The women of Norfolk Island are an entrepreneurial bunch

It feels like I’m in a world created by JRR Tolkien as I walk under the dappled shade of a stand of magnificent fig trees, when Jill Menghetti appears, her Jack Russell by her side. We have arrived at The Homestead restaurant on 100 Acre Farm, the cattle property that her husband Kurt grew up on.

Jill was also raised in the country, on a farm near Kempsey on the north coast of New South Wales. “As a teenager, I had the Yin and Yang of being at my parents’ place or with my friends on the beach. Norfolk is not so dissimilar,” she explains.

This chef and mother of three was only 19 when she found herself living on Norfolk Island and the owner of a restaurant. “Now that I’m older and our daughter Siena is about to turn 18, I look back and think, how did that happen?” she says.

Running a restaurant on Norfolk Island, a small, volcanic outcrop in the South Pacific just two hours by air from Brisbane, is not without challenges, but the 40-year-old loves her island life. “This community has been a wonderful place to raise children,” she says. Many in the island’s younger generation have taken their turn at The Homestead, working in the kitchen or front of house. “Those kids become part of our family too,” she says.

To say Emily Ryves is accomplished is an understatement. A photographer, flight attendant, cheesemaker, skincare product maker and potter, it seems this 41-year-old can do anything. “I’ve always been one of those people with a million ideas,” she says.

A documentary about Holy Goat dairy near Castlemaine in Victoria inspired this mum of two to apply for a Churchill Fellowship. Soon Emily had her own herd of goats — the only ones on the island.

Today, she milks them daily to make The Hilli Goat skin cream and lives on the farm where she grew up, with her parents Alison and Steve, who run Cottage Pottery. She recently started trying her hand at the wheel. “It’s come easily to her. Her work is selling,” her dad says. “So, yes, she is very good at it.”

Margarita Sampson, who moved to the island at age five, says her earliest memories are of complete freedom — and meeting her partner, Stuart ‘Bugs’ Robertson. “My parents sent me outside to play and this little boy asked me if I could rollerskate,” the 55-year-old remembers. The artist, who works predominately in soft sculpture but also has a contemporary jewellery practice, says her pieces are heavily influenced by Norfolk Island.

“It was the ’70s, so Mum and Dad would drop us at the beach in the morning with an esky full of food. We just took care of ourselves,” she says. A regular Sculpture by the Sea finalist, Margarita says those days had a lasting impact. “I realised there was a whole underwater world that had different conditions and different organisms, and that just completely fascinated me.”

Fiona Anderson was in Sicily when she bought The Wanderer, a caravan turned mobile cocktail bar. “I saw what they do in Italy around aperitivo time and I thought it would be perfect for that golden hour on Norfolk,” she says. Fiona was born on the island and later spent 20 years in Brisbane raising her family, but the ties are strong. “Norfolk, for most of us, will be our ‘heart home’. You can go and live somewhere else, but this will always be the place you want to come back to.”

The Wanderer is often at the historic site in Kingston, where Maree Evans is the Norfolk Island Museum manager. As a child, she ran among these ruins and it forged a strong connection. “I fell in love with the history around me. And when I was eight years old, I did ‘work experience’, assisting with piecing together convict-era ceramics, such as chamber pots, like a frustrating jigsaw puzzle, and sorting through artefacts excavated from convict-era toilets. I absolutely fell in love with it!”

The 36-year-old also grows flowers — partly to make sure the island custom of weaving beautiful floral tributes for funerals is not lost — at Steels Point, where she lives with partner David and their children Octavian, 13, Tiberius, 11, and Alexander, five. “I always wanted to return home to Norfolk. It was like there was a little hole in my heart that I couldn’t fix,” she says.

Heart is also big at Prinke Eco Store. Walk up to the coffee machine and you will see the mug rack, where regulars have their own cups. Prinke, which means ‘extremely grateful’ in the local Norf’k language, was born from Claire and Sharyn Quintal’s zero-waste ambitions. “We’re here because we’re so passionate about the environment and the culture,” explains Claire.

The hospital’s medical superintendent Dr Jodie McCoy, 45, is the first Norfolk Islander to become a doctor. She is an eighth-generation descendant of Fletcher Christian, who led the mutiny on the Bounty in 1789. Jodie left the island in 1998 to go to university. She joined the air force and was deployed to Afghanistan before becoming an anaesthetist in 2016. She’s a keen fisher and takes out the family boat as often as she can.

Jodie’s job puts her at the centre of the island’s close-knit community. “How would I describe Norfolk? I would say that it is like a country town that’s surrounded by water,” she says, “and with a lovely community.”

And there it is again, that thing to which Norfolk owes its magic — ‘community’.