This is the Friends of History Debating Society. I'm John Batchew with my very good colleague, Jeremy Zackis, in New South Wales.

I discover, through the direction of novel reading, that there's a new book highly recommended by one person who didn't know anything about Australia.

That would be me.

Macquarie Island. Macquarie Island is said to be between Tasmania and Antarctica.

It's a World Heritage Site. It's the backdrop for a new novel that is highly recommended. Charlotte McConaughey's

the novel is called Wild Dark Shore. Shearwater Island in the fiction is based on McCona Island.

I mean, Macquarie Island.

What is striking about Macquarie Island is that it's got a number of breeding sites for the albatross.

It doesn't have any cats anymore, but they destroyed the Macquarie parakeet population I learned from Claude.

And more to the point, that people worry about it with climate change.

Jeremy, Macquarie Island, is it much in your news, or is it regarded as just a legacy of Australia's late formation?

Well, interestingly enough, John, even though it is so far south of Tasmania and practically,

well, it is actually about halfway to Antarctica, it does tend to make the news a lot here

in Australia.

And it does so in the conservation news and in the scientific research news,

because Australia uses Macquarie Island effectively as, I guess you could say,

a petri dish for looking at what an untouched, unspoilt part of Earth looks like here and now.

And so what we typically have literally launching from Tasmania are research vessels that go

down to Macquarie Island from time to time and effectively observe the Albatross population,

certainly the bird population too, because there's some migratory birds that do actually come

from the Australian mainland onto Macquarie Island at certain parts of the year. It's effectively

monitored to really check for climate at certain parts of the year, it's effectively monitored to really

...