Macquarie Island: The legacy of Invercargill mayor Joseph Hatch
Saturday, 10 February 2024
Lou Sanson is a former director-general of the Department of Conservation and has spent most of his life exploring and enjoying the South Island’s wild places.
Macquarie Island, situated deep in the Southern Ocean, marks the terminus of New Zealand’s Southern Alps. Here the Australian Plate subducts beneath the Pacific Plate, forming the planet’s steepest landform at the end of the Alpine Fault. Over just 25km the ocean depth plummets from a highest point of 410m to 6000m below sea level.
The fault line from Wellington to Macquarie Island is the longest straight line on Earth and at its southern end reveals the only place on Earth where the deep ocean mantle is actively exposed above sea level.
Like our Southern Alps, significant earthquake events occur - the last an 8.1 magnitude quake in 2004. Today, the island resembles a mini Scottish Highlands set in the wild Southern Ocean teaming with wildlife.
Arriving on the Heritage Adventure, visitors who joined the Heritage Expeditions tour (called the Galapagos of the Southern Ocean) in Bluff are greeted by a breathtaking profusion of wildlife. Orca pods patrol the coast, feasting on this year’s elephant seal pups. At times the crystal blue sea boils with king penguins coming right up beside the zodiacs and pecking the pontoons.
Arriving ashore, the big male beach master elephant seals and their harems have only just left to get much needed food after eight weeks of pupping, weaning and mating. Female elephant seal milk is like liquid butter and the cute weaners go from 25kg to 75kg in three weeks before being left to their own devices.
All the while, active young agile bulls try to pick off any female on the margins of the big 4-tonne beach masters’ well-defended territory. He loses over a tonne of weight just defending his harem. As they head to sea they are recorded diving to 1500m and staying there in total darkness for up to two hours to avoid orca. Here is more flatulence, fighting, blood, gore and sex than you could hope to see on any south sea island.
The gentoo penguins go about their business, even walking over the top of elephant seals if they are in the way. In return the bigger elephant seals plough straight through groups of king penguins like giant slugs breathing steam in the cold air as they head to sea to feed. The noise is incredible as groups of king penguins waddle in formation and walk right up to you.
Meanwhile, the light-mantled sooty albatrosses, looking just like a flying version of a siamese cat, fly in perfect formation in an elegant courtship ritual against the surrounding cliffs in the brisk wind. Everyone is stunned by the sheer density and diversity of wildlife. Three million penguins occupy the limited flat areas largely due to the proximity of the island to the Antarctic convergence zone and the deep nutrient rich ocean upwellings hitting the uplifted oceanic crust.
At nearby Sandy Bay, over 50,000 royal penguins go about their business of walking up a creek covered in giant subantarctic megaherbs to their inland breeding colony, pecking and screeching at every bird that gets in the way.
Unfortunately with avian flu seriously impacting the birds and seals on South Georgia Island, this is now the only place in the world one can get this incredible experience.
It wasn’t always this way, as soon after Captain Frederick Hasselbourgh’s discovery in 1810 he keeps his discovery secret and describes “seals beyond your wildest dreams”. Once the secret leaks out through a drunken night’s trap set for him it becomes a sealing mecca for sealing gangs working out of Sydney.
All the seals are wiped out by 1820 to supply a hugely popular market for the top hats so in fashion in Europe at the time. In 1810, 400,000 seal skins were taken; by 1821 only four skins were taken. The first seal to come back was seen in 1955, such was the total decimation of the seals for European fashion.
New Zealand banned sealing in 1885 but this enabled a loophole exploited by Invercargill mayor and Southland MP Joseph Hatch. He had already been caught red-handed in 1887 when rescuing the survivors of the Derry Castle shipwreck on Auckland Islands, found with 160 illegal seal skins on his ship, the Awarua.
Australia took until 1890 to implement the ban, but neglected to include elephant seals and penguins. Hatch, who ran a rabbit poison factory in Invercargill at the height of the Southland rabbit plague, saw an opportunity. He purchased the best possible Norwegian steam digester to ship to Macquarie, built a house and killed and rendered down thousands of elephant seals’ blubber into high quality oil to supply London street lamps hungry for oil. One 4-tonne elephant seal would deliver 1 tonne of blubber worth 20 pound a tonne.
His Southern Isles Exploitation Company factory in Nith St, Invercargill, now produced rabbit poison, sheep dip and binder twine using seal oil, and exported hundreds of barrels of premium quality Macquarie seal oil. He had lost his government positions following the illegal landing of seal skins, but could make more from oil than being an MP or mayor.
When the elephant seals left the island in November he turned his attention to first king then royal penguins, clubbing 2000 in a day and packing them into his digesters before firing them up with good Ohai coal and boiling the penguins for 12 hours until all the oil floated to the top. The remains were spilled out onto the beach to be washed away in the tide and feed the numerous orca.
The men lived on elephant seal flippers and tongues (a real delicacy), Macquarie cabbage (the local megaherb) and the rabbits and weka Hatch had brought from Invercargill.
New Zealand attempted to annex Macquarie from the Tasmania government in 1890 to control the by now highly controversial ex-mayor of Invercargill. Tasmania had tried to sell the island to the Australian Federal Government and when rejected was happy to issue an exclusive licence to Hatch to get a small income from its then unwanted possession.
Hatch was not always the best at returning to check on his men and in 1896 the New Zealand government sent the steamer Kakanui following reports of starvation among the sealers left there for nine months with no food.
The ship found the oilers in good health, but wanting to get home to Invercargill. In tragic circumstances, the Kakanui hit heavy seas on the return voyage and sank with the loss of all 18 men on board in New Zealand’s worst subantarctic tragedy.
The New Zealand government further regulated a tax on all seal oil landed in Bluff and some of Hatch’s oilers would land owing more money than they had earned.
In my first year in the job as district conservator for the newly found Department of Conservation (DOC) in 1987, with responsibility for our subantarctic islands, I flew by RNZAF P3 Orion from Invercargill Airport to Macquarie to check on the latest shipping accident: the supply vessel Nella Dan had dragged her anchor in gale-force winds and was on the rocks at Macquarie.
A request had come from the salvors to tow the vessel to Carnley Harbour on Auckland Islands as the nearest sheltered water. As it was leaking oil, I declined the request.
Today the remains of Hatch’s oil industry are spread right across the island with the penguins and seals reoccupying every inch of land that he had cleared to kill their forebears. Sir Douglas Mawson’s visits to Macquarie from 1911 to 1914 (on his way to Antarctica) forced Australian national exposure on Hatch's activities and in 1920 the Tasmania government cancelled his lease. It declared the island a wildlife sanctuary in 1933. He had killed 2 million penguins by then.
In 1989, I visited for two weeks as a guest of Tasmania Parks and Wildlife Service. Over the next two years we worked closely together to have both Macquarie and the New Zealand subantarctic islands designated as IUCN World Heritage Areas, such is the incredible recovery from the exploitation of the last 100 years and the range of extraordinary wildlife, plants and geological features.
In 1990, the International Ornithological Conference was hosted by New Zealand in Christchurch, chartering a ship to visit the subantarctic islands. This was the impetus for DOC and Tasmania to carefully agree how to allocate places for tourists to visit and experience these incredible wildlife places where nature is in charge, based on systems already proven on the Galapagos Islands.
These same procedures have now seen hundreds of Australians and New Zealanders travel south every year to experience the absolute magic of the five subantarctic islands to the south of New Zealand.
In 2002, we managed to secure $4 million to achieve the world’s largest rat eradication on Campbell Island with an incredibly skilled DOC team led by ranger Pete McClelland from Invercargill.
Tasmania Parks and Wildlife used our success to leverage $25m in 2004 to attempt an even more ambitious Predator Free Macquarie. Into this mix comes a tall, fit-looking ex-vet as the new base leader at Macquarie. Ivor Harris has managed Antarctic stations and is on board as a guest lecturer. He finally gets to manage Macquarie.
He has a brainwave to bring in rabbit calicivirus, along with 100kg of fresh carrots, with the permission of the Tasmania Parks and Wildlife Service. He proceeds to mix it all up in a kitchen blender, then spends seven days walking up and down the island with two rangers. A week later, 98% of the 20,000 rabbits that have been there since Hatch left are dead. All for about a few hundred dollars.
The Australian government then spends another $25m getting the last few rabbits and eradicating mice, rats and cats. Getting the last predator is always the hardest job. One operation fails due to bad weather. The biggest island eradication ever done at the time is led by another superb New Zealand island eradication specialist, Keith Springer.
Julie McInnes, a prominent Australian subantarctic scientist, is also on board from the University of Tasmania. Following the 2014 eradication, the subantarctic megaherbs and grasslands are the first to respond, she says. Burrowing petrels are coming back and the decline of black-browed albatross and light-mantled sooty albatross has been arrested.
The gentoo penguins are still in decline but that may be climate related as more frequent westerly winds dry out the fellfields and shift feeding grounds further south. Julie is at the heart of using emerging technology of drones, satellite monitoring and GPS tags to monitor the changes at Macquarie.
After years of decimation by Hatch, the king and royal penguins have bounced right back. For elephant seals it has been a lot slower. Hatch, frustrated with the New Zealand Government’s attempts to stop his sealing, shifted to Hobart to keep lobbying to continue producing the “best penguin oil in the world”. He died in 1928 aged 91 and is buried in a Hobart cemetery.
Tim Shadbolt continued the fascination of Invercargill mayors with the subantarctic islands when we announced plans to remove belgian blue rabbits, cattle and pigs introduced for shipwrecked sailors from Auckland Islands/Maukahuka. He led a national campaign to protect the genetic diversity of these animals, which have evolved in isolation for 150 years.
Apart from the odd difference, I enjoyed working with Tim on his mission, probably much more so than the New Zealand Government did working with Hatch back in the 1890s when New Zealand tried to annex the remarkable Macquarie Island to control a renegade mayor and ex-MP.
The journey from sealing and Hatch’s era of exploitation to today’s thriving ecosystem underscores the transformative power of New Zealand and Australian conservation efforts working together.
Geoff Chapple’s play, Hatch - The Plight of the Penguins, which toured New Zealand, brings this remarkable story to life, encapsulating the island’s complex history and inspiring conservation triumphs.