As great powers revive territorial ambition, Australia is neglecting the strategic and economic value of its remote islands and the vast ocean zones they command.

All the fuss about Greenland should be reminding Australians of their precarious possessions in far flung oceans, and the wealth on its vast continental shelfs below.

A recent article mentioning Australia’s possessions even forgot a few, including Heard Island, where Australia’s tallest mountain stands, and its neighbouring McDonald Islands.

Islands are all important and establish Australia’s presence in the Indian, Pacific and Southern oceans, as well as the Australian sector of the Antarctic. The areas involved far exceed Australia’s more than seven million square kilometres of land.

The islands also demark immense Australian economic zones because of the extent of continental shelf regions, particularly lying to the south of Australia.

Australia has watched the Chinese Navy circumnavigate our continent – the smallest continent, as opposed to Greenland the largest island.

It could do little more than shrug.

But the greater concern is the extent of fishing in these waters, the damage to ecosystems and the growing interest in mining the shallower ocean floors for resources.

Australia has been a lazy owner of its territorial resources.

It has barely invested in its Antarctic presence, despite the scale of the landmass.

It has popped up a research station on Macquarie Island, but it has only occasionally visited the UNESCO-listed Heard Island.

Christmas Island, famous for its red crab migrations and as a storage site for refugees the Australian government didn’t want, is slightly populated, and lies south of Indonesia.

Similarly, the Cocos (Keeling) Islands, in the middle of the Indian Ocean are barely accessible from Australia and support a small population.

One of my former neighbours, Eardly Horrocks, a cable specialist, was stationed there during World War II when it was a critical part of the worldwide Allied communications network.

He would tell how he and his fellow workers would hide while the Japanese regularly bombed their station. Eventually they decided not to rebuild. The Japanese continued to regularly send spotter planes overhead, and the station continued to appear destroyed. There were no more bombings and international communications were left to proceed uninterrupted in the ruins.

You never know when you need a remote island.

Australia’s most fascinating island by a long stretch is Heard Island, more than 4000 kilometres south west of Western Australia and deep in the Southern Ocean.

It is marked by its single mountain, Big Ben, bedecked with more than 10 glaciers and standing at nearly 3000 metres, far and away Australia’s tallest mountain. Its height varies, as one of the only active volcanoes in the Antarctic, let alone Australia. The nearby McDonald Island group has recently joined in the eruptions after a 75,000 year hiatus. The major island there is now much bigger than it was.

These islands, collectively known as HIMI, are much closer to Antarctica than Australia. Sealers once lived there, and there have been a few brief research visits since 1950 by Australia’s Antarctic Division. It is famous for its almost unspoilt flora and fauna, with avian flu about the only recorded invader.

Norfolk Island is remote, as is Macquarie Island, and there are a host of other islands, with Tasmania recently attracting attention as a Southern Ocean equivalent of Greenland. Would Donald Trump want that, too?

Australia invests hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars in its fight to remain close to islands to our north in the face of growing Chinese hegemony. These include Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, Philippines, Fiji, Solomon Islands, plus the myriad smaller Pacific Island nations now facing inundation.

It could do worse than spend more money, resources and time on its own remote islands.

While the islands are small, the wealth in the surrounding shallow seas is inestimable.

Australia – through its Exclusive Economic Zones – has control of more than 10 million square kilometres of ocean, or much more than its land area of 7.7 million square kilometres. Most of that is in the 370 kilometre (200 nautical mile) extension of the Australian mainland coastline.

But the islands have similar extensions giving Australia control over vast and far-flung shallow continental waters that it has barely researched. That includes a similar zone along the Australian segment of Antarctica.

Beyond that it has a lesser, more contestable, jurisdiction over the continental shelves that stretch beyond the 370 kilometre mark. These include enormous sections of shallow waters standing well beyond Western Australia into the Indian Ocean.

Australia’s continental shelf extends well south of Tasmania and well to the east of New South Wales and far east of Norfolk Island and south of Macquarie Island.

But those remote islands called HIMI have the most spectacular of all. They reach 1700 kilometres south in a broad band all the way to Antarctica and Australia’s EEZ there.

Australia already has the world’s biggest EEZ. Once you add the contiguous continental shelves that it can lay claim to the total resource is a significant part of the globe.

So far control has been through hiding in plain sight, while tolerating factory ships from many countries trawling these rich waters and damaging its ecosystems.

However, during Donald Trump, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin’s reigns, the world has become contestable, islands have become negotiable, and imperial expansion has once again become fashionable.

Australia’s ownership of its immense slice of the oceans and islands within is barely remarked upon. Its maritime and naval ambitions are less than seaworthy.