Island Life

Yesterday, Ma & Pa Wilsher arrived in Wellington for a short 4-night visit. Last night we dined simply chez moi, and today we went out on a pre-arranged tour called “Ships & Chips”. This involved turning up at the Wellington Museum at 11am, to be given a guided tour of the museum by an entertaining and enthusiastic member of the staff. The Wellington Museum is spread over three floors, and you could spend a day or longer going round all the exhibits. He gave us an edited highlights tour, concentrating on three very important parts of the museum, and giving us a lot of info on Maori legends at the same time. The tour also included magic, where we sat down and watched a presentation of the Maori legend of the creation of New Zealand and Wellington Harbour. Turned out it was all done with smoke and mirrors (the presentation, not the creation of New Zealand and Wellington Harbour).

At around midday the tour finished, and we went outside to catch the ferry to Matiu/Somes Island (“MSI”). It gets its name from the English name given to the island in the 18^th century, and the Maori name for the island. There was some disagreement about what to call the island, and in 1997 a decision was made to call it by both names, which is how it is known today.

On arrival at the ferry, we collected our fish’n’chips lunch, to eat on the way – all part of the deal. The ferry dropped us off at the jetty, and we were informed that the next boat back was in 20 minutes, and the one after that in three hours. As it was a nice day, we decided to stay for the three hours.

The first thing you do when you arrive at MSI is go to the Rat House. This isn’t some German Parliament building – it does exactly what it says on the tin. MSI is a predator-free island, and they want it to stay that way, so the first order of the day on arrival is to ensure that you haven’t brought any unwanted visitors with you. This includes seeds of mainland plants – they’re trying to restore the flora to native species only, and the mainland positively abounds with introduced European plants, so soles of shoes are vigorously inspected for mud. Once they’re satisfied that you’re pest-free, they release you to tour the island.

At the top of the island is an anti-aircraft gun emplacement. Early on in the Second World War, Japanese planes from aircraft carriers had been seen from New Zealand, and it was decided that air defences were needed for the capital. As it turned out, the US rooted the Japanese out from the region fairly early on (the battle of the Coral Sea) so by the time the battery was operational it was redundant, and no shots were ever fired in anger. The concrete emplacements are still mostly visible, although the trench system has since gone, and the weapons themselves have been removed.

The island has also been used extensively as a quarantine station for animals (livestock) arriving in New Zealand for farm breeding, as an internment camp during both world wars, as a leper colony (as the unfortunate story of Kim Lee testifies), and as a fortress by the Maoris before Europeans even arrived in Wellington. Nowadays it is used as a predator-free nature reserve, and is one of an increasing number of places to have a tuatara population.

We went about the island in a fairly haphazard way, but covered pretty well all of it in our allotted time period. We were searching for tuatara, but didn’t see any. We saw plenty of common skinks,

and also red-crowned parakeets

and fantails (as usual, they wouldn't stay still long enough for me to photograph them), and the occasional North Island robin. The giant wetas failed to turn up as well – there were various boxes placed in the undergrowth where wetas were supposed to hide out, as they like the dark, but none of the ones we looked in contained any sign of life. Oh well, I’m sure we’ll see them another time.

After that, it was back to the ferry, and the mainland again. After a hard day’s walking around the island in lovely autumn sunshine, we needed a rest before going out in the evening.