I dump my box of fruit on the nearest table. The Macca men look like bushrangers. Their beards are full and fierce and long. Max was right. A man called Hump eats four bananas in a row and then says he feels sick. A man called Dog bites ferociously into an apple.

‘That’s better than sex.’

Then he qualifies it.

‘Well, as good as.’

His free hand caresses another apple.

Hump yells across the room, ‘Where’s the journalist?’

‘Here.’

I’m not in the mood for blokey exuberance. I’ve only got the afternoon and there’s no time to get to know the Macquarie Island men and they’re not sellable anyway. No producer back home wants an interview with them. They’re not on the ice. They’re not a sexy enough story. I want to get outside.

‘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.