The Sunday Times Magazine • 23company on the island. Wallace and his
father are among the “squidionnaire” fish
barons who have reaped the rewards of the
maritime boom. “This was not a wealthy
place in the late 1970s,” he says. “People
were moving away from the islands.”
Wallace is Argentine on his mother’s side
— she had flown over to the Falklands in
the 1970s, just after Argentina’s military
coup of 1976. Flights had opened between
the two countries in 1972 and the seeds of a
relationship were planted, encouraged by a
British government that was quietly hoping
to offload this distant imperial holdover,
which was viewed as being more trouble
than it was worth. This all fell apart in 1976,is that there’s simply no pro-Argentina
sentiment at all. None. One might hear the
occasional rumbling about greater autonomy
from Britain and “paying our own way”, but
absolutely nobody in the Falklands, left,
right or centre, old or young, of British,
Chilean or even Argentine origin, has the
slightest interest in being occupied by their
closest neighbour. In a 2013 referendum on
the subject all but three voters elected to
remain a self-governing British overseas
territory. (No one seems to know who
exactly the three renegades were.)
The war and subsequent prosperity has
also made the Falklands more independent
from Britain and assertive about its own
identity and self-government. They still
have red phone boxes and Bourbon biscuits
and EastEnders on the telly (piped in on
delay via the British Forces Broadcasting
Service), but laws are now made locally by
an elected assembly of eight Falklanders.
The British governor, who still lives in a
leafy colonial mansion in Stanley, is
restricted to making decisions on defence
and foreign affairs, the two areas in which
the UK retains control as part of its overall
sovereignty (and at a cost to the taxpayer
of more than £60 million a year). He also
oversees the Queen’s birthday parade, a
bicorn-hat-and-feathers affair that harks
back to the Falklands’ colonial past.
“The defence that the UK continues
to provide is fundamental to our current
success,” Wallace says. “It’s not a woke
or fashionable thing to say the UK has
some kind of parental role, but they
really do. And I think it’s fine, we have
a modern relationship.”
For all its progress, life on the Falklands
isn’t exactly normal. The islands lie in
chilly isolation, 300 miles off the coast of
Argentina, 8,000 miles from the UK and
just below the Roaring Forties, which make
it among the windier places on earth.
Supply chain challenges and inhospitable
soil make for somewhat exotic pricing. In
West Store, Stanley’s supermarket, a melon
can cost as much as nine Falkland pounds
(the same as British pounds but with
pictures of penguins). I found a single
mushroom on sale for £1.50 and a pack of
Bran Flakes for an alarming £6. Booze and
fuel are hardly taxed, though, so a litre of
diesel is less than half what it costs in the
UK and a good bottle of red sets you back
only £7. “There’s nowhere cheaper on the
planet to drink and drive,” says one local,
half-jokingly. As far as I can tell there are no
hard drugs on the island at all, though one
well-lubricated barfly informs me quietly
that one can source an eighth of cannabis for
a hefty £110, “if you really know who to ask”.
Despite the hundreds of cows you see
chomping on tussock grass, there is currently
no dairy on the island (they’re all beef cows)
and Falklanders recently went three weeks
without milk during a delivery snarl.
Islanders like to chuckle resiliently atMost Falklanders look at Britain
today, with its Brexit animosities
and cost-of-living crisis, and
consider themselves fortunate
Locals are proud of their independence from the motherland, but
pubs and red phone boxes attest to a strong sense of BritishnessThe bronze bust of Margaret
Thatcher erected in Stanley in
2015, two years after her deathRockhopper penguins are
among many species thriving
amid the rich fishing groundswhen the military junta seized power in
Argentina and immediately ratcheted
up tensions over the Falklands, placing
themselves on a path to war with Britain.
Amid economic turmoil at home the
junta leader, General Galtieri, launched an
amphibious assault that captured the
islands on April 2, 1982. To the surprise
of the Argentinians the British response
was swift and decisive: within days a naval
task force of 127 ships was powering its
way towards the South Atlantic.
Despite his own ancestry, Wallace is
appalled by Argentine behaviour towards
the Falklands, then and now. One thing
that’s immediately apparent in the FalklandsreX, georgina strange for the sunday times magazine, getty images ➤