Heard Island and McDonald Islands

Heard Island and McDonald Islands — HIMI in Australian officialese — is an external territory of Australia in the southern Indian Ocean, roughly 4,100 km south-west of Perth and about 1,600 km north of the Antarctic continent. It sits at 53° south, in the belt of ocean that sailors have called the Furious Fifties for four hundred years, and the weather there is exactly as advertised.

The territory is about 372 km² of land in total. Almost all of that is Heard Island itself, a single volcanic massif dominated by Big Ben, whose summit crater is called Mawson Peak and reaches 2,745 m. That makes it the highest mountain in Australian territory outside the Australian Antarctic claim — more than 500 m higher than Mount Kosciuszko, and higher than anything on the Australian mainland. It is also, along with McDonald Island 43 km to the west, one of Australia's only two active volcanoes.

About 70% of Heard Island is under permanent ice, and roughly a dozen named glaciers run from the summit dome to the sea. The ice is retreating fast enough to be measured from one visit to the next, which is a large part of why the place matters: it is a set of glaciers with no local industry, no roads, no grazing and no people to confuse the signal.

It matters for a second reason, and this one is close to unique. HIMI has no introduced vertebrate species at all — no rats, no mice, no cats, no rabbits, no reindeer, none of the things that have wrecked every other sub-Antarctic island group from South Georgia to Kerguelen. Its ecosystems still run on their original terms. UNESCO inscribed the territory on the World Heritage List in 1997 for precisely that combination: an actively volcanic, actively glaciated island where nothing has been added.

The island is named after Captain John J. Heard, an American sailing the barque Oriental from Boston to Melbourne, who sighted it on 25 November 1853 and reported it. The neighbouring group is named after Captain William McDonald of the Samarang, who found it six weeks later, on 4 January 1854. Neither man landed. Neither ever went back. Between them they account for the entire naming of an Australian territory.

One point of pedantry worth having straight: Heard Island is not in Antarctica and is not covered by the Antarctic Treaty. It lies well north of 60° south, it is undisputed sovereign Australian territory, and Australian domestic law — the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act in particular — is what governs it. This is why permits there are issued by a Canberra department and not negotiated between treaty parties.

Heard Island is roughly oval, about 43 km east–west and 20 km north–south, and essentially the exposed top of a single large volcano rising from the Kerguelen Plateau — a vast submarine igneous province, one of the largest on Earth, most of which lies a kilometre or more under water. Kerguelen itself is 450 km to the north-west; the two groups are the only substantial land on the plateau.

There are no rivers to speak of, a handful of meltwater lagoons that the retreating ice has opened up in the last few decades — Winston Lagoon and Compton Lagoon among them — and no natural harbour anywhere. Ships anchor off Atlas Cove in the north-west or Spit Bay in the east, both of them exposed, and everything and everyone that has ever landed came ashore in a small boat through surf.

Big Ben is a stratovolcano that has been building itself for around a million years and has not finished. Its summit crater — Mawson Peak — has been seen glowing, steaming and throwing lava on and off since the first reliable report in 1910. Confirmed activity has been logged in 1910, the early 1950s, 1985, 1992, 1993, 2000, and then in a long run from roughly 2012 through 2016, when satellites repeatedly picked up hot lava flows spilling down the ice.

That combination — an active vent inside a glacier — is the geological point of the place. Lava meets ice, ice melts into the lava, and the resulting landforms are the kind of thing volcanologists otherwise study on Iceland with a road running past. Here there is no road, no monitoring station, and no local anything: what is known is known from ships, from satellites and from a very small number of people who have climbed it.

Roughly 70% of Heard Island is glaciated, with around a dozen named glaciers running radially off the Big Ben dome — Vahsel, Gotley, Baudissin, Challenger, Brown, Winston, Compton and others — several of which still reach tidewater and calve directly into the sea. There is no larger permanent ice mass anywhere between Antarctica and the tropics in this sector of the Indian Ocean.

The retreat is dramatic and it is well documented, because a small number of expeditions happened to map the ice carefully in 1947 and it has been re-measured by satellite ever since. Total ice cover has fallen by roughly a tenth since the late 1940s, and individual glaciers have done far worse: the Brown Glacier, the most-studied of them, has lost something on the order of a third of its area and retreated well over a kilometre. Glaciers that reached the sea in 1947 now end short of it, and lagoons have opened in the gaps.

Heard Island sits at about 53°06′ S, 73°31′ E. To put that in perspective: it is further south than the southern tip of South America's mainland, on the same latitude band as the Falklands and the Kerguelen group, and there is nothing at all between it and Antarctica except 1,600 km of the roughest water on the planet.

Heard Island has no indigenous history, because there is no plausible way anyone could have got there before ocean-going sailing ships and no reason to stay if they had. There are no artefacts, no middens, no oral tradition and no claim of prior discovery from anywhere. The human record of the island begins in the nineteenth century and is, from the start, entirely about extraction.

The first sighting may have been by the British sealer Peter Kemp in the brig Magnet in 1833, who marked land on his chart in roughly the right place, though the evidence is thin. The first sighting anybody acted on was by Captain John Heard of the American barque Oriental, running the clipper route from Boston to Melbourne, on 25 November 1853. He reported it, it entered the charts, and the sealers came.

For about twenty-five years Heard Island was an industrial site. American sealing gangs, mostly out of New London, Connecticut, wintered on the beaches in huts made of barrels, stone and sailcloth, killing southern elephant seals for their blubber and boiling it down on the spot. The best estimate is that they took something in the order of 100,000 barrels of oil from the island in that period, which is a very large number of seals.

The conditions were as bad as anywhere in the history of the trade. Men were left ashore for a full year at a time with a stock of provisions and instructions to have the oil ready when the ship returned; sometimes the ship did not return on schedule. There are graves on the island. There is a place on the north coast still called Oil Barrel Point, and at Atlas Cove the ground is still littered with iron hoops and the staves of casks.

Sovereignty followed the oil at a distance. Britain formally claimed Heard Island and the McDonald Islands in 1910, when the sealing was already over and the islands were of no use to anybody, largely as part of the wider tidying-up of southern-ocean claims in the run-up to the Antarctic scramble.

The islands became Australian on 26 December 1947, when the British transferred them and an Australian party stepped ashore at Atlas Cove on the same voyage that established the station. The two things were deliberately simultaneous: the transfer of sovereignty and the physical act of occupation, in a decade when nobody wanted to leave a southern claim resting on paper alone.

The Atlas Cove station operated continuously from December 1947 to March 1955. It was a cluster of prefabricated huts on the isthmus behind the cove, in the lee of the Laurens Peninsula, holding a party of usually ten to fourteen men who wintered over for a year at a time. They ran meteorology, geomagnetism, cosmic-ray physics, biology and survey, and in their spare time they attempted Big Ben and failed.

The station closed not because it failed but because it had done its job. In 1954 Australia opened Mawson station on the Antarctic continent — the first permanent station south of the Circle by any nation — and the ships, the money and the men went there instead. Heard was wound up the following autumn. The buildings were left standing.

Since 1955 there has been no permanent presence. Instead there have been visits — a few dozen in seventy years, each of them a substantial undertaking. They fall into three kinds: scientific parties under the Australian Antarctic Division, private mountaineering and radio expeditions, and, very occasionally, an expedition cruise ship that has secured a permit and then usually cannot land because of the weather.

The pattern is consistent: the island grants access on its own terms. A great many well-funded expeditions have arrived off Atlas Cove, sat there for a week unable to launch a boat, and gone home. That is not a failure of planning — it is simply what 53° south does.

The one genuine economy attached to this territory is in the water. The Kerguelen Plateau around HIMI holds commercially valuable stocks of Patagonian toothfish (Dissostichus eleginoides) — sold worldwide as Chilean sea bass — and mackerel icefish. Australia licenses a small, tightly controlled fishery in the HIMI zone, managed under the rules of CCAMLR, the Antarctic marine living resources convention, and it is generally held up as one of the better-run deep-ocean fisheries anywhere.

It got that way the hard way. Through the late 1990s and early 2000s the zone was worked by illegal, unreported and unregulated vessels — flag-of-convenience longliners that would fish the plateau and run for the far side of the world when a patrol ship appeared. Australia responded with armed fisheries patrols and, on several occasions, with pursuit.

Four penguin species breed on Heard Island, and between them they account for a good deal of the island's biomass. The ground around the colonies is worked black and the noise carries a long way — a large king penguin colony is audible before it is visible, which given the visibility on Heard is a useful property.

A note on the pictures. There is no honest photograph of a macaroni penguin in this page's image set. One of the images supplied under that name shows king penguins with macaroni-style crests added — a chimera of two species that does not exist — and it has been left out rather than published with a caption pretending otherwise. If you want to know what a macaroni penguin looks like, the short version is: knee-high, thick orange bill, and golden plumes that start between the eyes and sweep back over the head.

Heard Island's beaches were the reason anybody came here in the first place, and after a century of recovery they are again among the more important seal breeding grounds in the Indian Ocean sector of the Southern Ocean. Three species breed; a fourth turns up to eat the others.

Somewhere around twenty species of bird breed on Heard Island and its neighbours, almost all of them seabirds, and the island's remoteness means several are present in globally significant numbers. It also holds the territory's only endemic vertebrate.

Also present: Antarctic and Kerguelen terns, brown skuas working the penguin colonies from above as the sheathbills work them from below, kelp gulls, cape petrels, and enormous numbers of small burrowing petrels and prions whose colonies would be a great deal easier to survey if they did not nest underground and come ashore only at night.

There are no trees, no shrubs and no woody plants of any kind on Heard Island. The entire vascular flora runs to somewhere around a dozen species — grasses, cushion plants and a few herbs — supplemented by mosses, liverworts, lichens and algae that between them do most of the actual covering of the ground. Everything grows low, everything grows slowly, and nothing grows above about 200 m.

Every other significant sub-Antarctic island group has been wrecked, at least partly, by species people brought with them. South Georgia had rats and reindeer. Kerguelen has rabbits, cats, mice, rats, reindeer and mouflon. Macquarie had rabbits, rats, mice and cats, and spent decades and tens of millions of dollars getting rid of them. Marion Island is still fighting mice that have learned to eat albatross chicks alive.

Heard Island and the McDonald Islands have none. No introduced mammals, no introduced birds, no introduced reptiles — nothing vertebrate that was not there before 1853. It is one of the very few sub-Antarctic island groups on Earth of which that can be said, and it is the single most important fact about the territory. The 1997 World Heritage inscription rests on it as much as on the volcano.

The territory's ecological significance does not stop at the shore. Heard sits on the Kerguelen Plateau, a shallow submarine platform in an ocean that is otherwise very deep, and it sits near the Antarctic Polar Front — the boundary where cold Antarctic surface water sinks beneath warmer sub-Antarctic water. Shallow water plus a frontal zone plus deep upwelling produces one of the more productive stretches of the Southern Ocean.

Nobody lives on Heard Island, but between 1947 and 1955 around a hundred men did, a year at a time, and since then a few hundred more have camped there for weeks at a stretch. Their accounts agree closely enough that the picture is clear, and it is not a romantic one.

The dominant fact is wind. The island sits in an unbroken westerly airstream that has crossed thousands of kilometres of open ocean, and Big Ben adds its own violence on top: cold air pouring off the ice cap accelerates down the slopes and arrives at sea level as a williwaw — a sudden, near-vertical squall that can go from calm to well over 150 km/h in under a minute. Tents have been shredded and a station building was once moved bodily off its footings.

Heard Island has no cuisine, because a cuisine requires people to have lived somewhere long enough to argue about it. What it has instead is a documented food history in two chapters — the sealers, and the ANARE station — and both are worth recording, because in each case what people ate was determined entirely by what could survive the voyage south.

Chapter one: the sealers, 1855–1880

Gangs left ashore for a full year lived largely off the island. Elephant seal was the staple — the tongue and the flippers were considered the best of it, and the young animals were eaten in preference to the bulls. Penguin eggs were collected in the thousands in season and preserved in grease; penguin breast meat was eaten when nothing else offered. And they ate Kerguelen cabbage, deliberately and in quantity, because it worked: the plant is genuinely high in vitamin C and its scientific name, antiscorbutica, commemorates the fact. From the ship came flour, salt beef, sugar, tea and rum, in quantities that assumed the ship would come back on time. Sometimes it did not.

Chapter two: the station, 1947–1955

The ANARE men ate an Australian ration of the period: tinned meat and vegetables, dried egg, powdered milk, an enormous quantity of flour, and a Sunday roast whenever the frozen meat held out. A station cook was a serious appointment and a bad one was a serious problem, since there was nowhere else to eat for a year. Three things from that ration have survived as the island's honorary dishes, and they are all Australian rather than Heard Island — damper, ANZAC biscuits and a roast leg of lamb. Nobody pretends otherwise, and the recipes below are given in that spirit.

Technically yes. Practically, almost certainly not, and it is worth being precise about why, because the internet is full of pages that treat Heard Island as a bucket-list tick rather than as what it is.

Entering the territory — including its territorial sea, and including simply anchoring off it — requires a written permit from the Australian Antarctic Division under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 and the HIMI Marine Reserve Management Plan. Permits are assessed case by case against the reserve's conservation objectives. They are granted routinely to Australian government science, occasionally to serious private scientific and mountaineering expeditions, and rarely to tourism.

There is no airport, no airstrip and no flat ground long enough to build one, and no helicopter has the range from anywhere. Everything arrives by sea, and the sea route is the whole problem.

There is nothing to spend money on once you arrive, which is the only economical thing about the place. The cost is entirely in getting there, and it is at the extreme end of what travel costs anywhere on Earth.

Forty-three kilometres west of Heard lies the other half of the territory's name: McDonald Island, Flat Island and the sea-stack of Meyer Rock. Together they amount to a couple of square kilometres of steep, cliff-bound volcanic rock with no ice cap, no beach and no anchorage.

They are, in a real sense, the least-visited land on Earth outside Antarctica. Sighted in 1854, they were not set foot on until 1971, and then by helicopter. There have been only a handful of landings since. Nobody has stayed overnight.

Because the territory's whole conservation value rests on nothing having been introduced, the rules governing what may go ashore are among the strictest applied anywhere in the world — stricter than the Antarctic Treaty area's, and enforced by Australian statute rather than by convention.

None of this is bureaucratic theatre. Macquarie Island's rabbit and rodent eradication took seven years and cost around AU$25 million, and it was undertaken because a small number of animals arrived on ships in the nineteenth century. The cheapest possible moment to stop that happening on Heard is on the deck of the ship, and everybody involved knows it.

Heard Island has no crime, no disease, no corrupt officials and no scams, and it substitutes for all of them a set of physical hazards that have killed people in comparable places and would have no difficulty doing so here.

The overriding point: there is no rescue. No helicopter can reach the island from anywhere. No aircraft can land. The nearest permanently staffed place is a French base 450 km away with no obligation and limited capacity to help. Any medical emergency is treated with what the expedition brought, on the ship it came on, ten days from a hospital. Expeditions plan on that basis, and so must anyone who goes.

Heard Island and McDonald Islands were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1997 as a natural site, under the criteria covering outstanding examples of ongoing geological processes and of ongoing ecological and biological evolution. It is one of the smaller and less-visited World Heritage properties on the list, and one of the very few that almost nobody has ever seen.

The citation rests on the pairing that runs through this whole page: an active volcano under an active ice cap, in an ecosystem free of introduced species. Either alone would be notable. Together, on an island nobody has settled, they make a control sample — a place where geological and biological processes can be watched running without any human variable to subtract first.

Every ISO country code gets a top-level internet domain, whether or not anyone lives there to use it. Heard Island and McDonald Islands got .hm, and it is by a very wide margin the most widely encountered thing about the territory — an uninhabited volcano's initials, sitting in the address bars of people who have never heard of it.

The domain is operated privately rather than by any Australian government body, and it has been unusually permissive: for long stretches of its history .hm registrations have been free or nearly free, with no residency requirement and no connection to the territory required. That combination — a short, free, two-letter TLD with no rules — produced exactly what you would expect.

For a place with no people, Heard Island produces a disproportionate quantity of science, and the reason is the absence itself. Almost every environmental measurement made anywhere on Earth has to be corrected for local human effects before it means anything. Here there are none to correct for.

Nobody was born here and nobody is from here, so the territory's roll of names is a list of the people who arrived, worked and left — and they are attached to almost every feature on the chart.

This page is an outlier in a travel factbook, and it is worth saying why it is here at all. Heard Island and McDonald Islands has a country code, a flag emoji, a domain and an entry in every dropdown menu on the internet, which means people look it up. Almost everything they find is either a stub or a piece of aggregated filler that treats an uninhabited volcano as a holiday option and pads the page out with an invented capital city and a list of restaurants. That seemed worth correcting properly.

So the honest summary: you are not going. Fewer people have stood on Heard Island than have stood on the summit of Everest — by a very large margin — and the ones who have got there did so on scientific expeditions, on chartered ships, after years of preparation, and half of them never got off the boat. Treating it as a destination is the one thing this page will not do.

What it is instead is a place worth knowing about: a mountain higher than anything in Australia, erupting under its own ice cap, on an island where the seals and the penguins have spent a century recovering from what people did to them and where — uniquely in the sub-Antarctic — nothing was ever introduced to stop them. The measurements taken there are the reference points against which glaciers and seabird colonies everywhere else are read. There is real value in a place that stays empty, and this is the clearest example of it anywhere under an ISO code.

On the images

The photographs on this page are illustrative reconstructions, not documentary photographs of Heard Island — genuine imagery of the place is extremely scarce, and none of it belongs to this site. Where an image diverges from reality in a way that matters, the caption says so and corrects it: Big Ben's real shape, the coast image filed under a penguin's name, the albatross that is not one of the island's species. One image supplied for this page — king penguins with macaroni crests grafted on, a bird that does not exist — was left out entirely rather than published with a caption explaining it away. Everything factual on this page stands on its own regardless of the pictures.