“Alert Expedition 1950”

The first major discovery from Rowley Taylor’s cabinet: a VHS tape containing 16mm footage from the 1950 expedition to the Antipodes and Bounty Islands!

These days, finding a VHS tape usually means stumbling across some grainy recordings of 1980s TV shows. But tucked away in one of the cabinet drawers was a tape labelled “Alert Expedition 1950.” With no way to play it ourselves, we sent it to a digitising company here in Dunedin. Today we got the file back – and it was exactly what the label promised: 16mm footage filmed by Alex Black, skipper of the Alert, which carried Robert Falla and other giants of New Zealand zoology to the Antipodes and Bounty Islands.

The footage is extraordinary. It provides the first visual record to match written accounts of the immense Rockhopper penguin population on the Antipodes Islands in the mid-20th century. Today only a handful of these birds remain, so reading passages like this feels almost unbelievable:

“Robert Falla commented that the nests of the Erect-crested penguins were surrounded and outnumbered by those of Rockhoppers and that some nests are on beach boulders near the high tide mark, and penguin suburbs go up the hills inland as high as 800 feet.”
– Taylor 2006, “Straight Through From London”

As it turns out, those early descriptions weren’t exaggerations at all. Now we can see it with our own eyes.

We’ve uploaded the video to the Tawaki Project YouTube channel: