Island reborn as birds’ paradise
There was a treat in store for Pamela Wade when she returned to Rotoroa, an island that ‘beers’ little resemblance to inebriate retreat it once was.
There was really no need to turn smuggler, but I did anyway. Returning to Rotoroa Island to spend a night there, I already knew its history after nosing around the museum on an earlier day visit, so I’d hidden away my single bottle of beer.
The island, about an hour by ferry from downtown Auckland, was bought by the Salvation Army in 1908, to use as what they daintily termed ‘‘an inebriate retreat’’, after the passing in 1906 of the more brutally titled Habitual Drunkards Act.
The act made it a punishable offence to be convicted of drunkenness three times within nine months, and the Salvation Army set up a strictly controlled institution on Rotoroa for these alcoholics – officially, criminals – to spend up to two years overcoming their addiction.
Rotoroa had always been dry. There are no natural springs, so Ma¯ ori had only visited, and it wasn’t until farmers arrived with rainwater tanks and later dug a bore, that people were able to live there fulltime.
The island was also dry in the other sense for almost a century while the Salvation Army was in residence, supervising the rehabilitation throughout that time of more than 12,000 alcohol and other drugs addicts.
By 2005, however, island isolation was no longer seen as the way forward, and the Salvation Army granted a 99-year lease, funded by philanthropists Neal and Annette Plowman, to the Rotoroa Island Trust. The aim was to return the island to its original state for the public to enjoy as a wildlife sanctuary and, in 2011, Rotoroa was opened to visitors.
Now, it’s only by studying photos that the scale of the trust’s work can be appreciated. More than 20 buildings have been removed, 20,000 pines and macrocarpas have been felled, 400,000 native trees planted, and the island – rid of first rats, then mice – was declared pest-free in 2014.
Going on a guided walk with island manager Milly Lucas, we stood high beside North Tower and looked along the length of the island past its nipped-in waist between Home Bay and Men’s Bay, towards South Tower beyond. Apart from some open areas deliberately left grassy, it was all wellgrown bush, which was very different from the almost completely bare island in the photograph Milly held.
Our ferry-load of visitors from the city had been greeted by Milly at the wharf, checked for hitchhiking pests, warned to keep to the tracks – ‘‘those cliffs are steep’’, and invited to explore and enjoy. However, most of us had come to see something rather special, so we hung around the exhibition centre in Home Bay to wait for ecologist Jo Ritchie to show us what she had brought along.
After explaining the trust’s aim – to restore vegetation and wildlife to the island – there was a collective gasp of delight as she carefully lifted a young, dark-feathered and blinking kiwi into the light.
The Operation Nest Egg project collects kiwi eggs from the wild – in this case, Coromandel – to hatch at Auckland Zoo, then release into a safe environment such as Rotoroa.
Once big enough to defend itself, the kiwi will be returned to its point of origin, or taken to another pest-free island to start a new population. Koanga, today’s young male, would go on to have a 99 per cent chance of survival, rather than a scant 5 per cent if left alone.
After everyone had a close look, Ritchie disappeared into the bush to pop Koanga into a temporary burrow, from which he would emerge on his own that night, without an audience of cooing humans.
We switched our attention back to Milly, who led us off on her tour of the island: to lovely, sandy Ladies Bay, past a display of pest traps and tracking tunnels, and gently up through the bush to the lookout. One of the many story stops was to look at a young kaiko¯ mako, a descendant of the once rarest tree in the world, down to a single specimen on the Three Kings Islands. Now flourishing, it’s just one of many species that Rotoroa is protecting, most notably birds.