Somes Like It Hot

Kia Ora!

I have always been drawn to islands. There is something innately mysterious about islands. They are spills of possibility on a bare, polished floor of water. Perhaps it is their literary associations with buried treasures, lost civilizations and strange creatures bypassed by the tides of time and natural selection. Maybe it is their offer, whether real or symbolic, of uniqueness in a world dominated by continental mass. Then again, it could be their promise of isolation and refuge.

The historian in me also finds islands a natural attraction. In a field where borders and boundaries are more illusion than substance, and eras, empires and events merge and diverge with far greater complexity than implied by their dates, islands offer a refreshingly distinct and naturally defined subject. Each island is its own story waiting to be told.


Given this, it was inevitable that one day we would explore the little island poking its green flanks above the blue waters of Wellington Harbour.

This last Saturday, morning clouds melted away to a bright, blue summer day, a perfect day for adventure. So, of course, the dreaded weekend exchange surfaced:


“So, what do you want to do today?”

“I don’t know, what do you want to do?”

“Whatever you want to do. I just want to do what would make you happy.”

“Well, what would make me happy is doing what would make you happy. What do you want to do?”

Wars have started this way.

Eventually, after a few volleys of reciprocal selflessness (or indecision, the distinction is often slight) I overcame my genetic inclination to park in front of the computer and suggested we ride the train to Wellington, eat lunch at Queen’s Warf and take the inter-harbour ferry over to Somes Island. Calm days are fairly rare around here, and with no whitecaps streaking the harbour I thought Linda stood a reasonable chance of surviving the boat trip without motion sickness. (Linda’s inner ear, like her sense of smell, has a sensitivity rivalled only by the most advanced sensors found in the world’s premier particle physics laboratories.)

The fine weather, arrival of a cruise ship and coincidental weekend of “The Sevens,” New Zealand’s annual international rugby tournament, brought out a noticeable increase of locals and tourists. White official tournament vans dodged about, each carrying the name and flag of some visiting national team. The sidewalks, usually clean, were dotted with abandoned beer cans and bottles. They lay discarded like empty fuel cans marking the trail of some advancing army.















We ate lunch at “Chicago,” a cafe/sports bar that is a fine testament to the cultural hegemony of America. We enjoyed quite good chicken quesadillas while sitting under a Chicago Cubs banner, next to a table of South-Pacific Islanders and across from a platoon of Aussies and a small contingent of Germans besieging the bar. The world is a village indeed. (This also engenders a question: who then, is the village idiot? I know my first choice.) Connor was quite concerned that we might miss the noon departure of our boat and punctuated lunch with his anxiety. “Has the boat left?” “Did we miss the boat?” ‘When does the boat leave?” “Where is the boat?” “Is that the boat there?” And so on. I drifted, not for the first time, into pondering the possible uses of duct tape as a parenting tool.


Much to Connor’s relief our ride, the Cobar Cat, lay tied up at the dock and attended by a flock of waiting passengers grilling in the midday sun. The lack of a normal Wellington brisk breeze accentuated the building heat, although by Florida or Arkansas standards it wouldn’t bear noticing at all. With the temperature nudging the 90 degree mark, the afternoon turned out to be the warmest so far in a summer which is setting records in the Wellington region for fine, warm days. When boarding time arrived, most of the passengers opted for the open top deck. Linda, already hot and getting a headache from the glare, and Connor, glowing a faint rosy pink despite industrial strength sunscreen, sensibly opted to sit below on the enclosed main deck. I love the sight of open water, the smell of sea and the feel of wind tugging at me too much to miss a chance at it, so I went back up and squeezed myself into a space at the rail in the starboard aft corner. The trip out took about 20 minutes, half of which I spent trying not to step on or sway into the utterly spent-looking German mother of three next to me, and the other half snapping pictures in hopes that one or two might actually turn out well. (I love digital cameras. At last I can snap away gleefully without feeling guilty about the cost of film and prints!)

The Cobar Cat pulled up at Somes Island’s small pier, a simple work of cracked concrete, sun-bleached wood and rusting fittings. About half the passengers disembarked, and we were all ushered into a small, one-room plywood cabin at the base of the dock. Here a blonde, freckled, bare-foot ranger, looking very much like a delivery from central casting (“Hello? Yes, do you have any corn-and-lamb-fed Kiwi girls, say, 30’ish, basic Scots-Irish immigrant stock? You do? Good, please send her up.”) gave us the requisite orientation and made sure that we and our bags were free of any exotic, unwanted flora or fauna before letting us loose upon the island.



From the preceding you may have surmised, correctly, that Somes Island is a plant and wildlife refuge.

But, naturally, it wasn’t always this way . . .

Note: if you’re short of time, patience or interest in history, feel free to skip the section that follows. Enjoy the photographs and return to a journal of our family adventures at “Waitangi Day,” somewhere around page 37. (Just kidding.)
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One Island’s Story

Maori tradition claims that Kupe, the legendary explorer and discoverer of Aotearoa (“Land of the Long White Cloud,”) first set foot upon this little island in a large bay around a thousand years ago. He named it Matiu, and the small rocky islet off its northern tip Mokopuna, after two of his daughters or nieces (the story varies.) Kupe returned to his home, somewhere in Polynesia, with stories of virgin lands of plenty waiting to be claimed. Over the next few centuries successive waves of voyagers repeated his journey, settled in Aotearoa and became the Maori people.

The Maori never lived on Matiu permanently; it was too small, too steep, too rugged and too exposed to hammering storms for any sizeable community to comfortably occupy. However, those very conditions made Matiu an ideal site for a pa, a place of refuge in times of war. Raids, disputes, tribal fractures and other opportunities for man’s oldest team sport were plentiful among the Maori, and different generations built and maintained pa’s on the island. The arrival of Europeans and their alterations to Matiu erased all visible traces of these havens, and all that remains of this period are the last remnants of a few Maori middens – garbage dumps.



In time, different settlers arrived after one of their own legendary explorers, James Cooke, charted Aotearoa’s coastline in 1769. These people proved more proficient at development and warfare than the Maori, and in time made the place their own. In 1839 Matiu, along with most of what is today the Wellington region, came into the possession of the New Zealand Company. The company rechristened Matiu as Somes Island, after Joseph Somes, the company’s deputy-governor and one of its primary investors. In 1866 colonists built a lighthouse on the island’s southern flanks, the first harbour lighthouse in New Zealand. The original structure was replaced in 1900, and that beacon, now automated, still guides ships into and out of Wellington Harbour more than a century later.

As it has so many times and in so many places, disease played a key role in shaping Somes Island’s story. In 1872 the immigrant ship England sailed into Wellington harbour flying the dreaded yellow flag – a declaration of illness onboard and warning to stay away. In response officials ordered the construction of a quarantine camp on Somes Island, a natural outpost to Wellington. The station remained in operation until 1920, and over nearly half a century hundreds of immigrants spent time there until they either recovered and were declared safe, or died. The later fate befell 43 people from 17 different ships. Few victims were actually buried on the island, and those who were later were exhumed. Today a small monument stands at the island’s northern peak, reminding the present of the past and honouring those whose long journey to a new land ended just offshore from their destination.

Human epidemics were not the only medical concern of the day. In some ways even more threatening to the colony’s livelihood and more likely to occur was the arrival of some disease that might devastate the agricultural economy. Every year ships disgorged thousands of animals to stock New Zealand’s farms, haul wagons and carriages, carry its citizens on their backs and pull plows and reapers across fertile fields. Any one of those immigrants could carry a parasite or disease capable of rapid and deadly spread, making it vital to identify and isolate ill or suspect animals before they reached the mainland.

As it had been for human quarantine, Somes was a natural site for this work. The first known use of the island for animal quarantine occurred with the isolation of a flock of sheep in 1853, though the island was not officially designated for that purpose until 1886. In 1893 the Department of Agriculture built a dedicated livestock isolation facility on Somes, then one of the two major animal quarantine sites for the nation.

Human and animal quarantine stations operated side by side until 1920. Over this period the small island changed dramatically. Nearly all of the primal vegetation vanished; paths and trails were cut into the rock, buildings constructed and in 1919 a tramway built from the landing to the main facility atop the island. Somes’ original rich population of birds, insects and reptiles dwindled away as well, victim to the destruction of the flora and an invasion of rats and mice carried in by a steady stream of vessels.


Although humans were no longer quarantined after the end of the First World War, animals continued to be screened and housed in large numbers. In 1968 a new, state-of-the-art maximum biological security station replaced the older facility. Within two decades, however, rapidly declining livestock imports, advances in veterinary medicine and the advent of invitro fertilization techniques rendered the facility obsolete and unnecessary. In 1995, after more than a century of protecting New Zealand from parasite and pathogen, Somes Island’s history of animal quarantine came to an official close. The derelict buildings remain, paint faded by sun and rain, concrete paving and foundations cracked and colonized by grass and weeds. The site reminds me of some bizarre mixture of a closed Cold-War military base, derelict and without purpose, and an abandoned prison, once seen as progressive but now deemed barbaric by society’s changing sensibilities.

As war drew the Maori to Matiu hundreds of years before the European arrival, war brought new interest in Somes Island in modern times. In August of 1914 the great European powers, snockered on a century of relative peace and chronically preoccupied, paranoid and pissed off over any number of frustrated ambitions, historic animosities and attempts at altering the international pecking order, had a go at each other. Nasty things were said, punches thrown and soon friends joined the fray willingly or not. In short order the world’s first global bar fight was underway. Kiwis answered the call of the mother country.

The contributions and sufferings of New Zealand in that tragic, horrific struggle are many. In fact, relative to the population of the nation and the number of troops it contributed, New Zealand suffered a greater casualty rate than any other combatant nation.

Among the domestic problems accompanying a globe-spanning conflict between multinational alliances, there emerged a question: what should be done with foreign, now enemy, nationals living in New Zealand? Were they loyal residents and harmless guests? Suspect variables? A nest of potential saboteurs, subversives and spies? Historically, most governments in times of great workload, limited resources and high paranoia resolve this dilemma by locking them all away and letting the scholars, lawyers, diplomats and moralists sort it all out later. New Zealand was no exception to this rule.

The 1911 New Zealand census recorded just over 4000 German-born individuals in the islands. When war came, the definition of just who was a German, however, was problematic. Danes, Scandinavians and Poles were classified as Germans; anyone with south eastern European origins might be classified as Austrian. Hundreds of individuals, many of them harmless labourers, farmers or seamen caught in port when the balloon went up, were arrested and interned.

With its central location in Wellington harbour, small area and pre-existing quarantine facilities, Somes Island offered an ideal location for a detention camp and served as New Zealand’s main internment facility during the war. Exact record of whom and how many were interned there between 1914 and 1918 is not available. One study of the existing sources for 1917 shows 277 internees on the island, 234 of whom were “German.” Hundreds more spent some period in camp during hostilities, either to eventually be deemed no security risk and paroled or transferred elsewhere.

Life on Somes Island was Spartan at best, but as far as is known the internees were not intentionally deprived or subjected to systematic abuse. There were occasional escape attempts, all unsuccessful. Only one internee is known to have died on the island, having collapsed after carrying water up from the shore to the camp. Eight other Somes internees passed away during the war; six to natural causes or illness after being sent to hospital in Wellington; one of natural causes complicated by a failed suicide attempt and one of exhaustion and exposure after swimming ashore in a bid for freedom.


Twenty years later, world war once again turned Somes Island into an internment camp. This time the New Zealand government exercised more discernment in classification and detention of enemy aliens and security risks, if for no other reason than that most Germans were now naturalized citizens and there were relatively few Italians and Japanese in the country. In 1939 the island technically possessed quarters for up to 450 people and a capacity to cook for around 250. The detainee population most likely never reached 200. Records indicate a maximum of 185 internees in January of 1943 -- 98 Germans, 30 Italians, 47 Japanese and a motley of individuals from various places deemed a threat to security for political or personal reasons.

On January 31st, 1943, Somes’ “guests” were relocated to a purpose-built facility at Pahiatua. The move stemmed from a formal complaint lodged by the Swiss Consul, who observed that since a degaussing station and anti-aircraft battery had been built on the island, Somes was a military installation and thus New Zealand in violation of Geneva Convention protocols forbidding collocation of prisoners of war with military facilities. Eighteen months later, however, the detainees returned to Somes when the government decided to use Pahiatua to house Polish refugee children. By this point in the war, the danger of an attack had long passed.

Such a threat had been a remote, but not impossible consideration in 1942. Though distant from Japan and the main areas of action in the Pacific, New Zealand was within what Japan considered its natural sphere of dominion. Long range strategic plans for the eventual occupation of both Australia and New Zealand existed, should the course of war allow. Though Japan never had the opportunity, resources or forces to bring either nation into its empire, Australia was directly attacked by air and New Zealand briefly threatened with the possibility. Throughout the conflict, as it had during World War One, New Zealand contributed valuable troops, food and materiel to the United Kingdom’s war effort, and in addition served a key logistical support role for American operations in the Solomon Islands and New Guinea. It was a viable and logical, if secondary, object of Japanese attention.


As one of the two major ports in New Zealand, Wellington’s docks, warehouses, machine shops, industries and shipping required protection. As part of the city’s hastily constructed defence system, engineers blasted and gouged more than 50 feet off Somes Island’s southern peak and built gun pits, an ammunition magazine and fire control bunker for a heavy anti-aircraft battery. Later, a degaussing station was added, operated by women naval reservists. This facility protected shipping against magnetic influence mines, a new weapon in the arsenal of World War II combatants. Traditionally, mines were either set off manually by an observer or by a contact detonator when struck by a ship’s hull. Magnetic influence detonators (when they worked; not always guaranteed) greatly increased a mine’s effectiveness by detecting the magnetic field of steel hulled vessels and detonating the mine in close proximity. Laid deeper than a contact mine, magnetic mines created a hydrodynamic shockwave that could snap a ship’s keel in half – almost always fatal damage. As defence against these weapons, degaussing stations temporarily demagnetized vessels by ringing their hulls with cables carrying a powerful electric current.

As during World War One, an internee’s life on Somes was anything but ideal; but, by the overall standards of prisoner camps among the belligerents, it was humane, safe and relatively comfortable. The care given to internees is evidenced by the fact that only one Somes island prisoner is recorded as dying during the war -- a 57-year old German who suffered from heart failure while at the Pahiatua camp.

There was also only one known escape attempt, but for a few days it captured the imaginations and fears of Wellingtonians, as papers warned of the dangers of three German escapees at large. The exploit centres on one Karl Schroeder, interned not only for his German pedigree, but also as a “communist agitator.” In November of 1941 Schroeder and two other men stole a dinghy belonging to the island’s caretaker and made it ashore. One wonders whether or not it had occurred to the trio that escape was only relative, New Zealand being over a thousand miles from the nearest neutral territory and quite a bit further from German controlled soil. Inevitably, geography and climate gained the upper hand. Authorities found and arrested the escapees six days later in the Akatarawa Mountains. Cold, wet and hungry, the fugitives gave themselves away buying food at a local store. They were summarily returned to Somes.


Failure apparently only whetted Schroeder’s appetite for freedom, and soon he and his two fellow conspirators were at work again. This time Schroeder planned on a seawards flight. Sailing to liberty across the vastness of the Pacific, however, required some means of accurate navigation (not to mention a great deal of luck and a rather large set of cahones) so Schroeder painstakingly constructed a working sextant from bits and pieces of wood, metal and scrap. The contraption truly was an amazing work of craftsmanship. Tighter scrutiny and changes in security protocols also forced the men to seek more clandestine methods of egress. On July 26th, 1942, an anonymous note was left with camp guards, advising that Schroeder and Co. were digging an escape tunnel under Hut Number 7. What action followed is, alas, not available to me at this moment. Whatever it was, it was enough to end further attempts. If the group actually was excavating a shaft, it seems either a most desperate or doomed undertaking; Somes island is rock. Upon war’s end and his release from detention, Schroeder handed his sextant to a bewildered camp commandant. “You might as well keep it,” he said. “The bloody thing is of no use to me now.”

In relation to Somes’ history as a wartime detainment camp, one comes upon the bizarre and fascinating account of one George Dibbern. An avid sailor, lover of adventure, philosopher and preacher of individual freedom and the brotherhood of man, Dibbern had the misfortune of being a German resident in New Zealand at the outbreak of World War I. Interned on Somes’ island, Dibbern returned to Germany shortly after release, apparently filled with joyous anticipation for the future of his nation under a new, democratic government. The failure of that government and the suffering of the Great Depression brought Dibbern disillusion and dismay, and in 1930 he left Germany, his wife and his family. What followed was a most bizarre odyssey, the kind one would never believe if contained in a work of fiction. Dibbern returned to New Zealand, but for most of the next decade his residence – and eventually his “country” – was his 32-foot ketch, Te Rapunga (“Dark Sun,” a reference to a stage in the Maori creation epic, a moment of pre-dawn when all is in anticipation, awaiting the revelation of day.)

In 1937 Dibbern flaunted German law by refusing to fly the Nazi swastika aboard his yacht. Instead, he created a flag of his own devising as a statement of his belief in the sacred nature of the individual and their divine right to pursue their own path. In 1940, while seeking an American publisher for his memoir, Quest, he renounced his German passport and created his own, identifying himself as a citizen of the world. German authorities were not amused. Nazi party chapters in Canada, The U.S. and New Zealand reported his activities to the Gestapo. His wife and children were threatened. Efforts were undertaken to force his return.

As the war in Europe grew larger and more dire in 1940 and 1941, Dibbern sailed the waters of the southwest Pacific on a crusade for peace on earth, human rights and goodwill toward men. On February 12, 1941, Te Rapunga put into Napier, New Zealand, after its long wandering. Officials did not accept his homemade passport or protestations of global citizenship. I imagine that such a romantic idealist and square-peg-in-round-hole-world like Dibbern stretched the boundaries of a bureaucratic world view to breaking. In any regard, an odd German semi-resident flying his own flag, bearing documentation of his own creation and cruising freely about in wartime waters set off too many warning lights. He was arrested and sent off to an internment facility. And thus George Dibbern sat out the war as a guest of the New Zealand government in the accommodations of Somes Island. Again.

Wars come; wars eventually go. Peace returned to Somes Island. The degaussing station was dismantled; the antiaircraft guns, ammunition and fire control systems hauled off for other duties or scrap. Grass grew amidst the emplacements. The procession of animals through the stations of the quarantine compound resumed. Fifty years after the last internees watched the island shrink over the fantail of a boat, the government closed down the quarantine operations.

Even before the end of Somes’ quarantine era, the next chapter of the island’s story was being written. In 1981, The Lower Hutt Valley branch of New Zealand’s Forest and Bird Association, in tandem with the Department of Agriculture and Fisheries, launched a project to return Somes Island to as close to its natural state as possible. For nearly three decades now thousands of volunteers have laboured to eradicate imported pests such as rats, mice and possums, reforest cleared ground and livestock fields and remove much of the evidence of man’s century and half of utilization.

As regeneration of plant life progressed, the natural food chain re-established itself. Somes rapidly turned into a refuge for many native species of birds, reptiles and invertebrates. Endangered species were reintroduced, and the island is vigorously protected and patrolled to prevent the return of alien species or predators. In 1995 the Department of Conservation opened Somes to the public as a nature, scientific and historic reserve.



Protection and restoration work continues and Somes Island draws thousands of tourists, nature enthusiasts and scientists every year.

And now, we have been three of them.

At home Saturday evening, face glowing warm from the day’s sun and a pleasant fatigue from the walk washing over me like one too many glasses of wine, I watched sunset unfurl a glorious red and orange banner over Somes Island. As twilight drained the colour from the sky and turned the island into silhouette, my mind cycled through the day’s discoveries. What had I learned? Where, now, did this little bump of land fit in the larger scheme of things? What message did it whisper across the waters, across the years, across the pages of its story?

Protection. Perhaps that is the theme of this island’s story. Pa’s. Quarantine. Internment. Defence installation. Refuge. For a millennium Somes Island has served successive generations of two cultures as a place of protection for what they held dear and a place of protection from what they feared.



This island’s story testifies to our enduring drive as individuals, polities and civilizations to preserve not just ourselves and our brief moment in time, but also protect our ways of living and cherished attachments from the hand of change. It is, in its way, an ironic tale, for in defence against unwanted change – personal, communal, economic, political and environmental – man has continually changed Somes Island.

I cannot help but wonder: a century from now, how will this little island have changed again?

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Waitangi Day

Yesterday was Waitangi Day! So there!

Okay, okay, I’ll explain.

On February 6, 1840, various Maori chiefs and British officials signed an agreement in which the Maori recognized British sovereignty and the New Zealand islands became part of the British Empire. In exchange, the Maori were promised ownership of their lands and the same rights as British subjects.

The treaty itself always was, and remains, a problematic and controversial foundation. The English and Maori versions of the treaty varied greatly and different Maori signatories had different understandings of what it meant. The Maori generally regarded the document as a sacred pledge; the colonial and later national government largely ignored it until the middle of the 20th century. Today a government commission exists to interpret the treaty and reconcile Maori grievances and current claims based upon it. The task is further complicated not only by more than a century of informal disregard, but also by a lack of the original document and paucity of copies, some of which differ.

Be that as it may, Kiwis regard, and celebrate, Waitangi day in much the same manner as Americans do the 4th of July. Waitangi Day is considered New Zealand’s national birthday and is a public holiday. Since they are in the southern hemisphere, however, fireworks are fired into the ground, rather than in into the air. Okay, well, not really.

We observed Waitangi day by driving over to the Tasman Sea and through a couple of communities we are considering as potential future homes. The western side of the North Island receives less precipitation than the east, since dominant weather patterns bring systems in from the south and east and the mountains wring a great deal of the moisture out of them before they reach the Tasman. This summer has been notably dryer than normal, and the mountain pastures and brush look decidedly dry, parched and ready to spontaneously combust.

Our destination was Queen Elizabeth Park, a considerable chunk of coastal territory north of Kapiti. During World War II the park was used as a camp for American Marines. Though nothing identifiable from that camp now remains (at least to my view) there is a modest display and memorial remembering their presence and contribution to New Zealand’s wartime defence.

The park is also home to an organization committed to obtaining and preserving old trams (trolley cars for Americans), once the mainstay of public transportation in New Zealand and Australian cities. (If you’ve seen Peter Jackson’s remake of King Kong, you’ve seen one this group’s restored trams in the opening sequences, dressed up as a Broadway Trolley of the 1930’s.) Several of these old trams are in operating condition, and visitors can ride them from the park entrance to the beach and back. These trams, most of them originally hand-built at local machine shops between 1900 and 1940, are more works of the craftsman’s art than modern mass produced vehicles.

After a tram ride and a walk through the restoration facility, we treated Connor to his first horseback ride at an adjacent stable. Connor looked very serious for most of the “ride,” (being led around on a pony by a stable hand), obviously trying to master his natural anxiety and look cool at the same time. Towards the end he did loosen up a bit and smile, and proclaimed “Yeehaw! I feel like a cowboy!” Since then, he delights in reminding us that he is an expert horseman.

On our way home we stopped at Mainline Steam, a company which operates one of, if not the last steam locomotive in New Zealand. Today the engine sat quietly at rest on a siding, ticking occasionally in hot sun. Connor, devoted fan of Thomas the Tank Engine that he is, was still thrilled at being in the presence of a real “steamie,” even if it was dormant. I walked him around the locomotive, seeing which parts he could identify (a lot!) and explained how the engine worked. He enjoyed it immensely, and, well, I did too.

Today was Connor’s first day back at school after his Christmas/summer break. As I walked him down the hill, I noticed that many of the mothers delivering their children to school wore unusually radiant smiles. Some even greeted me with more than the perfunctory pleasantries. The shared bond of liberation from a house under siege by offspring joined us all in happy accord. Today the sun burned a little brighter, the flowers glowed with richer colour and life seemed just a little more sweet. So this is how my parents felt when I returned to school . . . .

And that’s the latest news from us. I apologize for the length. As Linda likes to say, “If I had had more time, I would have made it shorter.”

Our love to you all.

*Note: the first two views of Somes Island are not my photographs. The island is visible from our living room window, but the image I have from that vantage point is a bit hazy. So, I borrowed these off the web.