“It’s not in the car, either,” I said.

I felt like crying. The unthinkable had happened. The thing that every true-blue tourist fears the most. I had lost my camera. Worse than that: I’d lost the film that was inside the camera. The almost full film with pictures of me posing dramatically over Blood Bridge, of a cow inspecting the hired car, of the Pacific-lagoon-blue Anson Bay…. Forget the camera, I wanted my treasures back.

“Where did you last see it?” my husband interrogated over and over.

“It was definitely at the picnic site with us,” I sulked. “The green hill where we… you know.”

He knew well enough. And no, it wasn’t what you think. We hadn’t got amorous at the picnic spot. We’d had an argument. Only something as mundane and as hurtful could make me storm off without checking the area for forgotten belongings.

“It’s not at the picnic site,” he announced ten minutes later. Everything on Norfolk Island is a ten-minute drive away. “Perhaps in the hotel room? Let’s see the Sound and Light Show and worry about the camera later.”

The Sound and Light Show was a realistic depiction of the island’s past as a penal colony. The performance starred the local shoe shop assistant and the waiter who’d served us the previous night’s dinner. It was almost impossible to accept that the beautiful island - with its delicious summer climate, green hills covered with pines that resembled gigantic Christmas trees - could once have been the gory “Hell Hole of the Pacific”, where people who’d been shipped there for stealing a loaf of bread, would receive 20 cut-to-the-bone lashes for missing the curfew.

And so, see the Sound and Light Show we did. But when we returned to the hotel, the camera was not in our room.

“Turn on the radio,” advised the receptionist. “They advertise found items on the air.”

Somewhat sceptically, we listened to a schedule of church services for the weekend, a description of a found watch and missing sunglasses, birthday wishes to every inhabitant by name and the fact that the beach carnival would be cancelled this year.

That was Norfolk Island in a nutshell: population two thousand, four policemen, zero crime. It’s where cows have the right of way on the entire road network (170km of road). Where car rental formalities at the airport boil down to: “here are the keys, this is your car, drop by the office sometime before you leave to complete the paperwork and pay”. Where you can nip out of the airport once you’ve checked in and drive back to town to buy a last-minute souvenir (chocolate coffee beans in our case). Where everybody knows everybody else and where the ghosts of the 19th century convicts haunt the quaint cream buildings of coastal Kensington.

It’s a place where you can scuba dive with fish so friendly that they accompany you on your dive, where you can snorkel in lagoons and horse ride through pine forests.

It’s where your camera is picked up at the picnic spot where you left it and handed in at the nearest building.

“Yes, we have a camera here,” said the angel on the other end of the phone line. “When would you like to pick it up?”

“Um, well, you see,” I mumbled. “The thing is, my husband locked the keys inside the car...“

“Not a problem, we’ll bring the camera to your hotel in a minute. Oh, and by the way, we never lock our cars on Norfolk Island.”