Culture
The penguin history
by Philip Matthews
How politically active journalist and “social entrepreneur” Geoff Chapple came to write the story of Joseph Hatch, arch-capitalist and penguin killer.
Geoff Chapple was killing time in the Southland Museum, waiting for the boat that would take him to the Sub-Antarctic islands, when he saw the name.
Joseph Hatch. Who was this guy? He had been Mayor of Invercargill once and an MP, but history wasn’t proud of him. In the museum there was a replica of the machine that Hatch had used to produce oil from animals on remote Macquarie Island. It sounds grotesque. Arriving on Macquarie in 1887, Hatch’s gang first went after sea elephants, hunting and killing them and boiling them down for oil. But that was hard work – you needed something smaller. Something like penguins.
Over nearly 30 years, from 1890 to 1919, Hatch killed about two million penguins on Macquarie. Heading into the rough Sub-Antarctics seas, Chapple tried to imagine the little boats of Hatch’s gang, loaded with barrels of penguin oil, tilting on the waves. “Man, what those guys did was astonishing in modern terms. And the attrition rate was high. Hatch would have been either directly or partly responsible for at least 20 deaths. Those are just little boats that went straight to the bottom.
“You can’t help but admire his entrepreneurial drive. No one had done an oiling job on penguins before!”
Chapple didn’t go to Macquarie on that trip, but on Campbell Island he saw something that he believes was a messenger pointing him towards his next task. The giant king penguin was probably a straggler from Macquarie. “Big. A big bird. I kept an eye on it.”
He wanted to know more about this slaughter of the innocents. He researched and wrote a long magazine article about Hatch’s macabre enterprise for New Zealand Geographic, even visiting Hatch’s nameless grave in Tasmania. Then he wrote up Hatch’s story as a one-man play, known initially as The Oil Factor and then simply as Hatch. The play will soon have its premiere in Auckland.
The southern voyage and the penguin sighting were key parts of its creation, but the final trigger for going deeper into Hatch’s story came while reading Sara Wheeler’s Cherry, a biography of polar explorer Apsley Cherry-Garrard. Wheeler’s subject was the author of The Worst Journey in the World – “perhaps the greatest travel book of all time,” says Chapple – who had travelled to Cape Crozier in 1911, during the worst stretches of an Antarctic winter, to retrieve penguin eggs. After the war, Wheeler wrote, Cherry-Garrard lent his name to a campaign to close down Hatch’s business.
This seemed astonishing to Chapple: so many great names – Baron Walter Rothschild, H G Wells, Douglas Mawson, among others – lined up against one man in New Zealand. Then he discovered that Hatch had struck back, maligning his enemies and talking up his case in a magic-lantern slideshow.
“I came to know that he was silver-tongued, very persuasive. Demagogic. Crowds loved him. They loved him because he was so provocative. He would slander you. Mawson, the great Australian Antarctic hero, complains in a lecture to the London Zoological Society that Hatch is maligning him, directly attacking him. So Hatch is loose, going around and talking over their heads, talking to the people, saying, ‘Support me, I bring you employment’, all the old arguments about industry. And they did.
“That seemed to me to be a really good dramatic format for a one-man play. Here’s the guy defending what has become now an indefensible industry. And carrying the crowds.”
So Chapple’s play is a kind of simulation of one of Hatch’s magic-lantern lectures. It was a show-and-tell and many of the original black and white photos that Hatch commissioned of his operation appear behind actor Stuart Devenie, who plays Hatch. Besides Devenie’s spellbinding ability with the text, Chapple is struck by an uncanny physical likeness. Compare headshots of Hatch and Devenie. “We don’t have to alter the bloody picture. Amazing, eh. Incarnations.”
A penguin cartoon is pinned to the yellow kitchen wall of Chapple’s Devonport house, next to a flyer for the play from when it was still called The Oil Factor. Chapple also has a penguin joke memorised. “Have you seen A Prairie Home Companion? There’s a penguin joke in that. One penguin comes up to another penguin and says, ‘Hey man, you look like you’re wearing a tuxedo.’ The other penguin says, ‘What makes you think I’m not?’”
Penguins are everywhere right now, in films and on television, as substitute people. We take them as curious, vulnerable, comic; this is “the cuteness factor” that Chapple believes Hatch was outdone by.
“The first European to strike penguins was Magellan. If you look back in their journals, you’ll see they’re described as wild geese. And the men stream off the boat and kill as many of them as they can as quickly as possible and stuff the ship with them, because they’re just food.”
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