Extraordinary discovery

RIGINALLY FROM Mittagong in the NSW Southern Highlands, Sally Montgomery’s path has taken her from the fens of Cambridgeshire to the wilds of Lord Howe Island, an isolated volcanic outcrop in the middle of the Tasman, 600km east of Port Macquarie.

For the environmental anthropologist, the World Heritage-listed island is a rich setting in which to study the complex engagement between state regulation aiming to preserve this ‘last paradise’, visiting scientists anxious to protect and study the island’s unique biome, and the needs of the eighth-generation settlers whose day-to-day lives and incomes depend largely on the 400 tourists permitted to visit Lord Howe each year.

Sally discovered a passion for anthropology while undertaking a Bachelor of Arts at the University of Sydney and living at the Women’s College. Encouraged to undertake the Honours research year, Sally graduated with first class Honours and won a Cambridge-Australia Newnham Scholarship to undertake her Masters and PhD at Newnham College, Cambridge. As one of only two remaining women’s colleges at the University of Cambridge, Sally found much that was familiar at Newnham, saying it has ‘a similar feeling of support, a similar atmosphere’ to Women’s.

For her fieldwork, Sally’s approach belongs to ‘more-than-human’ anthropology, and her research pays attention to the ways in which the island’s animals, plants, elements and landscapes interact and intersect with each other and with humans in meaningful but oftentimes overlooked ways.

Fortunately she has found herself a magnet for unusual sea-life. On her second day on Lord Howe she made an extremely rare sighting of a sunfish (and helped some tourists push the fish back into the sea). Not long afterwards, while beachcombing after a wild storm, she took a photo of what she thought was an unusuallooking squid. Crossing paths with marine parks staff, they identified it as a rare specimen that they had been seeking for years, the Lord Howe Island cuttlefish, Sepia baxteri, previously known only by its cuttlebones that occasionally wash ashore.

Sally has also participated in weed eradication, sorted beach plastics from the stomachs of seabirds alongside scientists and helped survey instances of invasive myrtle rust. Now nearing the end of her year’s field work, Sally hopes that her research will help us understand how global and local environmental concerns are negotiated and experienced.

‘Having been generously welcomed to the island by so many people who have shared with me their stories, experiences, and time,’ she writes, ‘I am also hoping that my research might benefit the island and lead to a better understanding of the island’s unique socialenvironmental history. There has been scant social research conducted on Lord Howe Island, so I feel I have been entrusted with important stories of the past and present that might otherwise not be recorded for the future’.