WILDLIFE, WILD TIMES

IN 1822 an Australian ship’s captain named James Douglass informed the Sydney Gazette, somewhat angrily: ‘[Macquarie Island is] the most wretched place of involuntary and slavish exilium … nothing could warrant any civilised creature living on such a spot.’ In contrast, almost 100 years later, the eminent Australian scientist and Antarctic explorer Sir Douglas Mawson described the same island as ‘one of the wonder spots of the world’ and launched an international campaign to create a protected scientific reserve there.

Macquarie Island’s wild beauty must be in the eye of the beholder. It is a large, narrow island, blasted by subantarctic westerlies and pummelled by heavy surf, in one of the roughest parts of the Southern Ocean between