Macquarie Island is one of the most remote landmasses on Earth. A wind-swept spot in the middle of the Southern Ocean, about halfway between Tasmania and Antarctica. The island is 34 kilometres long and 5 kilometres wide.
Its rugged beauty and diverse wildlife touch all those who make the long sea journey to get here. Pretty amazing place to live. From a biological point of view, it's almost like living in some sort of nature documentary. There are so many animals packed in such a small space.
Many of the sea animals the albatrosses and similar birds, and many species of penguin that may feed further south, want to lay their eggs on the last bit of sort of normal, green-covered dirt rather than ice, and that's what Macquarie Island represents. MUSIC PLAYS This really is a remarkable spot. The penguins, these are king penguins, one of the species on the island, and they just wander right up to you, clearly not at all afraid.
Elephant seals are flopping all over the beach, but their environment is under threat. The island was first sighted in 1810. It was named after the early governor of New South Wales, Lachlan Macquarie. One ship's captain described it as the most wretched place that could possibly be conceived.
Nothing, he said, could warrant any civilised creature living on such a spot. Nonetheless, sealers descended on the island from around the world. Not only did they decimate most of the native species on Macquarie Island, but in the 1870s they introduced the European rabbit as an alternative food source. Their diet was very limited, salt pork and bully beef and ship's biscuits and that sort of thing, and what they could get from penguins and seals, so rabbits were a very welcome form of alternative food for them.
I guess they just didn't have the foresight or maybe the values to think of what those rabbits might do to the island once the sealers had left. By the 1970s there were more than 100,000 rabbits on the island. They wreaked havoc with the vegetation, causing massive soil erosion and destroying bird nesting burrows.
The damage that has been done to the natural environment here is just staggering. Literally brings tears to people's eyes who know the place and know what the landscape looks like. The response is full-scale war. The assault begins with hundreds of containers of poison baits. The goal...
Total extermination. This huge operation, years in the planning, is costing more than $25 million. It's being run by Tasmania's Parks and Wildlife Service. Macquarie Island is technically part of Tasmania. The target is the three non-native species on the island.
Ships rats, House mice and most importantly those rabbits. We're trying to remove every last one of those three target species. Our performance measures are very simple. We either succeed or we fail. The only way to allow the vegetation and native wildlife to recover is to remove the impacts of those.
...invasive species. First to say that I think we're making history. I think it's the first dog training class ever in the middle of the great Southern Ocean. As they head south, 12 key members of the team are being put through their paces by super trainer Steve Austin. Their job, quite simply, is to find the rabbits.
The specially selected dogs are Labradors, Springer Spaniels and one Terrier Cross. One pip is sit and stay, pip pip is to turn direction and three or four pips quickly in a row is come when called. Alright get yourself settled, when you're ready you're right.
This has taken a lot of dogs to get here. I mean, what you see now is the end result of probably 40 or 50 or 60 dogs that have gone through processes that haven't made it. Stand still, stand still, stand still.
Bring him in, bring him in, bring him in. These dogs are the cream of the crop. These are the SAS of dog, of rabbit dogs, you know.
Good, praise them, good dogs. The dogs have their own personal handlers who've committed at least 12 months of their lives to Macquarie Island. Already Kiwi rabitor Gary Bocock has a soft spot for the smallest member of the team, Tama. It's a close bond and there's nothing better than coming home to a dog at the end of the night and have a cuddle and a pet.
As his precious cargo is offloaded at Macquarie on its way from ship to shore, trainer Steve Austin is tense. Hanging in the balance is two years of hard work. You see this happen and you know that if I hit the water, they're gone. The dogs real work will come later and could continue for several years.
First a fleet of helicopters buzzes to and fro across the island preparing for the aerial baiting phase of the program. Every square kilometer will be covered. It's accepted that there'll be collateral damage. The poison baits will kill some of the native seabirds. The deaths of some birds in this case can be expected, so it's a reality that we needed to accept early on.
We have long-term goals for the project, and so in 50 years'time, would the benefits to those species have accrued to the point that the mortality in the first instance is outweighed? Macca, as the locals call it, has never been so busy. Normally there'd be about a dozen people working here at the Australian Antarctic Division research base. But the eradication program means that this year there's more than three times that number.
Australia has had a permanent scientific station on the island since 1948. An intriguing mix of scientists and trade personnel are housed in a cluster of buildings clinging to the narrow isthmus. In such an isolated environment everyone needs to wear several hats, no one more than Island doctor Jamie Doobie. The other role, official role I have for the Antarctic Division is as a watercraft operator.
So I drive the little rubber boats that would have brought you ashore, the IRBs. and also the larks, the amphibious trucks that we use to transport cargo ashore. So during resupply at the moment, I'm alternating between doctoring and lark driving. It's a fascinating dynamic and I often think I wonder if it exists in many other places around the world because it's very diverse, it's a very diverse community that we put together.
You have the stereotype, if you like, of the tradesperson, you know, who might be a little bit older, you know, has done their apprenticeship, is usually a bit more experienced tradie, carpenter or plumber or something. And they're living in a community. with a young PhD student and interacting with them over breakfast, lunch and dinner. Rob Clifton came under Macquarie Island's spell when he was the youngest ever station leader here. It's not an easy thing, being away for 12 months.
Life goes on back at home. People die, people are born. There's a guy coming home on the ship with us now who's just, you know, first child.
Relationships break up, natural disasters happen, all sorts of things. So I'd say the ability to be tolerant, the ability to, you know, mix in with other people, but also the ability to cope with that isolation. He's really what makes someone a good expeditioner. When Australian explorer Sir Douglas Mawson set off from Hobart on his Antarctic expedition in 1910, his first port of call was Macquarie Island. The expeditioners set up an aerial and five stayed behind as he continued the voyage south to the land of the blizzard.
He needed a site to put a radio repeater. There was no hope of transmitting all the way from Australia down to Antarctica and so the thought was that if they established a repeater station somewhere in the middle of the Southern Ocean, from there he'd be able to send the signal back on and head off down south. It was a tough job for the wireless operators.
Every day, sometimes in driving rain or gale force winds, they had to climb up to the top of the hill to see if they could get a message. It would be more than a year before they were finally able to communicate with Mawson in Antarctica. Over the years, Mawson's aerial and its supporting masts have borne the brunt of some wild and windy conditions. And they've undergone massive deterioration.
A century after they were first set up, this is all that remains of the masts. What we have here is the remains of this first mast, which consists of three pieces of timber and two iron alloy elements associated with that mast. Peter Maxwell and Martin Passingham travelled to the island for the delicate process of collecting and then transporting the remnants safely back to Hobart, where they'll go on display.
There's Oregon timber, and Oregon timber does perform really well in the outdoors, so with this extreme environment, what we've got left is pretty amazing. The remains were carried back down the hill in much the same way they were taken to the top all those years ago. Manpower.
Victor Limmelwicht, Mawson Station, this is VJ Macquarie. The technology is very different on Macquarie Island these days. Communications officer Kevin White reaches the outside world with ease via satellite.
But plenty of people still like to do things the old-fashioned way. And a successful call to Macquarie Island... is considered a triumph for ham radio enthusiasts. OK, so we've got you in the log. Foxtrot 5, uniform, Florida X-ray.
And, yeah, 5 and 9 plus in Macquarie Island. Great signal from France. Over. MUSIC Surprisingly Macquarie Island was World Heritage listed primarily because of its geology rather than its wildlife composed entirely of oceanic crust and rocks from deep below the earth's surface.
Sir Douglas Mawson who was himself a geologist was a lifetime advocate for the preservation of Macquarie Island. It's a nice thing to see the effect it has on you when you come here over time and it's really nice to see the effect it has on others when they come and it's nice when you've been here for a while to see folks first come ashore and the smiles on their faces and the way they're looking around at everything and it reminds you how lucky and how privileged you are for a short time to live in what Douglas Mawson called you know one of the world's wonder spots. The baiting was just the first step in trying to save the island. Next the dogs and their handlers are spreading out across the steep hillsides.
As well as the cold, windy conditions, They'll be dealing with some incredibly difficult terrain. Either side of the island, it's quite steep, and particularly on the west coast, it's very rugged and very rocky. So, very high, very windy, and quite hard work. There is a rabbit down in that hole. She's telling me that there's something in there.
It's a rabbit and it's what she's been trained on. She's scratching it out wanting to get down to it. So we pull her out where she'll go to other holes and there's nothing and she just walks away. I trust my dog because it's what she's been trained.
Her nose is telling me, and her nose is better than my nose. And so she's saying, yes, boss, there's a rabbit down there. Let me at it.
Let me get it. Then we'll put down some gas. down the holes and then we'll block up the hole and then that'll gas the hole or we know and we also GPS the area and then we go back and tell the hunters hey there's some rabbits around this area and come back and deal with it and then they'll use a variety of methods to do it either shooting, night shooting, shooting in the daytime, putting out traps or putting out poison. It's clear the training has paid off. The dogs are totally focused on finding rabbits and show no interest in the native wildlife.
Steve, this is quite a scene, seeing dogs just a few metres away from penguins. and not flinching. What's this exercise all about? Well, this exercise traces to make sure that when the dogs are working around native wildlife at Macquarie that they don't go anywhere near them and don't have any attempt to hurt them. So it's very important.
And probably the most difficult... difficult part of the training dogs had to go through. So what would a dog's instinct be when it saw a penguin normally?
Oh, we'll leave the niceties out of it I suppose, probably grab one maybe, you know being a Labrador or a Springer, you know, pheasants and partridges, it's all in their nature to go out and bring the bird back to the table, you know. So it was very difficult for Gus and I to train the dogs to ignore those all sorts of birds. The sealers who came to Macquarie Island in the 1800s have more to answer for than the introduction of rabbits. They also brought with them rats, cats, goats, even horses and donkeys. But what they did to the native species is truly shocking, starting with the fur seals.
It took them only 10 years to kill 200,000 and wipe out the entire population on Macquarie, all for their coats. Well, it was a luxuriant coat. They've got two layers of hair, a fine underfur, which is incredibly dense, and was very, very valuable.
Incredibly valuable item used for all sorts of clothing, garments, hats, gloves. They were targeting mainly pups and the pups are really vulnerable, they're not afraid of humans so each year sealers were here they could potentially harvest the entire pup production born each year and so it only would take them a handful of years to really knock over the population and eliminate it. Researcher Simon Goldsworthy has been monitoring the gradual return of the fur seals to Macquarie Island. The first pup born since sealing was born in 1954-55 and between then and the early 1970s there were only between one and five pups born.
When I started the work here in the mid 80s there were about 30 pups born and this season we've had about 260 pups born so it's been a slow recovery about a six percent increase per year over that time but originally there would have been tens of thousands of pups born every year so it's taken you know 200 years later. you We're still at the very, very early stages of recovery for this population. After the fur seals, the hunters then did their best to wipe out the elephants. Elephant seal population. When their numbers also dwindled, they moved on to the penguins.
Believe it or not, these are penguin digesters. Back in the 1800s, hunters would corral any penguins that were in this area, shove them into the top of the device, boil them up overnight, and then the oil was drawn off into barrels, which became heating oil. Up to 2,000 penguins were stacked into one digester at a time. Now, it does seem barbaric and pretty horrific to us, but I suppose we have to remember that this was before we had much mineral oil. So if we wanted to have oil to run our lamps or oil to rub into our jackets to make them waterproof or to protect our ropes or to lubricate our cart bearings, we needed oil.
And at that stage, we were using oil from animals. Rabbit sightings on Macquarie Island are now virtually non-existent, since the baiting a total of only 13 live rabbits have been found. But the hunt's not over yet.
Staying in various field huts scattered around the island, the hunters and researchers are still on the lookout. To declare victory, they have to get every last rabbit. The fewer that are left the harder it is and the job just gets much much harder when there's so few.
So the team of about 15 hunters with the dogs have been looking for several months now and they haven't found any fresh sign of a rabbit. So that's an indication of the level of effort that's going in and not yet finding signs of those very small number of remaining bunnies. Without those rabbits the vegetation is already starting to recover on the island once known as the Big Green Sponge.
For a while there it wasn't green, it was brown. It approached the island and it would look really brown but slowly we're starting to see a lot of that green come back into it. It's really quite impressive to see just how much the vegetation's improved in this relatively short amount of time since the eradication operation's been undertaken.
Some of the most impressive things that we're seeing already are the tussock seedlings. So the big tussock grasses that you see around much of the island were largely devastated by the rabbits. Huge coastal slopes were completely denuded of these tussock grasses.
The other thing that I've noticed are lots of little baby stilbercarpas, stilbercarpas of the Macquarie Island cabbage. They're going really well as well around the whole island. What a remarkable turnaround.
This is what it looked like back when the eradication program was just beginning in 2011. This is a really clear example of the damage done by the rabbits. This small area has been fenced off and shows the sort of vegetation you'd normally expect to be all over these hillsides, including the Macquarie Island cabbage. But if you look up the hill, a mass of rabbit warrens. This is the damage they've done. It's like we've given the island a chance again.
The island was looking pretty beaten and battered around a few years ago and it's probably over the next few years the island will perhaps start to get to a stage that hasn't been out for maybe one or two hundred years. It's a timer. He's a Border Terrier Foxy Cross.
Sit. Karma, sit. He's coming up nine years old. Sit.
It's now time for the original group of dog handlers to go home, but their canine companions will stay here. Some may never leave. Small dog, but he has small man's disease.
He sort of thinks he's the boss all the time. and he will snap at the other dogs, but they sort of tolerate him because he's small. Yep. Lovely dog.
Good personality. Sweet. Yeah. Awesome. Can't wait to start working him.
The handover to the new trainers is a bittersweet experience. Yes. Always hard.
Yeah. I've been down here for nine months now and you get to know them personally and how they work and spend more time with them than humans down here. It's going to be very hard to say goodbye. I think I'll be wearing sunglasses as I leave. It's very much like a family and for a lot of people, particularly if it's been a really good year, there is almost a bit of grieving as the community parts and heads back to Australia because there's that sense that that family unit, if you like, that community has now broken up.
As this group of expeditioners heads back to the real world, former station leader Ivor Harris ponders the future of the eradication program and of Macquarie Island. Now more than 25 million dollars, lots of people, lots of time, an enormous amount of effort, some might say well is it worth it? How do you place a dollar value on something that is biologically... unique and special as Macquarie Island I guess is the answer. It's just an amazing place.
There's only one in the world like it and if we can't look after Macquarie Island it'll be a sad day.