Honoring Nature

New Islanders feel blessed with a mild climate and

adequate rains. They value their time to
play, rest and simply 'be' withe nature.
And they are aware of its fragility.

The women-convicts could only thank nature for their fortune.

Since the women far outnumbered the men (and female energy was further strengthened by he wreck of the Gloster in 1803) Nature was suddenly seen as a redeemer, and old women recounted stories of Nature-worship practices, long suppressed by the Catholic church and others as witchcraft or simple paganism. Captain Hayes and Cecelia O'hassett (along with the nature of sexual attraction) persuaded most of the reluctant guards and ships' crew to go along with a new form of civilization being offered by the women. Captain Hayes' reasoning was also influenced by the currently-in-vogue Age of Enlightenment.

It became very important to honor nature in religious practices, government, land use, and what we now generally call sustainability.

Thanks to Recent Followers!

This blog will continue to show many paintings and drawings
I've done of the island, like this one titled "The yellow Island".
Prints of these will be available soon.

Some followers have found New Island!

I hope this 'place', which is also my art, will continue to entertain you and that you'll tell your friends about it!

The story of New Island will continue on this blog. Also there will be a way for anyone to become a New Islander in real life. You'll be able to become a resident-being, acquire a building site, select or design your own house, retreat, film studio, ashram, or what-have-you for your site; or even create your own tribe. I'll announce these opportunities when they are ready!

By the Way, check out the Putney Times (current events, gossip) and the Cool Stuff from New Island blogs. They are part of this whole thing.

(Sorry about the link problem of getting directly to the New Island blog from the Putney Times or Cool Stuff blogs. I'm working to get that fixed.)

Stay tuned and thanks again!

New Island and Nature

This is the landscape that greeted the first settlers

on the island: quiet and green and
literally buzzing with the promise
of redemption.

Nature had an early influence...

Imagine you are camping out forever on a completely unknown island far away from home with only a few farming and construction tools, some seeds, chickens and pigs and maybe a few 'how-to' books circa 1799.

Also imagine you are likely illiterate (someone had to read the how-to books to you) and had been living a life of desperate poverty before being exiled off the edge of the known world by the law. You are also Irish or English and female with no rights at all as you were thrown into a floating prison for weeks on end with other rowdy, angry and often diseased shipmates before you were dumped here in a storm that you are amazed you survived!

The shipwreck had leveled the playing field a bit, and everyone, from the captain on down, has pitched in to salvage food and supplies and to set up a camp. A women-only compound has been established to hopefully ward off horny guards and sailors, and there you have perhaps your first sit-down meal and even a bit of grog to drink. As you and your mates talk you all acquire a giddy sense that the storm (Nature) may have freed you!

Finally exhausted, you sleep among sand dunes out of the wind, and you are still cold and wet, but the next day the sun comes up warm, the wind has died, and you and your mates do something completely unheard of: without a word on some mysterious cue, you all throw off your grimy wet clothes and enjoy the warm sun for the first time! (Well, there is a reason: your clothes are filthy from the voyage, and you've found a small stream in which to wash them, and yourselves...) But you can't help but sense a renewal here!

You and your mates are allowed to explore without a guard escort. (Where could you escape to anyway?) Away from the camp, you find no sign of hostile natives (luckily) but once inland from the roar of the surf, you are amazed at how quiet the place is. With few trees, the land is silent save for the twittering of some birds; and then you hear that hum... It seems to emanate from nowhere and everywhere; it has no audible source. It is pleasing, though, and a deeply soothing sound like the buzz of a million bees.

The older women say the hum is the Goddess who has brought the storm, the warm sun and this island to take care of us all; and you think there might be something to this idea. Indeed, nearly everyone here has realized that nature can be all-powerful and godlike, yet quite different from the 'traditional' god back home, the god invoked by the English churches and courts to help get rid of you!

Yes, you are a female convict that was being 'transported' to Australia from England to serve a seven year sentence of hard labor, and you got lucky!

New Island's People Today

"We're all a bit mad, you know...", said the Cheshire Cat in
Alice in Wonderland.

New Islanders tend to be free-spirited, freethinking, a bit adventurous and at ease with themselves. They love nature, are very aware of their own limited resources, and have embraced sustainability from experience. Indeed, the influence of nature has been pervasive here, from the Otter visits in the 1800's, to the 'Om'-like and still- mysterious "buzz" that can be heard in the island's outback.

Most islanders believe in a kindly God, the Way of the Goddess, and in a benevolent Universe. They feel they are meant to be here and they do their best to care for one another. Since the first settlers were overwhelmingly women (and charismatic, adventurous and a bit scurrilous) a matriarchal society, complete with Goddess-oriented religious practices became the status quo.

Of course without the help of the Russian Empire beginning in 1821, these early New Islanders would have remained an extremely primitive nation of impoverished Gaelic farmers. Though Russia extracted great quantities of whales, seals, fish, timber, and the local (sacred) otters, their presence was an unintended benefit. The Russians only wanted to extract raw materials, then later to secure an outpost from which to watch (and pester) the Americans and Australians. They did all this with almost no contact with the islanders other than to demand farm-produce quotas from them, but usually with an offered carrot in return.

This they accomplished by importing supplies like cookware, nails, seeds, tools, cloth, and some goodies like chocolate, coffee, tea and vodka. Beginning in the early 20th Century, the Soviet Navy and later the KGB enjoyed huge budgets with which they built concrete roads, hydroelectric dams, streets, railways, medical centers and other infrastructure to modernize the island.

In the Russian commanders' eyes, the islanders tended to be a bit spacey, and therefore unpredictable (and potentially dangerous) but yet proved themselves to be willing to fulfill the quotas and were a fierce guerrilla force in defending the island's coasts. So the standard procedure was to let them alone: islanders ran their own towns, schools, cultural affairs, police and governing. In 1992, the Russians graciously left all the infrastructure intact, except the airport control tower and military installations.

Next: more on New Island's culture

What New Island is About...

It's about loving yourself, being yourself
and maybe being a little crazy too.

I've been painting imaginary places for many years, and most of them seem to be coming from New Island. This place celebrates the sense of "other", an island of the mind that can be whatever you want it to be. I'm a wanderer there. I poke around, visit friends, make pictures of the landscape (and my friends) . I'm probably being a little crazy here but I can't not do it.

I would love for this to be a place other people could go to. I 've built it with many paintings, drawings, maps and artifacts such as tickets, postage stamps, currency, a flag and coat-of-arms and documents such as deeds and plat maps. Like any small nation, New Island has a history and a culture, but it sits out there isolated and largely unknown. It is still the last nearly-unknown island waiting to be discovered!

Until maybe now.

The previous posts gave a brief historical overview. Future posts will talk about the island now, and also how anyone can be a resident and own a building site there.

The Elders Take the Grand Tour

The Elders started their journey out of Victoria Harbor aboard this ship.

The SS Charles Ames and New Ireland were handed over to
the islanders as part of the 1992 Independence package.
Both ships were used to ferry Russian higher-up bureaucrats
and cargo to the island in the 1960s and '70s.
These now-restored vessels connect Fremantle Australia with
New Island's ports of Victoria Harbor and Putney.

New Islanders had no idea of how the world worked in 1992. They received very little news of outside events such as the world wars, or that there was a much bigger world out there with its huge cities, mass-market cultures, religions, space travel and the Internet. The Russians helped modernize New Island with dams, roads, railways, architecture and medical care, but restricted newspapers and radios and never introduced television!

The island's Elders knew there was definitely something out there. Their information came in mostly via short-wave radio and from a few old friends and contacts in Australia, who never forgot the island during its "off the map" years.

So they knew they had to take a tour.

In November 1992, a group of 9 Elders toured 30 countries in North America and Europe, with a stop in Japan on the way home. They took the steamer Charles Ames to Fremantle where their Australian friends met them and gave them a quick tutorial on international travel, then helped them reserve tickets and car-rental reservations. (Only one of the group, Clyde MacEvoy, could drive!)

They then flew to Melbourne, then on to Los Angeles, and stopped in Chicago, rented a van and drove out into the suburbs. There was no real plan, it just seemed the thing to do. After aimless driving and stopping for fast food, they stayed at a Ramada in Barrington, rented two rooms and watched TV most of the night, while getting a bit high from what they found in the mini-bar.

They traveled more as anonymous tourists than delegates from an emerging nation, and really didn't want to advertise their presence. They saw no heads-of-state, but they did wander into randomly-chosen corporate headquarters buildings in the area, attracted by the opulence. When challenged by security, they explained they were on a fact-finding tour from New Island, and after some rude questions in small rooms, they were brusquely escorted off the grounds...

By luck they found their way back to O'hare airport and the van rental agency in time to catch their plane to Ireland, then London. They enjoyed London more than Chicago, and from there (London) they took trains across Europe to St. Petersburg and Kiev, then a long flight to Tokyo, then more train rides to Osaka, and all the way to Kagoshima. Then from Japan they flew on to Melbourne and finally to Perth-Fremantel, and the boat back home.

They were exhausted, but they learned a lot of what they did not want to see on New Island.

New Island Gains its Independence!

A portion of the first comprehensive

map of New Island, copied from the
original Russian Survey map of 1912,
and redrawn in English.

In 1992, when the Soviet Union collapsed, the newly formed Russian Federation found itself the owner of the unacknowledged island. It no longer had strategic value and was expensive to maintain as a colony, so Russia arranged a sale to the island Elders. For a 20-year promissory quota of fish and wool, plus an undisclosed amount of gold, the islanders bought their independence! ( The gold was believed to have been acquired from the wreck of the Spanish merchantman Juan Alvarez in 1830, and hoarded in a cave.)

On April 13, the island's name was officially changed to The Commonwealth of New Island, and the celebrations lasted for days.

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New Island's Elders had long ruled the towns and settlements not directly under Russian administration. They used local governing practices more or less laid down by Cecelia, Captain Hayes, Roger Putney and others, but were unprepared to set up a nationwide government, let alone interact with the outside world as a sovereign state!