Lord Howe Island
Lord Howe 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 directly east of mainland Port Macquarie, northeast of Sydney, and about southwest of Norfolk Island. It is about long and between wide with an area of, though just of that comprise the low-lying developed part of the island. The island is named after Richard Howe, 1st Earl Howe.
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. 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 to the southeast of Howe. To the north lies the Admiralty Group, a cluster of seven uninhabited islets.
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, Gold Coast, Newcastle, 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". 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.
Bioregion
Lord Howe Island is part of the IBRA region Pacific Subtropical Islands and is subregion PSI01 with an area of. In the WWF ecoregion system, Lord Howe Island constitutes the entirety of the 'Lord Howe Island subtropical forests' ecoregion. This ecoregion is in the Australasian realm, and the tropical and subtropical moist broadleaf forests biome. The WWF ecoregion has an area of 14 km2.History
Prehistory
Before European discovery and settlement, Lord Howe Island apparently was uninhabited, and unknown to Polynesian peoples of the South Pacific. No evidence to suggest prehistoric human activity has ever been found on Lord Howe Island, even after an extensive archaeological investigation in 1996. In Australian Archaeology Atholl Anderson concluded in 2003 that, "the case for no pre-European settlement on Lord Howe Island is now more compelling than before" and that "the absence of pre-European settlement on Lord Howe Island is not easily explained. At 16 km2 it is twice the size of Pitcairn Island and half the size of Norfolk Island, two other remote subtropical islands that were inhabited prehistorically, and it had a biota very similar to that of Norfolk Island."1788–1834: First European visits
The first reported sighting of Lord Howe Island was on 17 February 1788 by Lieutenant Henry Lidgbird Ball, commander of the Armed Tender , 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.A drawing made in May 1788 by Arthur Bowes Smyth who was the surgeon aboard, a ship of the First Fleet heading for China on its return trip to England.
Many names on the island date from this time, and also from May of the same year, when four ships of the First Fleet,,, Lady Penrhyn and, 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 Lady Penrhyn.
Smyth was in Sydney when 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 in going out, and all were very agreeably surprised to find great numbers of a 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 turtles to Port Jackson and many were distributed among the camp and fleet."
File:Representation of a Bird of the Coot kind, found at Lord Howe Island A604008h.jpg|thumb|upright=1.65|left|alt=Original drawing of the extinct white gallinule by Arthur Bowes Smyth, surgeon aboard First Fleet ship Lady Penrhyn |The extinct white swamphen, 1788 watercolour by Arthur Bowes Smyth
Watercolour sketches of native birds including the Lord Howe woodhen, white swamphen and Lord Howe pigeon 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, 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 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.
The island was subsequently visited by many governments 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 deck work 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.
1834–1841: Settlement
Permanent settlement on Lord Howe was established in , 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 was 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 their Māori wives and two Māori 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.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, whose employees and others then settled on the island.
1842–1860: Trading provisions
The new business was advertised and ships trading between Sydney and the New Hebrides would also be 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 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, completed the island's first hydrographic survey. On board were three Scottish biologists, William Milne, John MacGillivray who collected fish and plant specimens, and assistant surgeon and zoologist Denis Macdonald. Together, these men established much basic information on the island's geology, flora, and fauna.
Around 1853, a further three settlers arrived on the American whaling barque Belle, captained by Ichabod Handy. George Campbell and Jack Brian arrived, and the third, Nathan Thompson, brought three women 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.