Heard Island and McDonald Islands
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How it came to be
Heard Island and the McDonald Islands are volcanic islands in the southern Indian Ocean, roughly midway between Australia and South Africa and just over 1,600 km from Antarctica. Heard Island is dominated by Big Ben, an active volcano 2,745 m high, and is mostly covered in snow and glaciers. No trace of anyone living on or visiting the island before the 1850s has been found.
In 1853 the American captain John Heard sighted the island from the Oriental and named it after himself. In 1854 the British captain William McDonald found the McDonald Islands and did the same. A sealing party under the American captain Erasmus Darwin Rogers made the first recorded landing in 1855, and by 1880 more than 16 million litres of oil had been rendered from elephant seals.
Britain claimed the islands in 1908, and on 11 December 1947 a party of 14 Australians led by Stuart Campbell landed at Atlas Cove and set up a research station. The territory passed from Britain to Australia in 1950, and the station closed in 1955. The islands were inscribed as a World Heritage site in 1997, and later eruptions roughly doubled the size of McDonald Island.
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