Above: The sole inhabitable island of the Islands of Refreshment, seen from space. Image: NASA
Ever heard of the Islands of Refreshment? It’s an odd little volcanic archipelago in the South Atlantic, 2400 km from anywhere, isolated as hell. Better known as Tristan de Cunha.
Once had a population of four but as a sovereign nation it was rather short-lived.
Bloke named Lambert arrived via whaling boat in 1811, claimed it for himself and set about building a seafarer’s highway-stop business. Not the sharpest idea. Hunger, theft, seal blubber and a surfeit of turnips didn’t help realise his ambitions. Or drowning in a fishing accident, so bad idea all round.
But not so different to what many others have tried, never been a shortage of people who won’t play by the rules.
Covid, for one, showed what plenty of folks think of vaccines, lockdowns, masks.
Mix these with anti-tax, anti-immigration and anti-constitutional sentiments and civil disobedience can easily morph into sovereign citizen stupidity. And not just by the sovereign citizens.
Take the Texans charged last month over plans to invade an island off Haiti, murder all the blokes, and make the women and kids sex slaves.
They’d made operational and logistic plans, boned up on military skills, learned the Creole lingo and drummed up recruits to assist the invasion.
Take blokes like Prince Leonard of Hutt River Province. Good fun until Covid stopped the tourists. Not in the same league as the wackos of Waco or Oklahoma City’s bombing but for something in between look no further than Dezi Freeman.
Take blokes like neo-Nazi Thomas Sewell, whose white supremacy and Jew hatred scares the socks off a government that doesn’t give a fig about the weekly anti-Semitic menacing behaviour of Hamas’ pro-Palestine useful idiots in Melbourne.
Take Pauline Hanson, in the gun over burka stunts highlighting the government’s failure to check Palestinian immigrants for Hamas terror links and secretly repatriating Aussies who joined the murderous ISIS in Syria.
Take even people like folk hero Ned Kelly, who was looking to set up a republic in northeast Victoria. He killed cops, sure, but was it murder or self-defence?
People forget Ned might have been the country’s greatest mass murderer had his efforts to derail a police train gone to plan. One man’s freedom fighter is easily another’s war criminal.
Curious that Dezi’s mate suggests he too might have believed he was acting in self-defence. With a mob of gun-toting cops banging on the door, you could almost understand that.
Don’t forget the loopy William Walker I read about in An Atlas of Extinct Countries. He was a diminutive, would-be despot who tried to set up three new countries, in Mexico, Nicaragua and Honduras.
Killed thousands when he threw corpses in the water supply. In the end, all he set up was his own firing squad.
A little less macabre, take even the good folks of Essendon West looking to change their municipal borders to become part of Aberfeldie, where property values are higher.
Sovereignty, so subjective, but I do like the mantra: If at first, you don’t secede …
But as our Lambert teaches, best we beware the turnips.
An abridged version of this story appeared in the Geelong Advertiser 9 December 2025
Further reading:
https://theappendix.net/issues/2014/7/the-king-of-the-islands-of-refreshment
