Battered by constant winds and rough seas, Macquarie Island lies in the subantarctic ocean between New Zealand and Antarctica. It is the only place on Earth where rocks from deep inside the planet rise above the ocean. Even with its harsh weather, the island is home to penguins, seals and albatrosses.
Best-selling Australian writer Charlotte McConaghy sets her latest novel, Wild Dark Shore, on a fictional version of Macquarie. The landscape is raw and dramatic, wild, threatening and beautiful all at once. Rising seas and terrifying storms caused by global warming are steadily consuming Shearwater Island. It is also home to a decommissioned research station containing a seed vault, inspired by the real Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway. This vault holds seeds from every country — an insurance policy designed to protect the world’s plant life and ensure it can be renewed should climate disaster ever destroy the planet.
It’s a tense, dark novel that blends family drama, ecological crisis, mystery and the suspense of a survival story in a series of short chapters and different points of view, with voices that shift from third to first person.
McConaghy has a gift for capturing the tension and beauty of endangered places. Migrations (2020) follows a woman tracking the last flock of Arctic terns, while Once There Were Wolves (2021) tells of a biologist reintroducing grey wolves to the Scottish Highlands. But Shearwater Island may be her most haunting backdrop yet. Here, she draws on her own research trip to Macquarie Island, and it shows in the detail: the ferocious wind, the collapsing beaches, the penguins and seals struggling to survive as the waves inch higher. The drowning island is alive with beauty and menace.
The story opens with Rowan, a shipwrecked woman lying half-dead on the black sands. “She washes in with the storm, draped upon a tangle of driftwood. The girl sees her from among the seals. She picks her way through their fat sleeping bodies and moves to the surging waterline…. The girl wades into the black roar. She dives under and swims out. Reaches for this bulbous thing to help steer it free. When her feet hit sand she rises, dragging the driftwood behind her…. Preparing all the while for something terrible. Something altering. But a last wave sends the tangle onto the beach and the girl parts the curtain of snarled kelp to reveal a face, and it is not swollen or blue or nibbled; it is breathing.”
Rowan is pulled from the water by Fen Salt and taken into the lighthouse where Dominic Salt and his three children — Raff, Fen, and nine-year-old Orly — have been living for years. The last people left on the island after the scientists evacuated, their job is to look after the abandoned research base and its storehouse of plant life.
Dominic is still carrying the weight of his wife’s death: “There is such peril in loving things at all, and he feels sort of proud, in fact, that he just keeps on doing it.” His children have each found their own ways to cope. Raff retreats into music, Fen spends her days among the seals, and Orly, who has lived his whole life here, is fascinated by the plants stored in the vault. Orly’s careful observations about seeds and trees in crisis are some of the book’s most moving moments.
When storms breach the building and flood water begins to seep inside the seed vault, the family is forced to choose which seeds to save and which to abandon. The urgency feels real, a grim reminder that climate change is fast transforming our world, “because we have, all of us humans, decided what to save, and that is ourselves”.
Wombats are not like humans, Rowan says. They take their families underground when there’s a fire. “They have tunnels under the earth … but they don’t just take their families, they also take other animals down there. They save everyone they can. And then the mum and dad wombats stick their bums up into the entrances of the burrows to block the fire and the ash from coming down. And their bums get burned, and sometimes they die, but they protect the others.”
McConaghy homes in on the impact of tragedy and trauma. After years on the island, the Salts have grown used to their solitude. But Rowan’s arrival forces them to consider what it might mean to rejoin the wider world. As she and Dominic circle each other suspiciously, their fragile trust grows into something more. Rowan warns Fen, “It’s not a good idea to fall in love, not with people and not with places.” But by the end, the book suggests that connection, even when it brings pain, is worth risking. “What is the use of safety,” Rowan asks, “if it deprives you of everything else?”
In the final third, the story accelerates into high-stakes action as the sea rises faster, and the family faces the real possibility of losing everything. “But here is the nature of life. That we must love things with our whole selves, knowing they will die,” McConaghy writes.
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