Protecting life in the far south

Press, 14 March 1987, Page 23

Protecting life in the far south

Beyond the Roaring Forties: New Zealand’s Subantarctic Islands. By Conon Fraser. Government Printing Office, Wellington, 1986. 214 pp. Illustrations. $69.95. (Reviewed by Hugh Wilson)

To many of us, New Zealand’s southern extremity is Stewart Island (if not Bluff!). We may be aware that there are islands further south, but few know them as anything but mysterious, remote fragments of land between New Zealand and the Antarctic continent, and fewer still are ever likely to visit there. Here is a handsome, detailed, exciting book to tell us of those islands and their teeming wildlife. Several major themes run through its pages. Central is the impact of humankind upon primitive environments, a microcosm of what has . happened to the planet at large.

The author recounts an extraordinary history of exploitation — of sealing and whaling which rapidly brought the target species to within a whisker of extinction — of shipwreck, loss of human life, and tenacious survival — even of attempted permanent settlement in dreadfully hostile climates, and of disastrous failure. The result for the islands’ vegetation and fauna has been serious modification and degradation. Guthrie-Smith, naturalist, writing of Campbell Island in 1936, was moved to these words: “The ravening energy of the Anglo-Saxon breed, its ferocious rat-like pertinacity, has accomplished the ruin of a Fauna and Flora unique in the world. What a poor, curtailed, mutilated, sterile world we threaten our descendants with! Man and the rat sharing it — fit mates in many ways — in their desperate, deplorable, gnawing energy, in their ruthless destruction of every obstacle.”

But another theme is also central to this book. Despite an amazing history of disturbance the islands are still of enormous ecological importance to the world. Within the widely varying groups there are still unmodified islands.

The Bounties and Antipodes are virtually unscathed; Disappointment Island, Adams Island, and the Snares have no introduced animals and few introduced plants, and as much as anywhere else on Earth have evolved undisturbed since their origin. Such places are exceedingly rare and valuable natural laboratories.

Some of the facts offered to bring this home to the reader are staggering. The Snares, it is suggested,

just over three and a half kilometres long, have more nesting seabirds than the entire coastline of the British Isles. Fraser traces changing human attitudes from ones of arrogance and exploitation, to deepening sensitivity and appreciation. R. E. Malone, at Port Ross in 1852, noted, “We had some good pot-shooting here. Tools were the most numerous ... two guns have brought down four dozen in a few hours.” Henry Armstrong wrote that on the Snares, “the penguins (ludicrous birds) in hundreds drawn up in rank and file stood to oppose us in our march, and it required not a little vigorous kicking to force our way through them.” Fur seals, widely hunted in the early nineteenth century for their pelts, were exterminated on Macquarie Island and the Antipodes. Tens of thousands were slaughtered at the Bounties. By 1831 only five could be found there at the height of the breeding season. It was not until 1985 that fur seals appeared to be breeding again on the Antipodes.

Even the penguins were exploited for skins and oil. There is a harrowing account of Joseph Hatch’s Penguin Oil Works on Macquarie Island, a gruesome and bizarre industry that, lasted for 30 years until the island was declared a sanctuary in 1920.

Leonard Cockayne, ecologist, had predicted in 1907 that as the primitive world became smaller and smaller, the subantarctic islands would be prized beyond present belief. In 1983 the Snares group was made a National Reserve — the highest degree of protection under New Zealand law. Three years later the other island groups followed suit Present management is attempting to redress some of the past mistakes and ensure that the relatively undisturbed parts remain inviolate, against several likely threats. Conon Fraser’s text is solidly if not inspiringly written — it is comprehensive, well-referenced, and fully indexed. His photographs are wonderful. Clear maps, diagrams and historical pictures add further depth (although I found it a little regrettable that the maps were not better placed in relation to the text). New Zealand’s subantarctic islands are among the last few truly wild places left on earth. As Peter Scott says in his foreward: “We need to know that there are some completely unmodified parts of the world, even if we are never able to visit them.” This beautiful book is an excellent substitute for actually going to the southern islands, and even better as essential background material for those lucky enough to visit.