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Penguins and the remains of the wreck The Gratitude, Nuggets Beach, Macquarie Island, 1911, Frank Hurley
Part 1 – Macquarie Island & South Georgia
Thank you to the staff of Wavescan, for Part 1 of Part 3 in this series
Jeff: This week, we begin a two-part look at radio broadcasting in a part of the world few of us will ever get to visit – Antarctica. In part 1 this week, Ray Robinson looks at the history of broadcasting in two remote islands in the Antarctic region – Macquarie Island, governed by Australia, and South Georgia, governed by the British.
Ray: Thanks, Jeff. Macquarie Island is a cold, windswept island located halfway between the South Island of New Zealand and the Antarctic land mass. It is a long, thin island, 21 miles long and 3 miles wide, and is actually the exposed top of the Macquarie Ridge where the Australian and Pacific tectonic plates meet. Consequently, the area is prone to earthquakes, and two very large ones have occurred there so far this century, up around 8 on the Richter Scale. In spite of its remoteness and extreme climate, though, the island’s latitude is actually less than 55 degrees south – about the same latitude in the northern hemisphere as, say, Newcastle in England, or Copenhagen, Denmark.
The island has no permanent human population, but it has been governed as part of the Australian state of Tasmania since 1880. It is also home to the entire Royal Penguin population during their annual nesting season.
Macquarie Island has been noted as a place of shipwreck and as the temporary, unplanned home of shipwreck survivors. It was named in honor of a governor of New South Wales, Governor Lachlan Macquarie. The first known visitors to Macquarie Island were Polynesian sea travelers, most likely from New Zealand, although it’s not known when they initially encountered the island.
The first European to visit the island was Captain Frederick Hasselborough aboard the Perseverance who came across the island by chance on July 10, 1810. Ten years later, a Russian explorer, Thaddeus von Bellinghausen, also visited Macquarie. And then two years later again, Captain Douglass on the Mariner visited the island and pronounced it as unfit for human habitation. But, in 1825, Macquarie Island was declared to be part of Van Diemen’s Land, or Tasmania as we know it today.
For about 100 years, the island was used as a base for commercial companies harvesting animal oils, furs and skins. This commercial exploitation ended around 1920, by which time the animal populations had been hunted almost to extinction.
Since shortly before World War I, a total of four different communication stations have been established on Macquarie Island and its claim to fame is that the very first wireless station in the Antarctic region was installed on this forbidding island. The story goes back to the year 1911.
It was in December of 1911 that a small convoy of sailing ships, led by the Aurora, left Hobart, Tasmania, bound for Macquarie Island. A little over a week later, these venturing ships arrived off the coast of Macquarie, only to find several seafarers already on the island, survivors of a ship that had been wrecked there just the day before.
On board the Aurora was all of the apparatus intended for the new wireless station; a 1½ kW Telefunken spark transmitter & receiver, masts & wires, and a petrol generator. All of this electrical equipment was installed in a newly built wooden hut at the northern end of the island, for operation by the commercial companies engaged in animal hunting and processing there. Twin wooden masts were erected on top of a nearby hill which was 350 ft above sea level.
The first historic wireless contact with the outside world was made on the evening of February 13, 1912 when station MQI talked with shipping south of Australia and New Zealand in spark gap Morse Code. Soon afterwards, Morse Code contact was made with wireless stations AAM in Melbourne, AAA in Sydney & WN in Wellington. However, the Macquarie Island wireless station didn’t fare well. The aerial system was damaged and destroyed by high winds on three or four occasions, and there was always difficulty in making adequate contact with the Antarctic mainland as well as with Australia and New Zealand.
Finally, at the end of nearly three years of difficult service, the station was dismantled and shipped back to Australia, but the ship carrying it was sunk in a naval skirmish soon after the commencement of World War I in 1914, and all of the equipment was lost. Both New Guinea and Samoa were German colonies at that time, and naval engagement with Australia and New Zealand began as early as August 1914.
The second wireless station for Macquarie Island was planned after World War I, and was listed with the callsign VIQ in 1921. However, available records indicate that it may only have been on the air for a short period of time, if indeed it was ever erected at all.
A third station, this time for voice communication, was planned for Macquarie Island in 1947. This was to be a shortwave station with the callsign VJM, and it was finally installed by a contingent of amateur radio operators five years later in 1952. This station, again using 1½ kW, was in intermittent usage, depending on the availability of personnel, until communication on shortwave was phased out in 1988 in favor of satellite communication.
However, the shortwave station on Macquarie was re-activated in 1992 under the same callsign, VJM, but with a batch of new equipment, including a 1 kW Racal transmitter. Thus, Macquarie Island has been on the air with communication equipment during four widely separated eras under three different callsigns, MQI, VIQ & VJM. Wireless and radio messages from Macquarie Island were mainly for the benefit of passing shipping and other isolated wireless stations, with the home base on the island of Tasmania.
It is understood that a few QSL’s do exist verifying the VJM callsign, and in addition, several amateur radio operators who served on the island also issued their own amateur QSL cards.
And then there’s another very remote island near the continent of Antarctica – South Georgia in the far South Atlantic Ocean. Like Macquarie, this island is also less than 55 degrees south, but is often covered by snow, and famously was where Ernest Shackleton finally made landfall in 1916 following the disastrous Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition.
South Georgia is larger than Macquarie, being about 100 miles long and 25 miles wide, but it is equally as forbidding. The first settlement on the island was established in 1904 by a colony of Norwegian seafarers, and it ultimately became the hub of the whaling industry with some 2,000 permanent residents.
In 1925, a shortwave wireless station with the call sign ZBH was established by the British administration to enable communication with the outside world.
In 1938, a solar eclipse occurred over South Georgia on Sunday morning, May 28. The British arranged for special broadcasts from the island for the occasion and two small portable transmitters were stationed at two different locations, one on South Georgia itself, and the other further south on South Orkney, much closer to the Antarctic landmass. It is understood that these transmitters operated in the old Apex Hi-Fidelity Band, 30-40 MHz, feeding live transmissions to a more powerful relay station in Argentina, probably at Monte Grande.
Records also indicate that the communication station ZBH, located at King Edward Point on South Georgia Island, was also used to relay the live broadcasts from the two small portable transmitters. At the time of the eclipse, ZBH was on the air with 1 kW, on 8205 kHz.
In 1947, ZBH was again noted on 8 MHz with an irregular schedule that included a relay of the BBC news at 6:00 am. Station ZBH in South Georgia was later shown on a set of postage stamps, issued in 2006.
Reception reports for the special eclipse broadcasts from South Georgia were requested and these were to be addressed to the Colonial Secretary at Port Stanley in the Falklands. However, it is unknown whether any QSL’s were ever issued for the event. It is also unknown whether any QSL’s were issued for the relay of the BBC news via ZBH, or for any of its regular communications on shortwave.
Well, next week, I’ll be looking at the history of broadcasting on the Antarctic landmass itself, and there is quite a bit more to that than you might think.
Back to you, Jeff.
(Ray Robinson/Jeff White)
