From Heritage New Zealand, Autumn 2009

by Margaret Hopkins

New Zealand's third island is often visited only fleetingly - if at all. A longer stay will permit visits to some remarkable historic places.

It might be only 20 minutes by plane or 60 by ferry, but Stewart Island/Rakiura is a world away from mainland New Zealand. A visit to Rakiura (“Land of Glowing Skies”) is in some ways a step back in time; the pace of life is slower, the people are independent and friendly and you don’t have to go far to find a beach to yourself. The climate is temperate but often quite changeable, so walking shoes, camera and raincoat should be at the top of your packing list. And, for the historically minded, the small piece of the country offers rich pickings.

Flying in towards Ryans Creek airstrip, you look down on the crescent-shaped curve of Horseshoe Bay and the horseshoe-shaped harbour of Halfmoon Bay and wonder how the names could ever have been transposed on the 1857 British Admiralty chart. The original 1844 chart of Stewart Island, produced by Captain Thomas Wing following his survey on the Deborah, showed the names of Halfmoon and Horseshoe attached to bays that deserved the descriptions. However, once made, the mistake was never corrected.

Stewart Island/Rakiura is a vast 1750 square kilometres of rugged, bush-covered hills and tall podocarp forest dipping down to the sea. Its windswept beaches, rock-walled inlets, naturally tannin-stained rivers (due to thick vegetation and peaty soil) and more than 170 small off-shore islands and nuggets are part of Rakiura National Park, lying in the roaring forties to the south of mainland New Zealand. The only settlement on Stewart Island is the township of Oban in Halfmoon Bay, home to its 400 residents. The island’s economy is now mostly reliant on tourism, with commercial fishing for crayfish, blue cod and paua, along with marine farming in Big Glory Bay, also providing some employment for residents. Only half of the 280 dwellings on the island are occupied by permanent residents.

Archaeological sites indicate Maori occupation dating back to the 13th century, with Waitaha people, Kati Mamoe and later Kai Tahu travelling to Rakiura in search of seafood and titi/muttonbirds, which the island still has in abundance. Today, Rakiura Maori descendants return annually to the Titi islands in March for the seasonal muttonbird harvest.

Sealers and whalers also worked in the rich waters of Stewart Island in the 1820s, with the earliest permanent settlement on Whenua Hou/Codfish Island now a Nature Reserve and home to our rare and endangered kakapo. Sealers there married local Maori women, later moving from Codfish Island to various parts of Stewart Island, including the Neck, a long narrow isthmus guarding the entrance to Paterson Inlet.

Until the 1860s, the Neck was the main European settlement. In the 1864 Deed of Cession, when the Crown purchased Stewart Island from Rakiura Maori, the land at the Neck was set aside as a reserve for “half-castes”, which precluded further development by Europeans. The site of the island’s first school is marked by a stand of macrocarpa trees, which can be seen when cruising in Paterson Inlet.

An ideal place to start your visit to Stewart Island is at the Rakiura Museum in Ayr Street, Oban, which has a wonderful collection of early Maori artefacts, exhibits on mutton birding, timber milling, boat building, mining, fishing, transport, whaling and also social history. Early photos chronicle the development of the township itself, which was established around 1867.

Directly above the museum, on a hill overlooking Halfmoon Bay, is St Andrew’s, the older of the remaining two churches on Stewart Island. The wooden church was built in 1900 but a much older relic of the south’s early missionary days is displayed alongside the building. The North German Missionary Society sent out the Bremen bell from that town in 1846 to Rev. J.F.H. Wohlers for use at his Ruapuke church, and in 1900 the bell was brought to Stewart Island and installed at St Andrew’s Church. Of further interest is the small church hall, which has endured three major shifts in its 98-year life.

Originally a church at the Neck, the building was brought across the waters of Paterson Inlet and re-erected as a Sunday School hall next door to the Rakiura Museum. In the 1980s, the hall was shifted up the hill next to St Andrew’s – no mean feat on an island with limited machinery and resources. It is an island habit to recycle and not waste anything, as all building and roading material has to be transported from the mainland at great expense. Another historically significant building, just below the Oban Presbyterian Church, is the Sunday School hall, which started life as a cookhouse at the Norwegian whalers’ repair base in Prices Inlet before being shifted to Halfmoon Bay.

A walk around the coast road on the south side of Halfmoon Bay takes you through bays bearing the names of early settlers. Thomson’s Bay was once home to Greenvale Boarding House, an impressive establishment providing accommodation for visiting tourists, which was destroyed by fire in 1942. Five other guesthouses were burnt down in other years. Continuing around the coast road, you come to beautiful Lonnekers Beach, first settled by Frederick Lonneker. from Hanover in Germany. He established a farm growing crops and providing milk, vegetables and eggs for the growing population in Halfmoon Bay as well as establishing the island’s first licensed hotel there in 1875.

The tall blue gums fringing the beach are the legacy of a visiting whaler who gave the seeds as a gift to the Lonnekers. Leask Bay, further to the east, is still home to descendants of Tom Leask, from the Orkney Islands, who settled on Stewart Island in 1866 and established a highly successful boat-building industry. It was later also the site of a fish-canning business run by the Leask family. A few rusty relics of the boat-building era and an old whale tripot have been rescued from the long grass on the roadside and sit forlornly on a concrete pad awaiting some attention.

The road narrows beyond Leask Bay and leads to Harrolds Bay, where the very first European settlers established themselves before the township of Oban had sprung up. Lewis Acker, an American whaler from Charleston, New York, came to live near the entrance to Halfmoon Bay in 1836. The stone “house” he built is still standing. It is the oldest European building on Stewart Island, and one of the earliest stone houses in the south of New Zealand.

It is said that Lewis Acker’s parents had a stone house, and he wished to have one of his own. Local rock proved unsuitable for construction so Acker quarried rock from the Oreti Beach area in Southland, and brought it to Stewart Island as ballast in his boat. With his Maori wife, Mary Pi, Acker raised a family of nine children, and lived in the bay until 1864, when he was dispossessed of his land.

Following the purchase of Stewart Island by the Crown, Acker had failed officially to lodge a claim for the 240 hectares of land he had purchased from local Maori, and was forced to abandon his home and move to Otatara near Invercargill.

In 1987, the New Zealand Historic Places Trust registered the building as a Category I historic place, and some restoration work was undertaken. After the Ackers were evicted, James Harrold and his wife, Agnes, moved to the little cove, which became known as Harrolds Bay. They first built a home and shop on the point above Harrolds Bay, and set up a shipbuilding yard. In the 1870s, Ye Travellers Rest Boarding House was built.

This remains the oldest wooden building on the island, and can be glimpsed from the walking track to Ackers Point or from the sea. Owned by the Wilson family, descendants of Hans and Mary Jensen, who purchased Ye Travellers Rest and surrounding land in 1910, the building is in urgent need of restoration, and the NZHPT is preparing a report assessing its significance as a tourist lodge.

A 20-minute walk beyond Harrolds Bay, along a leafy bush track with beautiful sea views, brings you to Ackers Point, where an historic wooden lighthouse was recently removed by Maritime New Zealand as part of its programme to upgrade all lighthouses. The new, anorexic-looking metal structure has none of the charm of the old lighthouse, built in 1908. Originally positioned on Anglem Point at the eastern entrance to Paterson Inlet, it was shifted to Ackers Point in 1927 but now languishes in a council yard awaiting restoration. Fortunately, the NZHPT has recently been involved in discussions with the Stewart Island Community Board about reinstating the lighthouse in Oban township for display purposes.

The Ackers Point peninsula today forms part of a 210-hectare community habitat restoration project run by the Stewart Island Rakiura Community Environment Trust. Volunteers have been trapping possums, rats and wild cats over several years with a resultant increase in numbers of native birds and plants.

Above the far end of Ringaringa Beach, under the windswept branches of old macrocarpa trees, is a picket-fenced cemetery holding the graves of Rev. Wohlers, his wife, Eliza, daughter Gretchen and descendants of their family. Nearby, a monument, erected at the time of the Southland Centennial, commemorates Rev. Wohlers’ 41 years of dedication to the people of the Foveaux Strait area. The monument is on private land, but a marked track leads there from the Ringaringa Road end. The old Traill homestead can be glimpsed through the trees near the monument. Charles Traill was an acclaimed naturalist, who collected shells and botanical specimens for museums and other collectors.

Back in the township, the road leading to Horseshoe Bay sweeps down to Old Mill Creek, where at low tide the remnants of timber from a mill operated by Nicholson and Stock in 1874 are visible. This was one of four timber mills in Halfmoon Bay itself, with others at Paterson Inlet, Maori Beach and Murray River from 1861 through to the 1930s. The first mills were established in Kaipipi with a small water-driven mill and later a larger steam-driven mill. There were also timber mills at Thule, Kidney Fern, Sawdust Bay, Hapuatuna and Big Glory Bay. Little evidence remains of the milling that took place around the inlet, with old wharf piles, timber planks in creeks at the head of several inlets and a few remnants of an extensive network of bush tramlines that brought timber down to the boats occasionally still visible. The forest itself has reclaimed the land, and the busy milling settlements can now only be glimpsed in photos.

A day walk to Port William on the Rakiura Track is well worth the effort. Port William, known as Potirepo by its early Maori inhabitants, has a rich history of settlement. Early whalers and sealers used it as a base, and in later years fishing and oyster boats worked the area. A misguided government immigration scheme brought a group of 24 Shetland Islanders to settle at Port William, where they were granted land and expected to establish a fishery. In 1872, work began on a huge wooden immigration barracks capable of housing 150 settlers until they had cleared their land and built their homes. It must have been daunting for the poor Shetland crofters, arriving in the promised land only to find dense, bush-covered hills in Port William, where they were to clear their land for houses and gardens. Fishing methods used back in the Shetlands were not successful here, and eventual payment for their fish exports returned a paltry amount for their efforts. Within 12 months, the settlement was abandoned as the Shetlanders moved away to the mainland. Today, a Department of Conservation hut is situated where the barracks once stood, and tall blue gum trees planted by the settlers remain along the shore, with occasional garden plants appearing incongruously amongst the native bush.

Adjacent to the beautiful golden sand of Maori Beach in Port William, a bustling timber mill operated from 1913 until 1931. Small mill houses and a school dotted the shore with a wooden wharf running out into the bay for ships that transported the timber. In the bush at the southern end of the beach are the remnants of an old steam boiler, and further up the tramline, just off the track to North Arm, the McAllister hauler used for dragging logs out of the forest remains on site. A survey of this milling area was carried out by Paul Mahoney from DOC. He noted that “Maori Beach is the only place in New Zealand where you can find the complete remains for a sawmilling venture; the machinery at the sawmill site, a complete bush tram system, and log haulers on-site in the bush.”

Except for a few clumps of daffodils and snowflakes, a visit to Maori Beach today reveals little of the milling township. A boat trip from Halfmoon Bay into Paterson Inlet will give visitors an appreciation of the hardiness of the early inhabitants, who travelled between the small settlements and eked out their living on the sea in small craft. Today’s fast tourist boats can take you to Ulva Island in Paterson Inlet in no time. Passengers disembark at Post Office Bay, where Stewart Island’s first Post Office was located, central to the settlements at the Neck and the timber mills around the inlet. Opened in 1872 by Orkney Islander Charles Traill, who also ran a shop there, the Post Office stands today adjacent to a private holiday home. Several old cottages also remain in the area, as well as the grave of Charles Traill and his Danish wife, Jessie. Just above Post Office Bay is Flagstaff Point where the flag used to be raised to indicate the arrival of mail from the mainland.

Ulva Island first became a reserve in 1899, and today is an outstanding predator-free open sanctuary with many bird species including reintroduced saddleback, mohua and robins. The island, originally named Coupars Island, was renamed Ulva by Charles Traill after the island of similar shape off the Isle of Mull in the UK. A grove of exotic trees, including pines, monkey puzzle and macrocarpa, which he planted in the 1870s, can be seen on the track to Sydney Cove.

Also accessible by boat is the site of the Kaipipi shipyard in Prices Inlet. This was a repair base for the Norwegian Rosshavet Whaling Company, which operated in Antarctic waters in the 1920s. A large workshop, boiler room, blacksmith and machine shop were built in 1927 along with a slipway to haul the whale chasers out of the water for repair and a jetty leading out to the hulk of the old whaler Othello, which was used as a wharf. A carpenter’s shop, cookhouse, bunkroom and a manager’s house completed the busy shipyard, which was to continue operating until 1932 when the market for whale oil diminished. The base was closed and the buildings sold for removal.

Rusting propellers from the whale chasers litter the beach, and a large boiler perched at the end of the slipway is revealed with each receding tide. Several of the Norwegians married local Stewart Island girls, and never returned to live in Norway. Some are buried in the Halfmoon Bay cemetery. The NZHPT has been assessing the Norwegian Whalers’ Base for further recognition under the Historic Places Act 1993.

Owen Graham, NZHPT Otago/Southland Area Manager, says, “While there may not be lots of NZHPT registered historic places on Stewart Island, there are a lot of historic sites and stories to tell so Kiwis can better appreciate some of the historic heritage of Stewart Island.” The Otago/Southland Area office team is involved in a number of projects on Stewart Island, mentioned above, as well as the Stewart Island Coastal Heritage Inventory (of archaeological sites) in partnership with DOC, iwi, Southland District Council and Environment Southland.

Stewart Island/Rakiura is not the kind of place for a fleeting visit, as there is much to be seen and appreciated. Nature has reclaimed the sites of the timber mills, boat building yards, whalers’ bases and farming attempts, but some quiet bays still reveal the skeletons of industrial machinery and the remnants of early settlers’ gardens. Tranquil bays or wind-swept beaches all hold their own magic, while vivid sunrises and glowing sunsets proclaim Rakiura – Land of the Glowing Skies.

Margaret Hopkins is a long-time resident of Stewart Island and local historian.