Campbell Island

01:45

-The Lady of the Heather is the title of a romantic novel by Will Lawson. The novel is a mixture of facts and fiction elaborating on the incidents surrounding Captain Hasselburg’s death on Campbell Island. The story is about a daughter of Bonnie Prince Charlie, exiled to Campbell Island after she is suspected of treachery to the Jacobite cause. Her character was inspired by Elizabeth Farr. Farr was probably what would now be called a “ship girl”, but the presence of a European woman at this remote place, and her death, gave rise to The Lady of the Heather story. The remoteness and striking appearance of the sealing grounds, whether on mainland New Zealand or the subantarctic islands, and the sealing era’s early place in Australasia’s European history, supply the elements for romance and legend which are generally absent in the area’s colonial history.

-The world's most remote tree is believed to be on Campbell Island, a solitary 100-year-old Sitka Spruce. The nearest tree is over 222 km away on the Auckland Islands

-In 1954, the island was gazetted as a nature reserve. Feral Campbell Island cattle were eliminated by about 1984 and feral Campbell Island sheep were culled during the 1970s and 1980s, with their eventual extermination in 1992. In 2001, brown rats (Norway rats) were eradicated from the island nearly 200 years after their introduction. This was the world’s largest rat eradication programme. The island’s rat-free status was confirmed in 2003. Since the eradication, vegetation and invertebrates have been recovering, seabirds have been returning and the Campbell teal (the world’s rarest duck), has been reintroduced. Other native landbirds include the New Zealand pipit and the Campbell snipe. The snipe had survived on Jacquemart Island and began recolonising the main island after the rats had been removed.

Marine mammals have shown gradual recovery in the past decades. Sea lions and southern elephant seals have begun to re-colonize the island. Some southern right whales still come into bays in the winter to winter or calve most notably at Northwest Bay and Perseverance Harbour, but in much smaller number than in the Auckland Islands. Historically, fin whales used to inhabit close to shore.

-To mark the 200th anniversary of its discovery, the Campbell Island Bicetenial Expedition, was undertaken from December 2010 to February 2011. The research expedition was the largest multidisciplinary expedition to the island in over 20 years, and aimed to document the island’s human history, assess recovery of the island’s flora and invertebrate fauna since the removal of sheep and the world’s largest rat eradication programme, study the island’s plentiful but little understood streams and characterise the unusual stream fauna, and reconstruct past environmental conditions and deduce long term climate change from tarn sediment cores.

The expedition was run by the 50 Degrees South Trust, a charitable organisation established to further research and education on New Zealand’s Subantarctic Islands, and to support the preservation and management of these World Heritage ecosystems.