Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
of 338 square miles. The present population of Rennell is about 2,000. The interior
of the island is covered by dense forest and East Rennell holds the most expansive
lake in the Island Pacific.
The southernmost island in the Solomons, Rennell is the second largest raised
atoll in the world (after Lifou (Lifu) in the Loyalty Islands of New Caledonia),
fronting the sea with almost vertical limestone walls reaching a height of 380 feet.
The former atoll lagoon forms the Te Nggano Lake covering an area of 60 square
miles. The lake is surrounded by forest, and contains more than 300 islands, scat-
tered and in small groups: the Te Ava Islands, the Atualonga Islands, the Tautiage
Islands and many more. From the shores and from within the lake, Te Nggano
presents itself as a mini Island Pacific.
The forested interior of the island forms a bowl with shallow soils where forest
trees rarely reach more than 20 m thus admitting light for dense below-canopy veg-
etation. The island holds a large number of endemic plants, of which one, the orchid
Dendrobium rennelli
, only grows on islands in the Te Nggano Lake. The Lake is also
home to an endemic poisonous sea snake,
Laticauda crockeri
. As the snake is totally
unaggressive, its quite deadly poison, a postsynaptic neurotoxin, was unknown to the
inhabitants until collected and analyzed by a visiting herpetologist. Other endemic
animals comprise a flying fox,
Petropus rennelli
, seven endemic land snails and
60 endemic insects, as well as 11 endemic species and subspecies of birds, including
the Rennell white-eye,
Zosterops rennellianus
, and the Rennell fantail,
Rhipidura
rennelliana
. In terms of biology, culture and geophysics, Rennell is a unique island
ecosystem (Wolff
1958
; e.g. Filardi et al.
1999
).
Remote and Fascinating
Due to their remoteness from other islands, small size, lack of valuable trade goods
and lack of sheltered anchorages, the islands of Rennell and Bellona were only
rarely visited from the outside (e.g. Kuschel
1988
). Steamers from Australian ports
to the Solomon Islands used to pass between Rennell and Bellona using the islands
as a landfall, but this was ended in 1907. The first official visit to Rennell was by
the Solomon Islands resident commissioner in 1906, while the first missionary
arrived in 1909 (Wolff
1958
/1:28). After the Solomon Islands became a British
Protectorate in 1893, the inhabitants of Rennell, along with the inhabitants of other
Solomon Island Polynesian outliers, were not taxed, and the islands were declared
a closed district in 1937. As the inhabitants had proved poor plantation workers,
only minimal Australian recruitment (blackbirding) took place in the islands
(Bennett
1987
:272). During the Second World War, Japanese and then American
sea-planes used Lake Te Nggano for landings, while a small US lookout post was
established in November1942 and discontinued before the end of the War. The
Battle of Rennell Island was the last major naval battle of the Guadalcanal
Campaign which occurred in January 1943 (e.g. Morison
1953
). At the end of the
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