Once hell for man, but heaven for wildlife, four remote and rugged subantarctic islands have a new incarnation as ecotourism destinations.
When a boat anchors off Macquarie Island, a speck of Australian territory 1500km south-east of Tasmania in the Southern Ocean, it is quickly surrounded by king penguins. Unable to repress their curiosity, battalions of penguins swim out from nesting colonies on the island, braying as they splash about the boats. The welcoming party is as unexpected as it is beguiling.
Map: Craig Molyneux
The subantarctic islands of Australia and New Zealand are the latest hot spot on the ecotourism map. Just a few hundred tourists on fewer than a dozen expeditions have visited these remote islands in summer since Antarctic tour operators began adding them to itineraries in the early 1990s. Rodney Russ, whose New Zealand-based company Heritage Expeditions has pioneered ecotourism in the subantarctic islands, sums up what they have to offer: “There are few places with such a rich biodiversity that is so captivating. Add the wildlife to a fascinating human history and jaw-dropping scenery, and you’ve got a destination with great appeal.’’
Because of the environmental fragility of the largely unpopulated islands, numbers and movements of visitors are tightly restricted. Part of the islands’ appeal is their ambience of solitude – a wilderness experience so uncluttered that, typically, an expedition will not even see another boat.
A visit to these World Heritage-listed islands is challenging in ways that add an element of adventure. Four seasons in one day are not unusual on Macquarie Island and the New Zealand islands of Auckland, The Snares and Campbell. A sunny morning may be rudely interrupted within minutes by gale-force winds aptly called the Roaring Forties and Furious Fifties. Expedition schedules are flexible, so plans can be rearranged in response to fickle weather to ensure visitors do not miss out on the main attractions. The New Zealand nomination for World Heritage listing of its islands states: “There are days when these islands are enveloped in an unsurpassed bleakness, and days of bright-blue clarity when they are the most invigorating and wild places on Earth.’’
The islands are among the world’s wildest and most isolated places, the setting for extraordinary tales of human resilience, where shipwrecked sailors survived in unimaginably hostile conditions. They are home to a weird and wonderful assortment of ancient plants and to countless seabirds, seals and other animals that show no fear of people.
Macquarie Island
A male elephant seal, all 3000kg of it, rears up on its tail with surprising agility, bellowing as it whacks its neck against another seal rising to meet the challenge. A few metres away, a royal penguin emerges from the sea to disgorge semi-digested squid to its fluffy chick. Above, a snow-white antarctic tern hovers, red bill glistening in the sun.
Tourists wade ashore from a zodiac and sit on the gravelly shore of Macquarie Island’s Sandy Bay, staring in awe at the wealth of wildlife – thousands of seabirds and seals call this small bay home in summer. They are surrounded by king penguins peering intently at them, pecking gently at their boots. It’s mutual admiration writ large, this meeting of humans and birds.
It was not always so. Scattered around the island are rusting steam digesters, which processed penguins that were once butchered for their oil: 225 litres were obtained from 150,000 birds in one three-month season in the 1910s. About 200,000 fur seals were slaughtered here for skins and oil, mostly in the 19th century. Animal populations have recovered and Macquarie Island these days rivals the Galápagos archipelago on the must-see list for wildlife enthusiasts.
It is certainly penguin heaven. Two million royal penguins nest on Macquarie Island, as do 200,000 king penguins and smaller numbers of gentoo and rockhopper penguins. The king penguin colony at Sandy Bay is as chaotic as it is smelly. Birds returning from the sea with food scamper about in search of partners and chicks in a seething mass of lookalikes. Here and there, a penguin aggressively fends off a giant petrel or skua; these predatory seabirds constantly probe the colony’s edges in search of stray chicks and unguarded eggs.
Referring to the harsh environs of Macquarie Island, Captain James Douglas of the Mariner in 1822 declared that “nothing could warrant any civilised creature living in such a spot’’. But perceptions change with time; Australian Antarctic explorer Douglas Mawson described the island almost a century later as “one of the wonder spots of the world’’. In 1997, Macquarie Island was listed as a World Heritage area, its attributes including “outstanding examples representing major stages of Earth’s history’’ and “exceptional natural beauty”.
The island has one of the planet’s most stable climates; temperatures rarely stray from a minimum of 3.3˚ Celsius to a maximum of 7.2. Macquarie is unique among subantarctic islands as the only one of oceanic tectonic origin. It was formed by the upthrust of a plate 6km below the ocean floor 700,000 years ago, exposing rocks from Earth’s mantle above sea level. The island is unstable and frequently experiences earthquakes of sufficient magnitude to destroy cities.
Macquarie is also the only permanently populated subantarctic island owned by Australia or New Zealand. Scientists and support staff at the small Australian National Antarctic Research Expeditions (ANARE) base at Buckles Bay are happy to welcome tourists, taking them on guided tours of the base.
Auckland Islands
Sheer cliffs rise dramatically up to 400m above a roiling sea along the western shores of Auckland Island, main island of the Auckland archipelago. In her account of the tribulations of castaways there, Joan Druett describes Auckland as a “godforsaken island at the edge of the world”. Sailors referred to one sector of coast as the Jaws of Hell. The Grafton and the Invercauld, two of many ships wrecked on Auckland, ran aground at opposite ends of the island in 1864. While on the island at the same time, neither the five Grafton survivors nor the 19 men from the Invercauld were aware of the other group, separated by 30km of mountains and thick bush.
How the castaways coped with their misfortune is an extraordinary tale of the pitfalls and strengths of the human character. Thanks to the resourcefulness of French seaman Francois Raynal, who devised ways of making everything from soap to iron tools with the barest essentials, the Grafton castaways held out for 18 months before three sailed 450km to New Zealand – through some of the world’s roughest seas in a tiny boat – and returned in a rescue vessel for the other two. By contrast, 16 of the 19 Invercauld castaways were dead within five months, with some resorting to cannibalism. The three survivors were found by accident a few months later.
So many vessels were wrecked on the Auckland Islands that shipping authorities established caches of supplies for castaways and undertook twice-yearly expeditions to search for them.
The islands have the distinction of being the shortest-lived British colony. The whaler Charles Enderby was authorised by London to establish a colony at Port Ross in 1849, with the same official status as Australia, Canada and New Zealand. With too few whales to catch and crops hard to grow, the colony was disbanded after three years, many of its 300 souls having descended into alcoholism. The most conspicuous inhabitants of Port Ross now are the 200 southern right whales that spend the winter there, the species no longer in danger from the depredations of whaling vessels.
Visitors today hike through moss-laden forests of rata trees with their showy red flowers on Auckland Island, or brace against the wind to negotiate the sea-cliff edge of nearby Enderby Island. They stand in silence at the grave of 15 sailors who perished when the Derry Castle was smashed against the rocks on Enderby Island in 1887, and inspect the ruins of a coastwatch station in the hills of Auckland Island.
The station was established to monitor enemy vessels during World War II, but not a single one was spotted.
Separating Auckland from Adams Island, Carnley Harbour is a deep caldera and, with onshore lava and basalt flows, a legacy of the intense volcanic activity 20 million years ago that created the archipelago. In the harbour, royal-blue waters lap the rocky shore, their surface mirroring towering hills of grey-green tussock grass and meadows of emerald-green cushion bog meadow. The silence is broken only by the cries of kelp gulls echoing around the harbour.
The Snares
This small cluster of rocky islands was discovered in 1791 by a two-ship expedtion led by Captain George Vancouver, who named The Snares for their potential to wreck ships. They are among the most pristine islands anywhere, having never been settled and with no record of introduced pests such as rats and rabbits.
The Snares cover only 300ha, but are home to more seabirds than the UK. Three million sooty shearwaters nest in summer, blackening the sky as they fly to their burrows at dusk. They undergo a 60,000km annual round-trip to spend winter in the North Pacific Landing is prohibited on the islands to protect seabird burrows. Flocks of smartly plumaged Snares crested penguins that gather on granite slopes can be admired at close range from zodiacs. As New Zealand fur seals swim in the waves, the zodiacs pass through tunnels of jagged rock along a sea edge broken by numerous caves, sinkholes and inlets choked with giant kelp.
Four sealers put ashore by their captain in 1810 spent seven years there, eking out a living by planting potatoes and hunting seals and birds. Three survivors were eventually rescued by a passing ship.
Campbell Island
Campbell Island had an unfortunate beginning to its human history. It was discovered by Captain Frederick Hasselborough aboard the Perseverance in 1810, but a few months later, on a return visit (after discovering Macquarie Island), the captain drowned when a jollyboat taking him ashore overturned. Eighteen years later, the Perseverance was uncannily wrecked on the rocks at the same spot where its former captain had perished.
The island is home to the rarest duck in the world. The Campbell Island teal was long thought extinct until it was rediscovered by Heritage Expeditions’ Rodney Russ in 1975. According to the Guinness World Records, Campbell Island has the loneliest tree in the world – a 6m spruce planted in 1902 that is separated by hundreds of kilometres from the nearest tree.
The climate is too severe for trees, but Campbell Island abounds with “megaherbs’’, so described by the explorer Sir James Ross because the colourful plants produced a “floral display second to none outside the tropics’’. While subantarctic conditions have a stunting effect on plants generally, megaherbs with huge flowers and leaves thrive. Among them are the bright yellow bulbinella, a giant member of the carrot family called anisotome, and the rhubarb-like stilbocarpa, which proved a godsend to the castaways who discovered it was edible.
Campbell is the albatross capital of the world. A total of six species nest there, including the southern royal albatross which, at up to 3.5m, has the longest wingspan of any bird. Visitors can walk among the birds as they tend their chicks and greet each other in vigorous displays known as gamming. Albatross pairs mate for life and the young traverse the oceans for five or six years without touching land before their first nesting season.
The albatross colony is reached by a boardwalk that meanders from a cove in Perseverance Harbour through fields of flowering megaherbs to Col Lyall, a saddle between two mountain peaks. From here, the view is wonderful – a wild mosaic of windswept valleys, granite outcrops, harbour inlets and picturesque lakes. In the distance, the waves of the Southern Ocean lash the entrance to the protected harbour.
Just as interesting as the albatrosses, but a little less friendly, are the Hooker’s sea lions, which breed on the island. The pups are engaging as they play, but feisty adult sea lions charge at visitors who get too close; if a sea lion is spotted on the path ahead, a detour through the vegetation is advisable.
Introduced rats wreaked havoc on the wildlife when they arrived on Campbell with the sealers and whalers in the 19th century, but in the world’s largest successful rat-eradication program, the island was declared rat-free after 120 tonnes of poisoned bait were dumped from helicopters earlier this decade.
In 1895, Britain’s Lord William Glasgow, during a visit to Campbell Island, said: “Altogether, were it not for the severity of the climate, this island is a most attractive spot and would be a very delightful possession.” The same might be said of all the subantarctic islands of Australia and New Zealand.
Expeditions to the Subantarctic Islands
Christchurch-based Heritage Expeditions organises summer visits to the islands in this story aboard its Russian-flagged vessel, the 72m Spirit Of Enderby, departing from Bluff in southern New Zealand. The islands are included in a month-long Heritage Expeditions trip to Antarctica, and can also be visited in an annual 19-day expedition that does not extend to Antarctica.
Source: Qantas The Australian Way October 2009