Island of Strange Noises

Television (Full Length) – 1981

The remote Antipodes Islands lie 860 kilometres southeast of Stewart Island. This 1980 documentary follows a Wildlife Service team surveying the islands’ inhabitants who are making all the strange noises – fur seals, albatrosses, petrels, parakeets and snipe, elephant seals and prolific penguins. It also investigates threats to their survival: mice and overfishing in the southern ocean. Winner of a Silver Medal at New York's International Film and Television Festival, this early Wild South episode helped establish the reputation of TVNZ’s Natural History Unit (later NHNZ).

To be shipwrecked 500 westerly windswept miles from New Zealand, imagine the terror of the castaways’ first night ashore: the darkness cut by a piercing subantarctic wind, and by a weird cacophony of cries.
– Narrator Peter Hayden