Environmental Exchanges Seminar Series - Rohan Howitt

Launching in February 2022, the Environmental Exchanges Seminar Series is an opportunity to showcase and discuss innovative new research that engages with key themes in environmental history. On 27 September 2023, the Centre for Environmental History at ANU held their third Environmental Exchanges Seminar for second semester on the theme 'extraction'.
Oil from Penguins: Mentalities of Extraction in the Southern Ocean World, 1889-1919
From 1889 to 1919, Macquarie Island was the centre of one of the world’s most unusual extractive industries. On this small island, roughly midway between Australia and Antarctica, penguins were killed and boiled down to produce oil. Yet despite a single company having a virtual monopoly and investing heavily in machinery that allowed them to process 3,500 penguins a day during the summer oiling season, penguin oil never became the lucrative commodity its boosters predicted. This paper explores two overlapping processes of extraction in the Southern Ocean World. It firstly reconstructs the extraction of oil from penguins on Macquarie Island, a deeply controversial industry that triggered an organised transnational conservation movement aimed at ending penguin oiling and establishing a wildlife sanctuary on the island. This physical process of extraction is then used to explore the wider mentality of extraction that both animated the penguin oilers’ schemes and shaped visions for the island’s future articulated by the oilers’ critics. The paper argues that the history of penguin oil provides an entry point for understanding how extraction has shaped human interactions with the Southern Ocean World.
Dr Rohan Howitt is a lecturer in environmental history at Monash University. Rohan is a global and environmental historian of the Southern Ocean World, focusing on the deeply interconnected histories of Australia, Antarctica, New Zealand, the subantarctic islands, and the Southern Ocean itself. Prior to joining Monash, Rohan was the inaugural Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for Environmental History at the Australian National University in 2022.
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