Lord Howe Island was, until 1788, unique in the Pacific Ocean in being a relatively large (1455 hectares), temperate island that had escaped detection by both Polynesian and European explorers. It lies just 570 kilometres off the coast of northern New South Wales, and the first intimation of its existence was a great cloud of seabirds seen in the area by the French explorer La Perouse. He reported this to members of Australia’s First Fleet, who set out in search and sighted the island in March 1788. The place was a convenient larder for the starving convict colony, and in the following years it was systematically plundered.

Among the birds found on the island, all of which were remarkably tame, was a stately species with a solid red beak and yellowish-red legs. It was clearly a relative of the cosmopolitan purple swamphen, but was flightless, white, and possessed of a more robust bill. Nothing is known of its habits, but given the purple swamphen’s propensity to carnivory, it may have been a predator on the chicks of the other bird species that swarmed the island.

Today the white gallinule is sunk in mystery. Just two skins survive, one in Liverpool and one in Vienna, both of which date to the late eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries and are of somewhat uncertain provenance. Some ornithologists dispute that the skins are from Lord Howe Island at all, but historical records confirm that such a bird once existed on the island. One of Lord Howe’s earliest visitors was surgeon Arthur Bowes Smythe of the Lady Penhryn, who landed in May 1788. So taken was he with the idyllic, palm-clad island and its utterly tame birds that he wrote ‘when I was in the woods amongst the birds I cd. not help picturing to myself the Golden Age as described by Ovid’. Bowes Smythe also wrote of encountering ‘fowls or coots some white, some blue and white, others all blue wt. Large red bills’. Some researchers have speculated that the blue birds were purple gallinules (which still exist on the island today), and that the blue-and-white birds were hybrids with the white gallinule. Others, however, consider that all belonged to one variable species.

So little is known of the white gallinule that it is impossible to determine whether it became extinct as early as 1788, or whether it survived until 1834 the island was first settled. Whatever the case it was clearly gone by 1844. The cause of its demise was almost certainly outright slaughter, for it was not timid and could easily be killed with sticks. It is possible that hybridisation with the purple swamphen may also have played a role. Rats and cats cannot be blamed, for they arrived much later.