The lost Hermit of Tata Island
Most people are unaware today that the Tata Islands in Golden Bay once had a permanent resident.
Peter Peterson was a Norwegian who made a little hut on South Tata (Ngawhiti) Island his home during the late 1930s.
He became known to locals as the Hermit of Tata Island. The remains of his hut were visible well into the 1960s, even if he was well gone by then.
By all accounts, Peterson was a likeable individual but was considered a reclusive character who just preferred to live by himself. Whether he intended to come out to specifically live in New Zealand or whether circumstances just brought him here is now unknown.
But he fits the bill as being part of the secondary wave of European immigration to this country – Dutch, Italians, Scandinavians, Swedes, and the seafaring Norwegians in particular, who came here in the late 1800s and early 1900s. They integrated seamlessly into their new society, even if a few preferred to live on the fringes.
It is likely Peterson didn’t build the hut he occupied on South Tata – rather, opportunistically, he just moved into the one built and used as shelter by the limestone quarrymen who began excavating limestone from the island around 1904.
That operation was initiated by the Wellington and Marlborough Lime and Cement Company Ltd, which built a sizeable plant to manufacture cement in Picton just after the turn of the century.
Initially, it was thought that the only ingredients required for the manufacture of perfect cement were three-quarters crushed papa rock and one quarter crushed limestone, the nearest accessible limestone outcrops determined as being 100 nautical miles (185km) away on South Tata Island.
The best thing about this source of limestone was that it had in its sheltered lee the best deepwater anchorage to facilitate all-weather loading.
Deck scows, Magic being one which frequently did this rock run, would get the quarried limestone bocks craned aboard by derricks before heading back to the works at Picton. The scows would often need to be towed down sheltered Queen Charlotte Sound by a steam launch.
The Government took the islands under the Public Works Act in 1908, the fear being that Golden Bay would lose the shelter of its only potential sea port if the island was excavated level. This was in danger of happening at the rate of extraction.
That’s when the Golden Bay Cement Company was formed at Tarakohe. It was now known that the recipe for cement demanded a majority of limestone content. Delightful little Limestone Bay at Tarakohe would end up getting swallowed up by port development.
It was on vacated South Tata Island that Peterson took up residence, probably utilising the abandoned quarryman’s hut spectacularly located on a little cut platform across the neck of rock which connects out to the leaning pinnacle and jumble of rocks at the southwestern end of the island. From there, his lookout view was superb – not only out into Golden Bay but back over the sheltered mooring and into Tata Beach. He couldn’t have chosen better.
Distinguished veteran aviator and test pilot Bernie Lewis, 91, now of Stoke, is one man who remembers Peterson well from his childhood.
‘‘We lived at East Takaka, but my father (A F ‘‘Fred’’ Lewis) kept his launch Rose moored out in behind South Tata Island,’’ Bernie remembers. ‘‘When we wanted to go out fishing, we’d all line up along Tata Beach and wave and holler out until Peter saw us and rowed his wooden dinghy over to collect us and take us out to the launch.
‘‘When we came back in, the reverse happened. He was most obliging. My father had some sort of arrangement with him.’’
Bernie Lewis recalls Peterson as an ‘‘old Norwegian’’ man, fluent in English, likeable and a good chess player. He lived out there for years from the 1930s onwards.
Lewis recalls that Peterson kept a garden along the sunny top of the island, which averages around 30 metres in height.
Abundant shag guano would have maintained fertility, but the worst thing for the garden was the flak it got from salt-saturated spray in wild weather. One year, he tried to grow melons, but they didn’t work out.
South Tata being a dry island with no running water meant Peterson’s only fresh water came from what he could collect and store off his little shack’s roof.
He lived mainly on the plentiful fish he caught around the island, and what he could grow, but occasionally he would row over to the mainland, where he would replenish his supplies by trading fish and spending some of the meagre pension he would have been entitled to as he got older.
Peterson came to a tragic end – or rather, he just disappeared.
Tata locals became concerned after there had been no sign of their offshore resident for some time – no smoke from his hut, no sightings of his boat. Just nothing. Lewis’s father was one of the men who took his launch out to search for him.
No body was ever found, but the recovery of Peterson’s swamped dinghy indicated that he probably drowned after attempting to row to shore in a westerly gale which had swept through the area.
Today, Peterson Rd, the main entry road into the Tata Beach community leading down to the boat ramp, remembers the existence of this offshore island dweller.
He was a man who came from a time when a person of character, stamina and desire for solitude could just go and squat in an unused wilderness hut, not expecting to be hassled by so-called ‘‘authorities’’ – mainly because those authorities didn’t exist, didn’t care, or their jurisdiction just didn’t reach that far.
Connecticut-born writer Annie Proulx describes the gritty subjects of her New World stories as ‘‘broke, proud, ingenious characters setting their heels against civilised society’s pull’’.
Peter Peterson, the hermit of South Tata, was one of these sorts of men. May he never be forgotten.