‘Be careful,’ someone yells to me as I zip up my parka in the cold porch, ‘or one of us might get you.’

Outside, wet wraps itself around me. There’s slick wet wind and rain. It comes every day of the year here. Wind-sheared slopes climb into cloud. Cranky lime-green and white ocean bashes onto beaches of black sand. Surf smashes into jutting rocks and sheer drops of shiny black cliffs. Slimy tendrils of kelp huddle close to the shoreline as if a population of oily-black octopi have come here to die.

I walk along the cliffs. Wind pushes me. I slip. A necklace of shipwrecks rings the island in a grim warning. Some of the wrecks poke up, like ragged shards of glass set into the top of a concrete wall.

Somewhere beyond the shipwrecks, in the thick of the fog, is my ship.

Max has filled me in on the Macca stories. The ship broke its anchor chain on its last trip to the island and drifted dangerously close. Its predecessor sank here. There are ghosts. The ship comes no closer than a kilometre from the shoreline for this trip. The resupply for the fourteen men on the station has to be done entirely by air. The helicopters carry cargo in rope nets slung swinging under their bellies. They thump back and forth. Then they stop.

There’s a shout behind me. It’s Dog. He comes up to me, panting. The chopper pilots are grounded on the island. They’ve lost sight of the ship in the dropping down mist and they’re not going to risk any flying. The island’s my home for the night. Great.

We walk back to the base, winding down from the cliffs through tufts of long yellow grass to the coal-black beaches. Around us are the bark and belch of the elephant seals. They’re like giant slugs clumped in close harems on the sand. Strong brown skuas are buffeted by the breeze overhead and the head of a killer whale rises up and then sinks in the furious green of the ocean. Penguins keep an affronted distance, on the beach, and the rocks, and the helipad.

Dog’s apologetic and stumbly about the men in the mess. He says the blokiness inside is all bluff and the men have forgotten how to treat women because it’s been such a long time. He’s sure they’ll remember by the time we get back. He coaxes me to put my hand to the coarse black curls of a seal pup, as if to make up for it all.

The fur’s stiff and damp and not at all soft. The bull seals peer at us like fat old men peering from behind newspapers in an English club. Some of them break from their stillness with a huff, and lumber away on too-small flippers. They heave-ho their rippling bulk. It’s a strange, ugly sort of grace.