On an island half the size of Gozo, with fewer than 2,000 inhabitants, it is not surprising that news of a murder case would come as a huge shock, especially when it was the first case in 150 years.
When this happened on Norfolk Island, off the east coast of Australia, on 31 March 2002, police investigations included a mass fingerprinting programme for the entire population, as well as the 680 tourists who were on the island at the time. It was very well-attended by the residents who were hoping that the murderer was an outsider.
The victim was 29-year-old Janelle Patton, an Australian restaurant manageress who was brutally murdered, wrapped in plastic and dumped by a waterfall.
The Norfolk islanders just recently prepared for their first murder trial as Glenn McNeill, a 28-year-old New Zealand chef, was arraigned in court accused of killing Ms Patton.
Among the witnesses in the trial was a certain Greg Magri, a friend of the victim during her stay on the island. Speaking about the trial, international media agencies quoted him as saying that “it’s the biggest thing that has ever gone through the Norfolk Island courts, and it’s the biggest thing we hope ever goes through”.
Greg is one of four siblings born to Maltese emigrant Peter Magri, who happens to have married a woman who is in fact a descendant of the mutineers of the British warship HMS Bounty. About a third of the Norfolk Islanders are descendants of the Bounty mutineers, who settled there in 1856 after leaving Pitcairn, another island in the southern Pacific Ocean, which was getting over-populated.
The Malta Independent got in touch with the Magri family, now in its fourth generation on Australian territory.
Mr Peter Magri was clearly overwhelmed when I contacted him by telephone. He left for Melbourne with his parents when Malta was suffering the aftermath of the Second World War. “It was 1951 and I was a 10-year-old kid,” he told me.
When I asked whether I could speak to him in Maltese, he said that unfortunately he’s forgotten the language, “but I’m very proud to be Maltese, I’ve been back (to Malta) twice and I hope to visit again sometime,” he enthused.
Maltese tourists always want to visit “Sliema” – Mr Magri’s home on Norfolk Island.
He explains that the tightly-knit community of the island has a cultural group where various countries are represented by the emigrants. During activities of the group, Mr Magri proudly carries his little Maltese flag, together with another islander having Maltese connections.
Although a few other residents on the island have links with Malta, with surnames like Borg and Scerri, Mr Magri told me that his is the only family on Norfolk Island which has direct Maltese ancestry. All of his four children and six grandchildren also live on the island, although they were born in Melbourne for medical reasons.
Following his marriage to Patricia, whom he met on the island while on holiday, Mr Magri lived in Melbourne for about five years, but has permanently resided on the south Pacific island for the past 34 years. Jenny, his second wife, has been working as a medical doctor on Norfolk Island for 30 years.
Mr Magri said that they receive a satellite transmission of the news bulletin from Malta once a week, but he regretfully told me that he only follows the pictures since the broadcast is always in Maltese.
He recalled that his family was from Spinola in St Julian’s and his father, Alfred Magri, was a mineral collector. He told me that his father visited Malta on several occasions and passed away here when he visited in 1989 specifically to donate part of his collection to a priest, whose name Mr Magri couldn’t recall.
Before the arrival of the Bounty mutineers, Norfolk Island was a former convict settlement which the British government decided to colonise to prevent it from falling into the hands of France in 1788, a mere 14 years after the first European – Captain James Cook – is believed to have sighted the island.