"The mood is one of abject depression," Lloyd told Australia's ABC Radio. "To think that it's taken us a long, long time to get over Janelle Patton's murder."
Patton's bloody end revived a past that locals thought the passage of time had erased.
Discovered by Captain Cook in 1774, Norfolk Island was picked by the British as an ideal dumping ground for the very worst of its criminals because escape to the mainland was nearly impossible. It became a byword for institutionalized brutality.
The island was described by historian Robert Hughes in his seminal work The Fatal Shore as "the worst place in the English-speaking world" during its time as a repository for the dregs of the Empire.
It was a place once known as the Isle of Despair, Devil's Island or Ocean Hell.
Hughes records that one prisoner, Joseph Mansbury, was flogged with a knotted leather whip known as a jack-o'-nine-tails no less than 2,000 times in 36 months. His skinned shoulder blades, a jailer recorded, poked out "like two polished horns."
Norfolk Island was considered such a hell-hole that some prisoners killed others in order to escape their misery on the gallows through their own death.
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