The Macquarie Island SagaMacquarie Island is a cold, windswept, lonely island prone to blizzards, and located half way between Tasmania and the Antarctica mainland. The main island is twenty one miles long and about two miles wide. It is uninhabited, and over-run at times by rats, mice, cats & rabbits. Native animals are penguins and fur seals, and albatross birds. The area is prone to earthquake, including two quite recent quakes that measured up around 8 on the Richter Scale.
Macquarie Island has been noted as a place of shipwreck, the temporary unplanned home of shipwreck survivors, and a cause for dispute between Australia and New Zealand as to who owned the island. The island was named in honor of the governor of New South Wales, Governor Lachlan Macquarie. On several occasions, seafarers have been marooned on the island, for varying periods of time. The first known visitors to Macquarie Island were Polynesian sea travelers, though it is not known when they initially encountered the island. Geography would suggest that they came from New Zealand.
The first European to visit the island was Captain Frederick Hasselborough aboard the Perseverance who by chance came across the island on July 10, 1810. Ten years later, the Russian explorer, Thaddeus von Bellinghausen also visited Macquarie. An additional two years later again, Captain Douglass on the Mariner visited the island and he described it as unfit for human habitation.
Three years later, that is in the year 1825, Macquarie Island was declared as a part of Van Diemen’s Land, or Tasmania as we know it today. In the year 1997, it was declared a World Heritage Site.
For about a hundred years, Macquarie Island was used as a base for commercial companies harvesting animal oils and furs and skins. This commercial exploitation ended around the year 1920 when the animal populations were hunted to almost extinction.
During the past one hundred years, 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 Antarctica was installed on this forbidding island. The story goes back to the year 1911.
It was in December of that year, 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 wayfarers on the island, the survivors of a ship that was 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 into a newly built wooden hut at the northern end of the island. The twin wooden masts were erected on top of the 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 did not fare well. The aerial system was damaged and destroyed by wind storms 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 was sunk by enemy action soon after the commencement of World War 1, and all of the equipment was lost.
The second wireless station for Macquarie Island was listed with the callsign VIQ. This was in the year 1921, but available records do not confirm whether the station was ever actually erected. It would appear that it may have been on the air for just a short period of time.
The third occasion for a radio station on Macquarie Island was in 1947. A new shortwave station with the callsign VJM was planned, and it was finally installed by a contingent of amateur radio operators in 1952. This station at 1½ kW was in intermittent usage, depending upon 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 three or four widely separated eras under three different callsigns, MQI, VIQ & VJM. Wireless and radio messages from Macquarie Island were mainly for the benefit of other shipping, other isolated wireless stations, and with the home base on the island of Tasmania. Important news information was passed on for publication in newspapers, and in more recent eras, for use by the electronic media.
It is understood that a few QSLs do exist verifying the VJM callsign, though several amateur radio operators who have served on the island have also issued their own amateur QSL cards.
(NWS 60/AWR Wavescan)