little sapling in about the year 1350, with its roots still exploring the cracks in the cliff and getting a foothold, when there was a little village across the bay.
The Lone Pine has stood here for some 650 years, withstanding constant salt-laden winds, storms and droughts, as well as a nearby rubbish tip in the 1970s and well-meaning attempts to grow successive trees under its spreading branches. One of Norfolk’s celebrity pines, Lone Pine is a venerable Norfolk Island Pine (Araucaria heterophylla) standing some 45 metres in height, perched on the rocky limestone cliff at Seta Setter’s Point or Point Hunter on the southern head to Emily Bay.
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