Macquarie Island
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How it came to be
Macquarie Island lies about 1,500 km south-east of Tasmania, roughly halfway between Australia and Antarctica, and is 34 km long. It is the exposed crest of the undersea Macquarie Ridge, raised where the Indo-Australian and Pacific plates meet. It is described as the only place on Earth where rocks from the mantle, about 6 km below the ocean floor, are being actively exposed above sea level.
On 11 July 1810 Frederick Hasselborough, searching for new sealing grounds, found the uninhabited island and claimed it for Britain as part of New South Wales. It was named after Lachlan Macquarie, then governor of the colony. Between 1810 and 1919 seals and then penguins were hunted for oil almost to extinction, and of 144 recorded ship visits in that period, 12 ended in shipwreck.
From 1911 to 1914 the island was a base for Douglas Mawson's Australasian Antarctic Expedition. It became a wildlife sanctuary in 1933 and was inscribed as a World Heritage site on 5 December 1997. Rats and mice that arrived with ships, and rabbits left by sealers around 1870, damaged the vegetation, but after an eradication programme the island was declared pest-free on 8 April 2014.
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