Lord Howe Island lies in the Tasman Sea, some 600 kilometres from mainland Australia. This World Heritage–listed holiday destination with approximately 380 permanent residents astounds its many visitors with dramatic landscapes, groves of Kentia palms and colonies of seabirds.
Here on this isolated volcanic outcrop, the island’s plants and birds have evolved in isolation from predators over millennia. But a shipwreck in June 1918 brought stowaway black rats to its shores. The pests soon spread, alarming the island’s residents and decimating their valuable Kentia palm seed crop.
The Lord Howe Island Control Board desperately sought advice from the Australian Museum and, in February 1921, zoologists Allan Riverstone McCulloch and Ellis Le Geyt Troughton took the opportunity to revisit their favourite island, and escape office politics. Upon returning to Sydney four weeks later, McCulloch reported to the waiting press: ‘The present position is extremely serious; what it will be within a year or two … can be left to the imagination.’
McCulloch wanted people to understand the ecological impacts of the rats. ‘The. McCulloch repeated his concerns in the museum magazine more poetically: ‘Within two years, this paradise of birds has become a wilderness, and the quiet of death reigns where all was melody.’
