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 up to 3500 penguins a day during the summer oiling season, penguin oil never became the lucrative commodity its boosters predicted. This article 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 article argues that the history of penguin oil provides an entry point for understanding how extraction has profoundly shaped human interactions with the Southern Ocean World.