The old Lusitania Bay hut

Lusitania Bay, toward the southern end of the east coast is a "must see" destination for its huge King Penguin colony, estimated at 170,000 breeding pairs and covering the beach for several kilometres. Near the centre of the photo is the old hut installed by ANARE in the early 1950s. I once stayed there, a link to my 1968 photo is in a note at top left. The slopes are typical of the steep escarpment surrounding the island, inland it is essentially a rolling plateau. The island is about 34km long and 5km wide, running more or less north-south.

Although tourists are limited to landing at either the Macquarie Island research station, or at Sandy Bay, there is no constraint on floating around other parts of the island close to shore: apart from rocks and safety constraints.

I was concerned about water getting to my digital camera, so for this excursion I used a pocketable APS-C film camera. After this voyage, I never again used film: on my return I was so disappointed by the colour reproduction of the prints I asked for them to be printed again, but there was little improvement - so I went entirely digital. This is from a digital copy I made from the film negative, technically not great but far better than the original prints!