ATLAS OF REMOTE ISLANDS
Antipodes Islands

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(New Zealand)

Pacific Ocean

49° 41' S | 178° 46' E

formerly Isle Penantipote

21 km² | uninhabited

EACH OF US LONGs for a doppelgänger who lives on the other side of the Earth, upside down, his feet facing ours, held on to the same globe by gravity. The people whose feet press against ours live on the same longitude but on opposing latitudes. Their seasons are the opposite of ours and their time is shunted forward. Our antipodes have summer when we have winter, and midnight when we have midday. But nobody lives on Antipodes Island – only a couple of fur seals and penguins with colourful crests. When Captain Henry Waterhouse discovers it on his way from Port Jackson to England, he calculates that the island is almost directly opposite the zero meridian of Greenwich. A reflection of a place, he thinks, a tiny doppelgänger of the British Isles. London, his birthplace, is as far from here as the North Pole is from the South, and so it does not matter which route home he takes. England and this place are points at either end of a skewer through the globe, an imaginary line through the centre of the Earth. // But the equation does not work. His homeland looks quite different. This place here is mountainous, bare of trees and the climate is rough: cold and stormy. The mild air of the Gulf Stream is missing. Cattle that are brought here die quickly and quietly in the dun-coloured steppes of grass. And the thunderous echo of waves breaking against the hollows of the jagged coastline never ceases.