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Macquarie Island

Geographical Information:

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54º 37’S, 158º 54’E, in the South Pacific Ocean, 1500 km south-east of Tasmania

Area:

12 785 ha

Maximum Altitude:

433 m  (Mt Hamilton)

Physical Features:

Macquarie Island station ©

Macquarie Island, which has never been part of a continent, is geologically unusual.  It emerged above sea level between 90,000 and 300,000 years ago and is a rare example of uplifted oceanic crust formed about 27 million years ago at depths of between 2,000 and 4,000 metres.  An outstanding example of a major stage of the earth’s evolutionary history, it is perhaps the best preserved fragment of deep oceanic crust known above sea level.  It is therefore of great interest to scientists studying the phenomena on sea-floor spreading and continental drift.  Volcanic blocks (mainly pillow lavas), basaltic dykes, and various sediments compose about 80 percent of the land.

Geologically, Macquarie Island is very young: the oldest accurately dated rocks so far collected from there are between 9.7 million and 11.5 million years old.  The oldest accurately dated organic feature on the island is a peat deposit about 13,000 years old.  Macquarie Island emerged from the sea as a result of uplift created through interaction of the Indo-Australian and Pacific plates, a process that continues today all along the Macquarie Ridge, which the Macquarie Island Nature Reserve is the exposed crest of. The area is still seismically active, and large earthquakes occur frequently on Macquarie Ridge.  About once a year there is a tremor of magnitude 6.2 or greater on the Richter scale, and approximately once a decade a tremor of magnitude 7.2 or greater. 

Flora and Vegetation:

Tall tussock grassland provides the tallest vegetation cover on the island, which has no tress or tall shrubs.  This community is dominated by poa tussock, Macquarie Island cabbage and shield fern.  It occurs on the better drained sections of the coastal terraces, most of the steep coastal slopes and in sheltered well drained places.  Small burrowing birds like petrels and prions nest in the tussock areas because they provide cover from such predators as skuas.  Heavy grazing by rabbits destroyed some tall tussock grassland areas, but since the start of the rabbit eradication program, the tall tussock is regaining its former distribution.

Short grassland is the main habitat for rabbits on Macquarie Island and as a result has been greatly modified since their introduction, with several plants greatly reduced in or eradicated from many areas.  The short grassland covers areas of the raised beach terraces and the plateau that have a moderate to high water table and/or wind exposure.  It occurs on extensive areas of coastal slopes that were previously tall tussock grassland and will probably revert to tussock when the rabbits are completely gone. 

Feldmark is the most widespread vegetation formation, covering about 50 per cent of the island in the areas of the plateau region and mountain tops most exposed to wind.  In some areas the feldmark vegetation forms extensive terraces and may cover either the flat or the slope of the terrace, with gravel covering the alternative.  Several factors such as wind, moisture, slopes, slope and stability, and vegetation form these terraces which are several hundred metres long in places.

Mire formations cover most of the raised beach terraces of the northwestern and southeastern coastal regions and many valley bottoms in the plateau region.  In this formation the water is at or near the surface, the vegetation layer is quite thin and often floating on an unstable peat layer over six metres deep in places. In recent years a small helmet orchid has been discovered growing in the mire formation of Macquarie Island.  Although it is also found on some islands to the south of New Zealand this is the furthest south that any orchid has been recorded. 

Only two plants found on the island have conspicuous flowerheads.  The Macquarie Island cabbage grows up to one metre high in sheltered places and has large pale yellow flowerheads and masses of small hard wood fruit.  Because of its vitamin C content, sealers used to eat the stems and possibly the leaves to prevent scurvy.  The large sage green rosette herb Pleurophyllum hookeri has distinctive purple flowerheads in November – December, but does not flower every year.     

Birding Highlights:

Macquarie Island Shag ©

The highlight of a visit has to be the endemic Royal Penguin and the Macquarie Island shag. But time spent with the King, Gentoo and Rockhopper Penguins is time well spent.

Click here for a detailed Bird Checklist

Historical Features:

Penguin disgesters ©

Macquarie Island was one of the earliest European occupied sites in Australia: the first British settlement in Tasmania predates it by only seven years.  The occupation of Macquarie Island differed from the early settlements in mainland Australia in that it was intermittent and an initiative of private enterprise rather than of government.  Until comparatively recent times, the animal oil and sealskin industries were virtually the only reason for Macquarie’s having a history of human habitation.
 
It is possible that Polynesians visited or were wrecked on Macquarie Island in the distant past, but the first recorded sighting of the island was on 11 July 1810 by Captain Frederick Hasselborough on the brig Perseverance, out of Sydney on a sealing expedition.  He named his discovery Macquarie Island, after Governor Lachlan Macquarie of New South Wales, Australia.

Captain Hasselborough landed a party of eight sealers, it is not known precisely where, with nine months provisions and returned to Sydney for more salt, which was used in the curing of skins and supplies.  His men had found the island’s potential for sealing excellent “with sufficiency of skins to employ four to five gangs” and he intended to keep its location secret.  He failed.  Reportedly he was tricked into revealing the location during a night’s carousing in Sydney and by December 1810 three other parties of sealers had been landed.  By that time the location of Macquarie Island had also been published in the Sydney Gazette and the commercial exploitation was under way.

The sealing gangs were quick to establish bases on the island.  One early gang, led by a man named Rook, worked from a base at Sandy Bay, another established at the Isthmus and set up tryworks suggesting that oil from elephant seals was also exploited right from the start.  A typical early cargo from Macquarie Island, landed in Sydney on May 1811 from the Aurora, consisted of 60 tons of seal oil and 30,000 sealskins. 

By 1816 at least four sealing gangs had bases on the island.  Underwood maintained two stations, one at North Head and the other at Sandy Bay and in 1820 an operation in Lusitania Bay was run by a man named Raine, from Tasmania. 

The exploitation of Macquarie Island fur seals was quickly devastating, the skins were easier to obtain than oil, took up less space in the boats and were more valuable.  The original market for fur seal pelts was China, but after 1815 the British developed a tanning method that allowed the coarse outer hairs to be extracted and exposed the second layer of fur beneath.  Then Britain became the main market.  The pelts were made into various kinds of clothing, including men’s hats.

It has been estimated that there were between 200,000 and 400,000 fur seals on Macquarie Island when sealing began, and in the first eighteen months after the island’s discovery at least 120,000 skins were taken.  Both the number of fur seals on the island and the consequent ease with which they could be killed are graphically suggested by an entry in the log of the Mary and Sally, which made a sealing voyage to Macquarie Island in 1813.  “At 11am the boat was sent to shore to look for seal.  At 2pm the boat returned with 256 skins and was hoisted in”.

The effect of such unrelenting slaughter was quickly obvious.  As early as 1815 the Sydney Gazette was suggesting that Macquarie Island was no longer profitable for sealers and in 1821 just 10 years after the island’s discovery, only four fur seal skins were obtained in a one-year period.  In total as many as 193,000 fur seal skins were taken, according to one scientific estimate, and possibly one species of fur seal was eradicated entirely from the island.

After devastating the fur seal population sealers turned their full attention to elephant seals, whose blubber contained oil that could be used as a fuel for lighting, lubricant for iron machinery and in tanning and rope manufacture. By 1826 the production of elephant seal oil seems to have been the only remaining commercial activity. Scientists have calculated that there were between 93,000 and 110,000 elephant seals on Macquarie Island, a population reduced by 70 percent within 20 years.

Consequently, between 1830 and 1874 only three sealing ships called at Macquarie Island.  One of them, the Lord Nelson was wrecked at Hasselborough Bay’s western end in 1838, with the survivors waiting two years to be rescued.  In 1851 the North End was worked where “over one dozen old houses and a great quantity of bones and hoops buried here; there are tri-pots set about in different places; there are two graves on the flat”. There were also several visits from non-sealing ships during this time, but between 1860 and 1873 there were no recorded ship visits to Macquarie Island.

Sealing resumed in 1873 and between then and 1889 some 30 ships visited the island.  An 1873 visitor was the Sarah Pile, whose crew slaughtered some seals and introduced the weka, a flightless bird from New Zealand to the island as a food source.  Rabbits were also released on Macquarie Island in the 1870s for the same reason.  Feral cats had been recorded on the island as early as 1820 and mice and ship rats by the 1890s. The last cats were eradicated in 2002.

In 1902 a New Zealander named Joseph Hatch, who had begun a sealing operation on the island in 1890 secured exclusive sealing rights to Macquarie Island.  His ships made 75 voyages there between 1890 and 1919.  He did not take as much oil during his long association with the island as earlier exploiters had done, but his operations left some of the most visible remains there, notably at the Isthmus.  He began in 1889 at Lusitania Bay where he landed the first steam digester plant to begin exploiting the King Penguin population.  This attempt failed because of the rapid reduction in penguin numbers and difficulties with the oil fermenting due to its high blood content.  Subsequently, Hatch moved his Macquarie Island headquarters to The Nuggets and introduced more steam digester plants to exploit the Royal Penguins there.  Other plants were later installed at the Isthmus, Hurd Point and Hasselborough Bay.

But even with those technical innovations, Macquarie Island was not always continuously occupied.  Hatch’s men did not work the 1901 season, but the following year Hatch was granted a sole occupational license to the island and sealing recommenced.

In the late nineteenth century, as seal numbers dwindled on the more accessible beaches, the production of oil from penguins, an industry believed to have been unique to Macquarie Island, became more important than sealing.  Penguin oil was not as valuable as seal oil, but it had the advantage that it could be based on a few large colonies.  By 1894 the King Penguin colony at Lusitania Bay was so devastated that it ceased to be commercially viable.

The Royal Penguins at The Nuggets then became the focus of the oil industry. At their peak, around 1905 the plant could process 2000 penguins at one time. Each penguin yielded about half a litre of oil.

Serious activity of a different kind reached Macquarie Island in 1911 with arrival of Douglas Mawson’s Australasian Antarctic Expedition which found on the island the shipwrecked crew of the Clyde and half a dozen sealers who were prepared to defend their sealing rights against what they thought was an opposition sealing expedition. Mawson loved the island and on his return to Australia he began a campaign to stop oiling and to have it made a wildlife sanctuary.  World War One reduced the impetus, but after the war petroleum products were increasingly available for use making inroads into the animal oil market. In 1919 oil production on the island stopped, the following year the Tasmanian Government revoked Hatch’s license and the commercial exploitation of Macquarie Island was over. 

In the 109 years there were 207 recorded visits by sealers to Macquarie Island and during the same period several shore stations were established and at least nine ships wrecked on the island. The sealers lives were hard, their housing primitive.  A visitor in 1820 described the head man’s hut at Sandy Bay as “20 feet long by 10 feet broad, inside it was lined with skins of seals, the outside was covered with a kind of grass which grows on the island. At one end there was a small hearth and a lamp was always kept alight. Beside the hearth was a bedstead. Provisions were stored at the other end of the hut. Windows were bladder covered holes.”

Recent archaeological work has revealed that more remains of sealing gangs’ occupation of Macquarie Island have survived than was expected, landslides having covered and therefore protected a number of sites. Some traces of sealers huts remain and digesters and other artefacts from sealing days have also survived and may be inspected at the Isthmus by visitors. They are, however, comparatively late, dating only from the time of Hatch’s operations (1890-1919).  An early tussock peat walled hut thought to date from the 1820’s was recently uncovered at the tryworks site at Hurd Point. 

Scientific Visitors
The first scientific investigation of Macquarie Island was the Russian expedition led by Bellinghausen, which visited the island in 1820 and made a small collection of the flora and fauna.  Scientific interest in Macquarie Island remained slight for a long time.  An American expedition led by Charles Wilkes collected some specimens in 1840, but they were later lost.

The first systematic collections and studies began when J H Scott, Professor of Anatomy and Physiology at the University of Otago, New Zealand spent some days on the island in 1883.  Then Augustus Hamilton, later Director of the Colonial Museum in Wellington, New Zealand made a short visit in 1894.  He and his son, Harold, a later scientific visitor are commemorated in the name of the island’s highest point, Mt. Hamilton.

Joseph Burton sailed to Macquarie Island on the Gratitude in 1896 and spent 3 l/2 years working on the “dreadfully dreary” islands with oiling parties and collecting in his spare time. 

Expeditions visited Macquarie Island more frequently as Antarctic exploration became more common.  Captain Robert Falcon Scott collected a small number of specimens in 1901, a bottle of liqueur had to change hands before the collecting party was allowed to land.  Another British polar expedition led by Sir Ernest Shackleton, called at the island in 1909 “for the purpose of making zoological and geological collections and also of observing whether any Antarctic birds or penguins migrated there in the winter months.”  Among other things, Shackleton’s landing party found an Irish seaman named William McKibbin, who in 1907 elected to stay on the island alone in the hope of collecting enough oil to enable him to buy a boat.  McKibbin refused the expedition’s offer of a passage back to civilization, but arrived at Invercargill, New Zealand on the Hinemoa late the following year.

The first scientific station on the island was established in 1911 by Douglas (later Sir Douglas) Mawson and maintained until 1914, the year Mawson was knighted.  It made studies of the island’s botany, zoology, meteorology and geology, as well as magnetic observations and the first detailed maps of the island.  The Macquarie Island party also established a radio link between Australia and Mawson’s main group at Commonwealth Bay, the first such radio link with Antarctica.  To do so they used a sealers flying fox to haul masts, aerials and timber up the cliff at Aerial Cove and constructed a transmission hut and an engine room and set up an aerial.  The party also built a headquarters, George V Villa, at the northern end of the Isthmus below Wireless Hill.

During the years 1913 to 1915 the meterological observations begun by Mawson’s party were continued by the Commonwealth Meterological Expedition under Power (1913-14) and Tullock (1914-15).  Sir Ernest Shackleton in the Aurora visited Macquarie Island again in 1917 and in 1930 Mawson aboard Discovery was back with the British, Australian, New Zealand Antarctic Research Expedition.

The first permanent scientific station was established on the island by the Australian Government in 1948.  The Australian National Antarctic Research Expedition (ANARE) Station has been operating ever since.

Map:

Further Reading:

• Cumpston, T S Macquarie Island, Antarctic Division, Department of External Affairs Australia, 1968.
• De La Mare, A J Joseph Hatch and the Loss of the Kakanui, Invercargill.
• Selkirk, P M et al Sub Antarctic Macquarie Island, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1990.
• Shirihai Hadoram  A Complete Guide to Antarctic Wildlife.  Alula Press Oy,  Finland 2002.

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