Last call for Trader Jack after ‘40 years behind bars’
TJack Cooper
restaurateur b December 8, 1946 d June 1, 2022
rader Jacks on the waterfront at Avarua is Rarotonga’s bestknown bar and restaurant. All thanks to its colourful and often controversial owner, Kiwi-born Jack Cooper, who died aged 75 early last month at his hillside home overlooking the old taro swamp at Avarua.
A couple of years back, I had the privilege of spending 10 days with him, recording his life story in every gritty detail. He delivered his stories with blunt honesty and an acerbic wit, drawing on his huge life experience working in the hospitality trade – ‘‘40 years behind bars’’ as he described it.
Born in Wellington, Jack was just made for running a watering hole in the Pacific. His great-great-grandfather Thomas William Deacon built the original Riverhead Hotel at the head of Waitematā Harbour, back in 1867, the first riverside tavern in New Zealand.
The first time young Jack carried a tray was at the Logan Park Motor Inn in Auckland. He loved the work, but his feet were itchy. Throwing it in, he did a stint on an oil rig in the middle of Australia’s Gibson Desert, telling me how he remembered that time well because that’s when the song Hey Jude came out.
Back in New Zealand, he took up running the house bar at the South Pacific Hotel, at the corner of Queen and Customhouse streets, in Auckland.
His hospitality career took him around the North Island, with stints at hotels in Wellington, Whakatā ne and Hastings, progressing to management.
As he was about to make another move to the Rotorua International hotel, he was headhunted by Paul Temm, a QC from Auckland who at the time was chairman of The Rarotongan, a hotel on the southwest coast. Cooper didn’t know much about the Cook Islands, but the challenge interested him enough to take the job. He arrived in 1983 to take up the job of turning the place around.
But the United States management company was not impressed by what it thought was some young Kiwi interfering in its operation, and did everything in its power to obstruct him. Just eight weeks after arriving, he was ousted.
With bridges back to New Zealand burnt, he was in Raro to stay. An opportunity arose to take over the Vaima restaurant in Vaima’anga, at the southern end of the island, in partnership with an old mate from Wellington.
He ran the place quite successfully for a couple of years as he developed a wider vision about what he wanted to achieve. As he put it: ‘‘There was always something I just couldn’t figure out about the Cook Islands. It was surrounded by water but there were few watering holes to actually sit down and drink and watch the ocean, the sunrise or sunset, or just contemplate the waves out on the reef. That was what tourists wanted, but it felt like no-one provided it.’’
After plenty of looking and asking around, Jack found the perfect bit of land right on the Avarua waterfront. No-one can individually own land in the Cooks; you have to lease it or get it allocated from family entities.
But this chunk of land was reclaimed, which meant no families had ever owned it, so he negotiated a 60-year lease with the Cook Islands Investment Corporation (CIIC).
Once he had the lease tied up, he went about meticulously planning his new bar and restaurant, and had it built within six months.
Initially he was going to call it Lighters Bar and Restaurant, from the adjoining unloading facility which used lighters or longboats to unload cargo from freighters moored off Avarua Harbour. But six weeks before he was due to open, the lightering service got pulled out and shifted to Avatiu Harbour next door.
Suddenly, Cooper was confronted with finding a new name for his establishment. General traders are big in the Pacific, and a few Trader names already existed. Vanuatu had Vanuatu Traders, in Rarotonga there was even a Trader Vics, but none of them were bars. So he thought, ‘‘Trader Jacks, yes why not’’.
Trader Jacks opened for business bang on schedule on Friday, June 6, 1986. Cooper started with 10 staff, as opposed to the 54 or so the business built up to preCovid.
Right from the start, Trader Jacks became a real meeting place where any business big or small, or social concerns, could be frankly aired. The bar even became jokingly referred to as the Cook Islands’ ‘‘Second Parliament’’, that phrase even entering into the country’s Hansard when a member got up to point out the true influence of Jack’s establishment in Rarotongan affairs.
Like many a foreigner, Cooper felt welcomed to Rarotonga, but also appreciated he was a papa’a, which literally means ‘‘four layers of clothes’’, the way the missionaries used to dress. He said he felt like a white man in paradise, just privileged to be there. One of his especially proud moments was when the locals started calling him Tiaki Kupa, the local transliteration of his name.
He also reckoned he would have been a rich man had it not been for three cyclones that wiped him out each time, the last, in February 2005, costing him a good $1 million.
The first to hit was in early January 1987, just seven months after opening. The poles and roof survived relatively intact, but everything else was destroyed, fivemetre waves pushing through the building with terrific destructive force.
The only thing protecting Trader Jacks had been a flimsy tin seawall, and that was all ripped away. The hardwood floor had been pushed up by the force of the waves. Not only was it a total disaster, but it would be the last insurance payout he would ever get, and that took a year and a half to come through.
The second cyclone hit on his birthday, in 1997, costing him about $80,000 to repair.
The third and most devastating was Cyclone Meena in February 2005. There was nothing left of Trader Jacks but a pile of rubble and a few poles sticking out of the foreshore.
For a few days it certainly felt like the end had come. But then Cooper had a brainwave, converting a 20-foot stainless steel-lined shipping container into a sideopening bar, which he positioned back on Avarua Harbour waterfront.
Calling it Jack in the Box, it was basic but at least it was still flying the flag. He dumped a couple of truckloads of sand out front for customers to stand on and he was away.
Slowly, he rebuilt the business around Jack in the Box, ending up eventually selling that container to the island of Aitutaki, where it still operates as a bar for the fishing club.
Everyone congregated at Jacks. At least one commentator attributed the origins of the ‘‘Winebox’’ inquiry there, with Winston Peters being a regular customer at the time.
Cooper could never resist having politicians on – prime ministers in particular were always fair game to him. One evening he rarked up Sir Geoffrey Henry so bad that the Cooks PM threatened to get him thrown out of the country. Sir Tom Davis would well hold his own, one night firing back to him: ‘‘How come you be so god-damn stupid sometimes, Jack.’’
Cooper’s interactions with patrons and friends have been well recorded, the practical jokes and of course his legendary drinking.
I had to ask him what the most intoxicated night he could recall. His reply: ‘‘Thirty-seven bourbon and Cokes, but I still managed to drive home!’’ He enjoyed shocking people, and he could swear too – ‘‘sentence enhancers’’, he called them. Bombay Sapphire gin became his preferred tipple towards the end.
There were many defining incidents in his career, such as the naked visit to Trader Jacks one night by All Black Zac Guildford, which made headlines around New Zealand. Then there was the impromptu Neil Finn concert, which nearly brought the house down. The Crowded House band members had all been holidaying in Rarotonga and just obliged, Raro-style. No wonder he loved the place.
Trader Jacks provided the venue for so many events, even once hosting a function for Hillary Clinton. Cooper knew everyone, and everyone at least knew of him.
He had a few Cook Island girlfriends over the years, but it was Rosa Tauia who became his live-in mainstay to the end. Just as Chris Douglas became his business partner in the fish processing and pickle business which they founded in a big tin shed on the Ara Metua backroad. A man with Cooper’s calibre and business network does not stand alone, and no-one appreciated this more than him.
Jack Cooper, proud to have met you; prouder still to record all your stories. – Gerard Hindmarsh