Lord Howe Island

Lord Howe Island (; formerly Lord Howe's Island) is an irregularly crescent-shaped volcanic remnant in the Tasman Sea between Australia and New Zealand, part of the Australian state of New South Wales.

Lord Howe Island (; formerly Lord Howe's Island) is an irregularly crescent-shaped volcanic remnant in the Tasman Sea between Australia and New Zealand, part of the Australian state of New South Wales. It lies 600 km (320 nmi) directly east of mainland Port Macquarie, 780 km (420 nmi) northeast of Sydney, and about 900 km (490 nmi) southwest of Norfolk Island. It is about 10 km (6.2 mi) long and between 0.3 and 2.0 km (0.19 and 1.24 mi) wide with an area of 14.55 km2 (3,600 acres), though just 3.98 km2 (980 acres) of that comprise the low-lying developed part of the island.Along the west coast is a sandy semi-enclosed sheltered coral reef lagoon. Most of the population lives in the north, while the south is dominated by forested hills rising to the highest point on the island, Mount Gower (875 m, 2,871 ft). The Lord Howe Island Group comprises 28 islands, islets, and rocks. Apart from Lord Howe Island itself, the most notable of these is the volcanic and uninhabited Ball's Pyramid about 23 km (14 mi; 12 nmi) to the southeast of Howe. To the north lies a cluster of seven small uninhabited islands called the Admiralty Group.The first reported sighting of Lord Howe Island took place on 17 February 1788, when Lieutenant Henry Lidgbird Ball, commander of the Armed Tender HMS Supply, was en route from Botany Bay to found a penal settlement on Norfolk Island. On the return journey, Ball sent a party ashore on Lord Howe Island to claim it as a British possession. It subsequently became a provisioning port for the whaling industry, and was permanently settled in June 1834. When whaling declined, the 1880s saw the beginning of the worldwide export of the endemic kentia palms, which remains a key component of the island's economy. The other continuing industry, tourism, began after World War II ended in 1945.

The Lord Howe Island Group is part of the state of New South Wales and is regarded legally as an unincorporated area administered by the Lord Howe Island Board, which reports to the New South Wales Minister for Environment and Heritage. The island's standard time zone is UTC+10:30, or UTC+11 when daylight saving time applies. The currency is the Australian dollar. Commuter airlines provide flights to Sydney, Brisbane, and Port Macquarie.

UNESCO records the Lord Howe Island Group as a World Heritage Site of global natural significance. Most of the island is virtually untouched forest, with many of the plants and animals found nowhere else in the world. Other natural attractions include the diversity of the landscapes, the variety of upper mantle and oceanic basalts, the world's southernmost barrier coral reef, nesting seabirds, and the rich historical and cultural heritage. The Lord Howe Island Act 1981 established a "Permanent Park Preserve" (covering about 70% of the island). The island was added to the Australian National Heritage List on 21 May 2007 and the New South Wales State Heritage Register on 2 April 1999. The surrounding waters are a protected region designated the Lord Howe Island Marine Park.

Prior to European discovery and settlement, Lord Howe Island apparently was uninhabited, and unknown to Polynesian peoples of the South Pacific. The first reported European sighting of Lord Howe Island was on 17 February 1788 by Lieutenant Henry Lidgbird Ball, commander of the Armed Tender HMS Supply (the oldest and smallest of the First Fleet ships), which was on its way from Botany Bay with a cargo of nine male and six female convicts to found a penal settlement on Norfolk Island. On the return journey of 13 March 1788, Ball observed Ball's Pyramid and sent a party ashore on Lord Howe Island to claim it as a British possession. Numerous turtles and tame birds were captured and returned to Sydney. Ball named Mount Lidgbird and Ball's Pyramid after himself and the main island after Richard Howe, 1st Earl Howe, who was First Lord of the Admiralty at the time.

Many names on the island date from this time, and also from May of the same year, when four ships of the First Fleet, HMS Supply, Charlotte, Lady Penrhyn and Scarborough, visited it. Much of the plant and animal life was first recorded in the journals and diaries of visitors such as David Blackburn, Master of Supply, and Arthur Bowes Smyth, surgeon of the Lady Penrhyn.

Smyth was in Sydney when the Supply returned from the first voyage to Norfolk Island. His journal entry for 19 March 1788 noted that "the Supply, in her return, landed at the island she [discovered] in going out, and all were very agreeably surprised to find great numbers of fine turtle on the beach and, on the land amongst the trees, great numbers of fowls very like a guinea hen, and another species of fowl not unlike the landrail in England, and all so perfectly tame that you could frequently take hold of them with your hands but could, at all times, knock down as many as you thought proper, with a short stick. Inside the reef also there were fish innumerable, which were so easily taken with a hook and line as to be able to catch a boat full in a short time. She brought thirteen large turtle to Port Jackson and many were distributed among the camp and fleet."Watercolour sketches of native birds including the Lord Howe woodhen (Gallirallus sylvestris), white gallinule (Porphyrio albus), and Lord Howe pigeon (Columba vitiensis godmanae), were made by artists including George Raper and John Hunter. As the latter two birds were soon hunted to extinction, these paintings are their only remaining pictorial record. Over the next three years, the Supply returned to the island several times in search of turtles, and the island was also visited by ships of the Second and Third Fleets. Between 1789 and 1791, the Pacific whale industry was born with British and American whaling ships chasing sperm whales (Physeter macrocephalus) along the equator to the Gilbert and Ellice archipelago, then south into Australian and New Zealand waters. The American fleet numbered 675 ships and Lord Howe was located in a region known as the Middle Ground noted for sperm whales and southern right whales (Eubalaena australis).The island was subsequently visited by many government and whaling ships sailing between New South Wales and Norfolk Island and across the Pacific, including many from the American whaling fleet, so its reputation as a provisioning port preceded settlement, with some ships leaving goats and pigs on the island as food for future visitors. Between July and October 1791, the Third Fleet ships arrived at Sydney and within days, the deckwork was being reconstructed for a future in the lucrative whaling industry. Whale oil was to become Australia's most profitable export until the 1830s, and the whaling industry shaped Lord Howe Island's early history.

Permanent settlement on Lord Howe was established in June 1834, when the British whaling barque Caroline, sailing from New Zealand and commanded by Captain John Blinkenthorpe, landed at what is now known as Blinky Beach. They left three men, George Ashdown, James Bishop, and Chapman, who were employed by a Sydney whaling firm to establish a supply station. The men were initially to provide meat by fishing and by raising pigs and goats from feral stock. They landed with (or acquired from a visiting ship) their Maori wives and two Maori boys. Huts were built in an area now known as Old Settlement, which had a supply of fresh water, and a garden was established west of Blinky Beach.This was a cashless society; the settlers bartered their stores of water, wood, vegetables, meat, fish, and bird feathers for clothes, tea, sugar, tools, tobacco, and other commodities not available on the island, but it was the whalers' valuation that had to be accepted. These first settlers eventually left the island when they were bought out for £350 in September 1841 by businessmen Owen Poole and Richard Dawson (later joined by John Foulis), whose employees and others then settled on the island.

The new business was advertised and ships trading between Sydney and the New Hebrides (Vanuatu) would also put into the island. Rover's Bride, a small cutter, became the first regular trading vessel. Between 1839 and 1859, five to 12 ships made landfall each year, occasionally closer to 20, with seven or eight at a time laying off the reef. In 1842 and 1844, the first children were born on the island. Then in 1847, Poole, Dawson, and Foulis, bitter at failing to obtain a land lease from the New South Wales government, abandoned the settlement although three of their employees remained. One family, the Andrews, after finding some onions on the beach in 1848, cultivated them as the "Lord Howe red onion", which was popular in the Southern Hemisphere for about 30 years until the crop was attacked by smut disease.

In 1849, just 11 people were living on the island, but soon the island farms expanded. In the 1850s, gold was discovered on mainland Australia, where crews would abandon their ships, preferring to dig for gold than to risk their lives at sea. As a consequence, many vessels avoided the mainland and Lord Howe Island experienced an increasing trade, which peaked between 1855 and 1857. In 1851, about 16 people were living on the island. Vegetable crops now included potatoes, carrots, maize, pumpkin, taro, watermelon, and even grapes, passionfruit, and coffee. Between 1851 and 1853, several aborted proposals were made by the NSW government to establish a penal settlement on the island.From 1851 to 1854, Henry Denham captain of HMS Herald, which was on a scientific expedition to the southwest Pacific (1852–1856), completed the island's first hydrographic survey. On board were three Scottish biologists, William Milne (a gardener-botanist from the Edinburgh Botanic Garden), John MacGillivray (naturalist) who collected fish and plant specimens, and assistant surgeon and zoologist Denis Macdonald. Together, these men established much basic information on the geology, flora, and fauna of the island.Around 1853, a further three settlers arrived on the American whaling barque Belle, captained by Ichabod Handy. George Campbell (who died in 1856) and Jack Brian (who left the island in 1854) arrived, and the third, Nathan Thompson, brought three women (called Botanga, Bogoroo, and a girl named Bogue) from the Gilbert Islands. When his first wife Botanga died, he then married Bogue. Thompson was the first resident to build a substantial house in the 1860s from mainland cedar washed up on the beach. Most of the residents with island ancestors have blood relations or are connected by marriage to Thompson and his second wife Bogue.In 1855, the island was officially designated as part of New South Wales by the Constitution Act.

From the early 1860s, whaling declined rapidly with the increasing use of petroleum, the onset of the California Gold Rush, and the American Civil War—with unfortunate consequences for the island. To explore alternative means of income, Thompson, in 1867, purchased the Sylph, which was the first local vessel to trade with Sydney (mainly pigs and onions). It anchored in deep water at what is now Sylph's Hole off Old Settlement Beach, but was eventually tragically lost at sea in 1873, which added to the woes of the island at that time.In 1869, the island was visited by magistrate P. Cloete aboard the Thetis investigating a possible murder. He was accompanied by Charles Moore, director of the Botanic Gardens in Sydney, and his assistant William Carron, who forwarded plant specimens to Ferdinand Mueller at the botanic gardens in Melbourne, who by 1875, had catalogued and published 195 species. Also on the ship was William Fitzgerald, a surveyor, and Mr Masters from the Australian Museum. Together, they surveyed the island with the findings published in 1870 when the population was listed as 35 people, their 13 houses built of split palm battens thatched on the roof and sides with palm leaves. Around this time, a downturn of trade began with the demise of the whaling industry and sometimes six to 12 months passed without a vessel calling. With the provisions rotting in the storehouses, the older families lost interest in market gardening.From 1860 to 1872, 43 ships had collected provisions, but from 1873 to 1887, fewer than a dozen had done so. This prompted some activity from the mainland. In 1876, a government report on the island was submitted by surveyor William Fitzgerald based on a visit in the same year. He suggested that coffee be grown, but the kentia palm was already catching world attention. In 1878, the island was declared a forest reserve and Captain Richard Armstrong became the first resident government administrator. He encouraged schools, tree-planting, and the palm trade, dynamited the north passage to the lagoon, and built roads. He also managed to upset the residents, and parliamentarian Bowie Wilson was sent from the mainland in April 1882 to investigate the situation. With Wilson was a team of scientists who included H. Wilkinson from the Mines Department, W. Condor from the Survey Department, J. Duff from the Sydney Botanical Gardens, and A. Morton from the Australian Museum. J. Sharkey from the Government Printing Office took the earliest known photographs of the island and its residents. A full account of the island appeared in the report from this visit, which recommended that Armstrong be replaced. Meanwhile, the population had increased considerably and included 29 children; the report recommended that a schoolmaster be appointed. This study sealed a lasting relationship with three scientific organisations, the Australian Museum, Sydney Royal Botanic Gardens, and Kew Royal Botanic Gardens.

In 1883, the company Burns Philp started a regular shipping service and the number of tourists gradually increased. By 1932, with the regular tourist run of SS Morinda, tourism became the second-largest source of external income after palm sales to Europe. Morinda was replaced by Makambo in 1932, and she in turn by other vessels. The service continues into the present day with the fortnightly Island Trader service from Port Macquarie.The palm trade began in the 1880s when the lowland kentia palm (Howea forsteriana) was first exported to Britain, Europe, and America, but the trade was only placed on a firm financial footing when the Lord Howe Island Kentia Palm Nursery was formed in 1906 (see below).

The first plane to appear on the island was in 1931, when Francis Chichester alighted on the lagoon in a de Havilland Gipsy Moth converted into a floatplane. It was damaged there in an overnight storm, but repaired with the assistance of islanders and then took off successfully nine weeks later for a flight to Sydney. After World War II, in 1947, tourists arrived on Catalina and then four-engined Sandringham flying boats of Ansett Flying Boat Services operating out of Rose Bay, Sydney, and landing on the lagoon, the journey taking about 3½ hours. When Lord Howe Island Airport was completed in 1974, the seaplanes were eventually replaced with QantasLink twin-engined turboprop Dash 8-200 aircraft.

In 2002, the Royal Navy destroyer HMS Nottingham struck Wolf Rock, a reef at Lord Howe Island, and almost sank. In recent times, tourism has increased and the government of New South Wales has been increasingly involved with issues of conservation.On 17 October 2011, a supply ship, M/V Island Trader, with 20 tons of fuel, ran aground in the lagoon. The ship refloated at high tide with no loss of crew or cargo.The 2016 film The Shallows starring Blake Lively was largely filmed on the island.During the COVID-19 pandemic in New South Wales, a public health order was issued on 22 March 2020 that declared Lord Howe Island a public risk area and directed restricted access. As of that date there were no known cases of COVID-19 on the Island.One of the most contentious issues amongst islanders in the 21st century is what to do about the rodent situation. Rodents have only been on the island since the SS Makambo ran aground in 1918, and have wiped out several endemic bird species and were thought to have done the same to the Lord Howe Island stick insect. A plan was made to drop 42 tonnes of rat bait across the island, but the community was heavily divided.The island was due to be declared rodent-free in October 2021, two years after the last live rat was found, but a living male and pregnant female were discovered in April 2021.The eradication, contrary to many community reservations, has seen birds, insects and plants flourish at levels not seen in decades.