Expedition members are winding down their field visits, packing away equipment, samples and supplies for the return home and doing last minute checks on research to make sure there are no gaps that will definitely turn their results into toast on arrival home (after 9 February there’ll be no going back to Campbell Island for a quick look).

With all the bustle of closing down the expedition I am reminded of the 1916 Campbell Island farm station diary in which the headman wrote...

The sea lion bites are healing well – getting to the itchy stage and am off the antibiotics. That experience has made me a tad cautious – verging on the paranoid, as I poke under every tussock and fern in my travels around the coast - where there is a possibility of another close encounter. Like this evening on the board walk – got past one sea lion beside the track and almost immediately encountered another – or rather an amorous couple of sea lions – biting...

It is 10.30pm and I am just back from taking photos in the waning light and persistent drizzle. The base is quiet with the Maia having just left, sounding its fog horn as it lifted anchor and drifted off into the rain and mist. In a way it is like the silence that descends on a house when the kids have gone back to school, that seems all the more quiet after the fun and laughter of the school holidays (funny I should be using that simile given that I have no children of my own!). With our...

Having had a long-time interest in meteorology, I am the Expedition’s unofficial weather forecaster and receive weather-maps per the MetService Radiofax transmissions.

Interpreting these maps for the Expedition enables me to spread dismay, despondency and despair daily. I have a natural talent for this anyway and indeed doom and gloom is one of the few things I’m very good at.

If the weather is bad, as it often is here, I advise the team to make the most of it...

My heart is nailed to Campbell Island
like the aluminium pegs pushed in peat 40 years past
to mark plots with unknown futures
but with some secret aspiration to monitor vegetation change
forever -
attributed to sheep forgotten by shepherds half a century before

And here i am again
trying to locate these spots, being covered over by peat and plants
with fading memories and sepia pics
with fading muscles on spongy puds –...

I have cleared encroaching vegetation from the memorial to Leslie Clifton close to the former Magnetic Hut. Clifton produced the first topographical map of Campbell Island in 1946 – it was the standard reference for 40 years until the Department of Lands and Survey published the modern map in 1986 based on aerial photography by the RNZAF in 1984. Clifton worked in very difficult conditions without the aid of modern equipment and instruments today’s cartographers take for...

When I arrived at Campbell Island with the Bicentennial Expedition on the 8th of December 2010 I went up to the Met. Office in the Tech. Building to assist Wayne Lowry from MetService with the AWS (Automatic Weather Station) calibrations. On the wall of the office is the following note written in flowing script with a fountain pen.

‘In remembrance of my dear brother, Ralston Hawea Thomson, who worked on Campbell Island as a Shepherd with three other men. I was twelve years...

Canadians are a fine good bunch, and ingenious to boot, a character trait most kiwis can approve of. Canadians also have a rich cultural heritage. It should have been no surprise to me then that my Canadian host at the Penguin Bay Hilton had started to create his own versions of the staple foods of New Zealand back country huts. Two of these achievements in particular come to mind. In the cold and clag one afternoon down at the Rockhopper Penguin colony, my spirits were a little revived to...

The 28th of December! My dear wee sisters 26th birthday, so here I am sending flowers, or at least a picture of one. This is the smallest of the megaherbs (macroforbs), Damnamenia vernicosa. Latin is always a mouthful, but this little guy has no common name, so for the sake of the audience let’s dub it the Subantarctic Mountain Daisy. Usually these have a disk floret (centre) that is deep purple, but I have stumbled across this white anomaly, a rare treasure, and a wonderful present...

On the mainland Christmas often seems to sneak up on you but unless you are a hermit that shuns the media, you always know it is coming by all the advertising that starts as a trickle in November and becomes a torrent in December.

This year I have found myself in the novel situation of being away from all forms of media since December 3rd. Thus I have not watched television, listened to the radio, read the newspaper, or surfed the Internet during the period of Christmas overload....