Lord Howe Island — island
EmGer7 · CC BY-SA 3.0

Lord Howe Island

  • Elevation59 m
  • 2 min read
  • 31.550° S 159.083° E
  • UNESCO World Heritage
  • UNESCO natural beauty

Interesting facts

  • No trace of prehistoric human presence has ever been found, even after a 1996 archaeological search, which is unusual for a Pacific island of its size.
  • The island is the eroded stump of a shield volcano about seven million years old, and it is expected to disappear beneath the sea within some 200,000 years.
  • It sits on the Lord Howe Rise, part of Zealandia, a largely sunken microcontinent that broke away from Gondwana.
  • The flightless Lord Howe woodhen fell to fewer than 30 birds in the 1970s; after captive breeding and rat eradication, a 2023 survey counted about 1,100.
  • Rats came ashore when the steamer Makambo ran aground in 1918; after an island-wide baiting campaign, Lord Howe was considered rat-free by 2023.
  • The Lord Howe Island stick insect, wiped out on the main island by those rats, was rediscovered in 2001 living in a single shrub on Ball's Pyramid.
  • About 490 fish species have been recorded in its waters, 13 of them found nowhere else, along with more than 80 species of coral.
  • Kentia palm seed has been exported since the 1880s; the palm's tolerance of low light made it a favourite of Victorian conservatories and hotel lobbies.
  • In 1931 Francis Chichester landed a Gipsy Moth floatplane on the lagoon, the first aircraft seen at the island; storm-damaged, it flew out nine weeks later.
  • Its beach sand is made of shell, coral and algae fragments, flecked with black diopside and green olivine from the volcanic rock.

Why it is worth it

Lord Howe Island is a crescent of land in the Tasman Sea, about ten kilometres long and in places barely three hundred metres wide, lying some 600 km east of Port Macquarie on the Australian coast. Its drama is concentrated at the southern end, where Mount Lidgbird (777 m) and Mount Gower (875 m) rise almost sheer from the water, their summits often wrapped in cloud. The curve of the island shelters a lagoon of astonishing clarity, closed off by a barrier reef that sits at about 31°30' south — the most southerly coral reef on Earth, where tropical corals and fish share water with species from cooler seas.

The island was first sighted by Lieutenant Henry Lidgbird Ball in February 1788 and it stayed uninhabited until 1834, when a whaling ship left three men to set up a supply station. Its isolation produced a remarkable roll of endemic life: the Lord Howe woodhen, a ground-dwelling bird found nowhere else; the kentia palm, Howea forsteriana; and the Lord Howe Island stick insect. The only wild population of that insect was found on Ball's Pyramid, a jagged volcanic spire 551 m tall that stands alone in the sea about 23 km to the southeast — one of the most dramatic rocks in any ocean.

The Lord Howe Island Group was inscribed as a World Heritage Site in 1982. Life on the island is deliberately small in scale: a few hundred residents and a cap of 400 visitors at any one time. The rewards are quiet ones — snorkelling over the reef in the lagoon, watching seabirds wheel around the cliffs, or climbing Mount Gower to look down on the whole island and the pyramid beyond.

Getting there

Lord Howe has its own small airstrip, Lord Howe Island Airport (LDH), run by the island board. Scheduled flights link it with Sydney, and there are also services from Port Macquarie and the Gold Coast; baggage allowances on these small aircraft are strict. The nearest larger mainland city with an airport, Coffs Harbour (CFS), lies about 590 km away across the sea and is not a practical gateway. There is no regular passenger ferry; the island is reached by air.

On these lists

The Most Beautiful Places in New South Wales 12The Most Beautiful Places in Australia 55The Most Beautiful UNESCO-Listed Islands in Australia 5The Most Beautiful Islands in Australia 7The UNESCO Sites of Exceptional Natural Beauty in Australia 10The Most Beautiful UNESCO World Heritage Sites in Australia 12The Most Beautiful UNESCO-Listed Islands 15The Most Beautiful Water Wonders in Australia 23The Most Beautiful Islands 59The UNESCO Sites of Exceptional Natural Beauty 77The Most Beautiful Water Wonders 429The Most Beautiful UNESCO World Heritage Sites 557

From the encyclopaedia

Lord Howe Island is an irregularly crescent-shaped volcanic remnant in the Tasman Sea between Australia and New Zealand, part of the Australian state of New South Wales. It lies 600 km directly east of mainland Port Macquarie, 780 km northeast of Sydney, and about 900 km southwest of Norfolk Island. It is about 10 km (6.2 mi) long and between 0.3 and 2.0 km wide with an area of 14.55 km2, though just 3.98 km2 of that comprise the low-lying developed part of the island. The island is named after Richard Howe, 1st Earl Howe.

Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

-31.55000, 159.08333per Wikidata