The graves register at the Cornelian Bay Cemetery office in Hobart notes that he died 2 September 1928, and gives the precise location of his plot, down with the Methodists. I walked past the anonymous sward of the pauper’s block to get to it.

Joseph Hatch was once a mayor of Invercargill, and a member of the New Zealand House of Representatives. He was also a lock stock and barrel capitalist, a ruthless entrepreneur, and, at the height of his career at least, a wealthy man. I picked my way downhill, past the quiet rank and file of Hobart’s oldest and largest cemetery. Given the significance of Hatch’s life, I expected to find him properly squared away in death—a tall headstone at least, stone angels or a plinth perhaps. The reality was more grimly poetic. A concrete single, with marble chips and the odd eucalyptus nut fallen from a nearby tree. No angels, and not even a simple headstone. Nor had there ever been one. Hatch’s grave was nameless.

For this, blame perhaps the penguins. Blame people’s love for penguins. Blame people’s lies about penguins. Joseph Hatch drew big crowds to the town halls of his day. His reputation was always on the line, and a Hatch meeting invited its crowd to clap, or boo, or cheer. Hatch himself was a gifted speaker, precocious in his own defence and witheringly scornful of his enemies. His meetings were great entertainment, but perhaps the crowds were also drawn by the hypnotic purity of his vision, and by the glimpses he gave in speech and magic lantern slides of an emblematic island that gradually became such a masterpiece of horror. For Hatch embodied the Old Testament command for turning a wild planet to human uses: “And subdue it, and have dominion... over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.” Over a period of 30 years, and despite implacable difficulty, Hatch would render down over 3 million penguins.

Macquarie is a bleak island 750 miles south of Bluff across a stormy southern ocean. It is 21 miles long and up to 3 miles wide, but without any harbour, swept often by high winds, and pounded by dreadful seas. The island is also a great ark of strange life. Albatrosses skim the hills or sit solemnly amid tussock on their pudding bowl nests. Sea elephants lie in wallows along the shoreline. High overhead, a skua gull may drop a stolen egg and another skua swoop to snatch it in mid-air. Out from the beaches the grey heads of leopard seals swivel above the kelp, watching for prey. And surfing in by the thousand, on waves that bowl them right up onto the shingle, are the penguins.