Islands of the lost heritage
Tuesday, 13 April 2021
Historic buildings on a far-flung island are crumbling to ruin after two decades of cost-cutting.
The sad state of a World War II Coastwatchers camp and a mothballed meteorological station has led to pleas to save Campbell Island/Motu Ihupuku's heritage structures.
But the fate of the Tucker Cove historic huts, a legacy of New Zealand’s war effort, has already been decided, with the cash-strapped Department of Conservation planning their demolition.
These huts were living quarters for men deployed to the subantarctic islands to scan the Southern Ocean for German and Japanese ships.
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A scathing 2017 assessment of the island’s infrastructure, released to Stuff under the Official Information Act, placed the blame squarely on thinning budgets and scrimping on cheap materials. Cut-price repairs have also shortened the life of some structures.
And it warned that refurbishment was needed within five to 10 years. The report was completed by Paul Cummack, an expert on historical building and conservation projects.
“The Tucker Hut is the most historic building in the suite of buildings I investigated,” he wrote. “It is also in the worst condition and requires a complete rebuild.”
He judged the Hydrogen Building, where weather balloons were once assembled by MetService staff, as “of very high historical significance”, but said: “This building is also near to demolished from neglect.”
Cummack added: “The other buildings on the meteorological base, part of the Hostel, the Technical Building, and the jetty structures, including the Marston matting, are all of high historic significance and are all worthy of preservation.”
A cluster of significant structures and archaeological sites around the heads of coves and bays in Perseverance Harbour is listed by Heritage NZ as an “historic area”.
They reflect the different human endeavours on the island, which lies 600km from the mainland. This includes exploration, sealing, farming, whaling and mineral prospecting. There are castaway depots dating from 1868.
In the Tucker Valley, the Coastwatchers camp was established in June 1941, beginning with a prefabricated hut erected over 10 days. It was positioned so volunteers could scour the harbour for enemy ships as part of a top-secret operation, codenamed Cape Expedition.
Home to four observers at a time, relieved yearly, they also used it as a base to undertake surveying and scientific study on the bleak island.
The civilian volunteers were demobbed in 1945 and the building was used as a weather station, and added to over time until it had about 15 buildings.
It was last used in 1970 for a Wildlife Service expedition and most of the buildings are now derelict, save for a red weatherboard ‘’Met’’ hut. Scrub is also taking over the site.
The Beeman base was built by the Meteorological Service in 1956. The island lies directly in the path of the weather that comes from the west and south, which dominates New Zealand’s climate patterns.
Until it closed in 1995, it was the country’s most important weather station – and the 20 or so staff made it the only inhabited subantarctic outpost.
The camp had a railway leading from the wharf, a boat shed, domestic buildings and food stores, all connected by Marsden matting roads.
The railway was decommissioned in 2012 and aerial radio masts taken down.
A boardwalk winds through gardens of megaherbs and tussock to the Col Lyall saddle and a southern royal albatross nesting site and is maintained for tourists.
Both DOC and MetService have responsibility for the site.
Cummack noted the original wall cladding used in the base’s main buildings “was of such a high standard that no maintenance had been required on them in the last 60 years, nor is work required in the short term”.
However, “cheaper materials of lower durability have been used with each subsequent decade until now when the most recent repairs require redoing after two years.”
The cut-price work “has made the whole durability of the building worse than if nothing had been repaired or added”, he said.
He pointed to “cheaper materials of low durability” used in the past two decades, and work done by “well-intentioned” volunteers or staff who were not skilled tradespeople.
And he warned: “There is an alarming backlog of deferred large expenditure recladding maintenance.”
The findings were backed by historian Norman Judd, who has been studying New Zealand’s subantarctic region for close to 40 years and is writing a book about the island.
He last visited in January, as a guide for Christchurch-based Heritage Expeditions.
Judd says the history is irreplaceable. And he believes preserving the heritage of the southern latitudes is vital.
Before 1900, there are only a handful of recorded events on Campbell Island/Motu Ihupuku.
“It has a lot of meaning for cultural heritage. We need to enrich that.
“[And] give the islands down there a cultural landscape and values to supplement the natural values that were part of the application for World Heritage status by Unesco.
“Each of those early sites will also give us the natural history of flora and fauna.”
Judd says the Tucker Cove camp was badly damaged in an avalanche in the early 1980s. But what’s left is still worth preserving as parts were built using materials from an old homestead established when the island was farmed between 1895 and 1931.
Fourteen sites on Campbell Island need “active conservation management”, Judd says. That requires protection from sea lions and other wildlife, and vegetation clearance.
But only four are included in DOC’s current asset management information system.
Judd is heartened by the development of an archaeological database by DOC, which will now include the subantarctic island sites.
“I know there are 192 sites in the subantarctic islands … this will allow for regional prioritisation for budgeting and ongoing archaeological site maintenance.
“That’s the golden chalice at the end of this rainbow.”
Managing the historic buildings is a difficult balance for DOC, which is also tasked with protecting the pristine wilderness and biodiversity of the five subantarctic island groups.
The huts were not built to last. And because visitor numbers are heavily restricted in the islands, arranging work parties is tricky.
Transport is usually provided by the navy and transporting tradespeople back and forward to the ship reduces the working day to 5.5 hours.
The weather is also filthy, with gales, heavy rain and low cloud even in summer months.
Coastwatcher buildings at Ranui Cove in the Auckland Islands have been partly restored by volunteers. But unlike the Campbell Island camp, that settlement is occasionally visited by tourists.
Brent Affleck is a senior ranger responsible for heritage and visitors in Murihiku (south of the South Island) region.
“We are a remote location, on the edge, where we only get access occasionally. It’s very difficult to get staff on the ground,” he says.
A senior works officer made an assessment of the site in February 2020. “It was a visit to get an operational perspective on what we can go about maintaining down there,” Affleck says.
“We have had a sinking lid on that sort of work, and we are going to have to prioritise what we keep to represent the heritage fabric of that part of the island.”
But DOC’s heritage budget is strained – with significant funds likely to be sucked up by the Clifden Suspension Bridge, which spans the Waiau River.
A proposal was made, with reluctance, to dismantle the Tucker Valley camp. A final decision is yet to be made, but the axe is likely to fall unless an alternative source of cash emerges.
Allowing the buildings to be subsumed by nature is not an option because the island’s wild weather could see materials blown about the sensitive and fragile wilderness. Some also contain asbestos.
“Our problem is it is a World Heritage island, and it would just spread across as the wind came through. We haven’t made a decision on those buildings but there has got to be some rationalising,” Affleck says.
“We can’t, in all honesty, maintain everything that is there with the budget we have.”
Matthew Schmidt, DOC’s senior heritage adviser, says many people don’t realise DOC is the country’s biggest manager of heritage.
”There are thousands of archaeological sites on DOC land. Six hundred or 700 sites on Lake Wakatipu alone. We then have to decide, with our budget, which ones are we going to leave and which ones are we going to manage and actively maintain.
“It’s very difficult to make those choices.”
Schmidt is pleased with progress in recording, GPS mapping and photographing heritage sites across all five subantarctic island groups.
“The next stage … is we are going to work on a system where you click on the site record, that tells you the history of the site and photographs.
“And when the rangers go out, they’ll photograph and update that form.
“We still need to know and to investigate what the earliest occupations were. And the impacts of people on the island.”
A spokesman for MetService confirmed it has responsibility for most of the buildings at Beeman Point.
But decisions about the old coast watching station lie with DOC. “Our permit area restricts us to operate a weather station at Beeman Point only,” he said, in a written statement.
He added: “MetService certainly haven’t forgotten the contribution that the men and women stationed on the island (the only meteorological observation point in the sub-Antarctic islands) by the former Meteorological Service made to weather forecasting in New Zealand.
“In that regard, there is a story to be told, and the buildings at Beeman Point are part of that story.”
Recent work has focused on the removal of hazardous materials, such as diesel residues from the bulk fuel storage facility, and asbestos, used in the construction of the base.
“The buildings at Beeman Point were constructed with materials designed to withstand the rigours of the environment, and MetService are committed to their maintenance as our permit from DOC allows.
“Except for this year, MetService undertake regular annual maintenance of the facilities during the summer season.”
Last year Stuff revealed that the Government rejected advice to expand a marine sanctuary in the waters around Campbell Island, following pressure from the commercial fishing industry and Ngāi Tahu.
And conservation efforts in the subantarctic region were dealt a further blow when it emerged Covid-19 had forced the abandonment of what was to be the world's most ambitious predator control programme in the Auckland Islands.