Campbell Island / Motu Ihupuku
— — the wind nobody is there to feel.
Not only on a wall.
“An uninhabited island roughly 700 kilometres south of the South Island, ringed by sea cliffs and held by the Roaring Forties. The megaherbs come up in summer, an unlikely garden of giant daisies and purple Pleurophyllum on the slopes above Perseverance Harbour. Southern royal albatross nest here in numbers that exist almost nowhere else. The old weather station at Beeman closed to permanent staff in 1995, and the silence that followed is part of what the place is now.
Campbell Island / Motu Ihupuku, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Campbell Island / Motu Ihupuku lies near 52.5 degrees south, about 700 kilometres south of Bluff and well inside the subantarctic belt. The island covers roughly 113 square kilometres and reaches 569 metres at Mount Honey. It is the southernmost of New Zealand's five subantarctic island groups, inscribed together as a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1998 for their exceptional seabird biodiversity. The Department of Conservation manages the island as a nature reserve, and access requires a permit; most visits arrive by expedition vessel into Perseverance Harbour, a long drowned valley on the eastern coast.
The last permanent inhabitants left in 1995, when the meteorological station at Beeman Cove was automated. Brown rats were eradicated in a 2001 operation that covered the entire island, the largest rat eradication ever attempted at the time. Since then the bird-song has come back. Southern royal albatross, with a wingspan close to three metres, nest in the tussock; yellow-eyed penguins haul out on the eastern shores. There are no roads. The wind blows for most of the year from the west, across more than two thousand kilometres of open Southern Ocean, and the silence the wind makes is the dominant sound.
Most expedition voyages reach Campbell Island between November and February, the subantarctic summer, when daylight stretches long and the megaherbs flower across the hillsides above Perseverance Harbour. Pleurophyllum speciosum throws up its purple daisy-heads in December; Anisotome latifolia and Bulbinella rossii follow. Temperatures rarely climb above 10 degrees Celsius even at the peak of the season, and rain falls on more than 320 days a year. Winter brings persistent gales and snow at altitude. The albatross breeding cycle runs over a full year, so an adult is on the nest in every month.