Visit will be following In father’s footsteps
When Joanne Laing steps ashore on Campbell Island next week she’ll follow in the footsteps of her father 70 years earlier.
Rob Stanley was stationed on the remote subantarctic island – about 600km south of New Zealand – for two years as part of a team taking meteorological readings for the Civil Aviation Department. Stanley died 20 years ago, aged 76, and although he didn’t often talk about the island, he loved his time there, Laing said.
She will leave for Campbell Island today on the Spirit of Enderby/Professor Khromov, as part of a 13-day voyage with Christchurch-based tour company Heritage Expeditions. It will not be the first time she has been on the ship.
She was New Zealand’s first female marine pilot and docked the 72-metre vessel when it arrived in Lyttelton port from Russia on November 17.
‘‘It will be quite different going as a passenger, it will be great actually.’’
Campbell is the most southerly of New Zealand’s subantarctic Islands and is lashed by the Furious Fifties, a notorious storm system called the West Wind Drift. It is about the size ofWaiheke Island.
Life would not have been easy for Stanley and his colleagues in the early 1950s.
They lived in modest quarters in the eastern inlet of Tucker Cove and supplies were delivered once every six months – with stock having to last until the next shipment.
Laing has a number of items from his time there, including his order sheet, which requested camera equipment, and 36 bottles of DB beer.
To pass the time, Stanley and the crew
would swim during the summer months and go skiing in the winter, using skis they built themselves.
Stanley was also a keen photographer and Laing hopes to visit many of the locations of his photographs.
‘‘There’s a really cool photo of him with an albatross chick, I’d like to try to find that spot, where the photo was taken,’’ she said.
The expedition will visit four of the subantarctic islands – The Snares, Auckland and Enderby and Campbell – and has been dubbed the ‘‘Galapagos of the Southern Ocean’’, because of the rich biodiversity that lives in the Southern Ocean.
Today, Campbell Island is known for its birdlife, freshwater invertebrates and megaherbs, but in the 1950s sheep and chickens roamed the landscape – having been introduced 50 years earlier.
Stanley’s later adventures took him to Antarctica three times and he returned to Campbell in 1969, as part of a University of Canterbury expedition. The following year he became a fisheries inspector and lived on the Chatham Islands for three years.