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Concept
Heard Island and McDonald Islands
Summary
The Territory of Heard Island and McDonald Islands (HIMI) is an Australian external territory comprising a volcanic group of mostly barren Antarctic islands, about two-thirds of the way from Madagascar to Antarctica. The group's overall size is in area and it has of coastline. Discovered in the mid-19th century, the islands lie on the Kerguelen Plateau in the Indian Ocean and have been an Australian territory since 1947. They contain Australia's only two active volcanoes. The summit of one, Mawson Peak, is higher than any mountain in all other Australian states or territories, except Dome Argus, Mount McClintock and Mount Menzies in the Australian Antarctic Territory.
The islands are among the most remote places on Earth: They are located about southwest of Perth, southwest of Cape Leeuwin, Australia, southeast of South Africa, southeast of Madagascar, north of Antarctica, and southeast of the Kerguelen Islands (part of French Southern and Antarctic Lands). The islands, which are uninhabited, can only be reached by sea, which from Australia takes two weeks in the vessels normally used to access them.
Neither island cluster had recorded visitors until the mid-1850s.
An American sailor, John Heard, on the ship Oriental, sighted Heard Island on 25 November 1853, en route from Boston to Melbourne. He reported the discovery one month later and had the island named after him. His wife Fidelia Heard provided the first written description and drawings of the island. William McDonald aboard the Samarang discovered the nearby McDonald Islands six weeks later, on 4 January 1854.
No landing took place on the islands until March 1855, when sealers from the Corinthian, led by Erasmus Darwin Rogers, went ashore at a place called Oil Barrel Point. From 1855 to 1882 a number of American sealers spent a year or more on the island, living in appalling conditions in dark smelly huts, also at Oil Barrel Point. At its peak the community consisted of 200 people. By 1880, sealers had wiped out most of the seal population and then left the island.
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