A lifetime of adventure, enterprise and activism
Kester Macfarlane was a sailor, a canny businessman and a lifelong socialist who, until his last days, remained deeply engaged with a wide world.
His was a lifetime of adventure, enterprise and activism. He grew up in Days Bay, on Wellington Harbour. Throughout his life the sea defined him. He was 6ft 4in (1.9 metres) tall, a large, bighearted, gentle man who charted a unique course through a colourful life.
His mother, Danish-born Inger Marie Frieboe-Funch was the greatgranddaughter of Ditlev Monrad, the former bishop, prime minister and founding father of constitutional democracy in Denmark. Monrad oversaw the migration of early Scandinavian workers to Manawatū in the mid-19th century. Kester’s father, Allan, was an accountant from a Scots migrant family.
The youngest of four, Kester Robin Macfarlane roamed his environs, forever with a dog at his heels. He joined his elder brother Ian, who ran the summer hire of small yellow row boats in Days Bay. The anti-submarine barrage line built during World War II, which stretched from the Eastbourne coast out to Mā karo/Ward Island, became a route for him and his mates to the island.
In Days Bay, sailing was a rite of passage. He left school to become a deck apprentice, sailing from Pt Howard on a
Shell tanker bound for Jakarta. It was 1960. General Sukarno was president of the recently independent nation of Indonesia. As the tanker journeyed upriver it encountered a parade: thousands of sailors and military trooping in Sukarno’s honour who saluted them from a warship.
The curious Kiwi soon acquainted himself with Indonesian politics. For the next 60 years he never forgot the inhabitants of West Papua, peremptorily abandoned by their Dutch colonisers and still under Indonesian iron rule. ‘‘Free West Papua’’ posters, along with Labour
Party election hoardings, continue to bedeck the fence of Macfarlane’s home in Ruby Bay, near Nelson.
He came ashore when family called. He married Catharina Nolle, and they had Sacha and Nina. When the marriage dissolved, Kester was awarded custody. With other parents he helped to set up the alternatively styled Estuary School, in Petone. Tragically, Sacha died in 1985, aged just 20, when a drunken Chilean diplomat drove head-on into her car on the Old Hutt Road, Thorndon.
In 1969 Macfarlane turned to producing a large-circulation, lucrative giveaway paper, Contact, whose ‘‘situations vacant’’ notices he interlaced with extracts from the Australian radical Nation Review. Home and office combined at the Dolphin on Days Bay.
Always an activist, he was a frontline protester during the 1981 Springbok tour. Knowing firsthand from his Pacific voyages the effects of nuclear testing, he took his yacht Vulcan out on the morning of May 25, 1982, when the visiting USS Truxtun was met by a flotilla of protest vessels. Many such actions helped lay the foundation of the Lange-led Labour Government’s nuclear-free policy, still alive today.
When the America’s Cup was contested in Fremantle, Macfarlane saw a new opportunity. With daughter Nina, he settled there to establish Cup News, a successful newspaper covering the event, before taking his biggest ‘‘career’’ step in 1987. Inspired by Kelly Tarlton’s new aquarium in Auckland, he persuaded then Western Australia Premier Brian Burke to support a similar project, and was involved in the design and collection of exhibits, forswearing the capture of cetaceans and restricting the range of sharks it housed. Underwater World (now renamed AQWA) remains an outstanding achievement.
He went on to project-manage other major aquarium developments in Southeast Asia, before creating a boutique version in Cairns. In 1995 he married fellow New Zealand expat Carol Cromie, a Sydney journalist. He opened the innovative Sacha Gallery in Surry Hills, Sydney, where, employing the skills of Vietnamese artists, he sold replica oil paintings both ancient and modern.
He took a close interest in the Aboriginal rights movement and, with some 250,000 others, walked the Sydney Harbour Bridge on Australia’s National Sorry Day March in May 2002.
He and Carol returned to New Zealand later that year to a beachfront home at Ruby Bay, with a panoramic view across Tasman Bay to D’Urville Island. It was there in 2016 that Nina died. She had suffered a brain injury the year before in an accident on one of the superyachts she worked on aboard with her captain husband.
Last year, Macfarlane embarked on a major refurbishment of the old Ruby Bay Store, developing it into a 36-seat theatre, cafe and gallery. He died before the project was complete but many musicians – folk, blues, jazz, classical – plus writers and campaigners have performed on its stage.
This, his last entrepreneurial leap, was effectively a front-of-house wrap of many of his special interests: music, international affairs, justice, talk, friendship and, above all, life itself. – By David Young
adventurer and entrepreneur b March 26, 1943 d October 11, 2022