I've written before about my struggles to confine this blog to its supposed subject - jetties of Whakaraupō/Lyttelton Harbour. I wanted to write more generally about the people in our small harbour communities for whom the sea was both an enabler and, at times, a threat. So rather than being solely focused on the technicalities of jetties, my posts embraced activities that took place in that transitional zone between land and sea. This post is about an activity I was vaguely aware of most of my life and really enjoyed finding out more about. It is part of the history of extractive industry in the harbour and further illuminates the incredibly hard physical work that was often required to make a living there.
I am grateful to Evan Walker for permission to reproduce the photos in this post and to Ian McLennan of the Ōtamahua-Quail Island Ecological Restoration Trust for making the digital copies of the images available to me. Some of the images already appear in Peter Jackson's Quail Island: A link with the past and Bernard Walker's True Grit: Bernard Walker's Recollections of an Unusual Occupation.
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Bernard Walker's Otamahua with Quail Island in the background
(also the recently dismantled lighthouse)
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The leper colony on Ōtamahua/Quail Island was disbanded in 1925. The link with the Antarctic ended when Commander Byrd’s huskies were transferred from the island in 1929. That year also marked the last use of the island as an animal quarantine station although the quarantine grounds were not officially abolished until 1954.
We’d be forgiven for thinking that the island was all but abandoned from then on. But not so.
Tucked away on the south-west side of Ōtamahua/Quail Island, adjacent to the ships’ graveyard, is a long, shelly beach known as Walkers Beach. In the early years of European settlement shell was freely removed from beaches around Whakaraupō to supply ballast for boats. The practice was curtailed when local landowners complained about the erosion of the foreshore in certain bays, though trying to police the ban proved difficult for the Lyttelton Harbour Board and the Mount Herbert County Council. In the 1920s R.W. Walker saw an opening to supply shell grit to returned servicemen who were being encouraged to take up poultry farming. After some years of taking shell and facing multiple prosecutions, Walker approached the Department of Agriculture in 1929 and secured the sole permit to take shells from a south-west facing beach on Quail Island. The proviso was that the shells removed should only be those cast up by the tide - not those that constituted the permanent deposit. Later the Department of Lands and Survey leased a designated area to Walker which meant the permanent shell deposit could be exploited.
Walker's son Bernard took over the business (known as 'Ovo Grit') at the age of 19 in 1932 when his father died of tuberculosis. The shell gathering was hard, physically demanding work.
The beach we used was approachable only at half tide because mudflats appeared at low water about 100 yards offshore. In the early days we’d get there on one tide, stay the night in a kind of wigwam made from an old sail and load up the next day, rowing three tons (60 sacks) out to the launch as soon as it lifted on the tide, in half ton loads in a big flat-keeled dinghy. Later we did get a small outboard, and finally a barge...This barge or lighter could carry seven tons and the drill was to float it onto the mudflats, just at the lower end of the sloping beach. Then the bagged shell was wheeled aboard, two sacks at a time along a plank walkway...The lighter would then be floated off the beach at high tide (not always as easy as it sounds) and towed back to Lyttelton.[1]
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Otamahua on the Millers slipway at Lyttelton
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On the Sinclair Melbourne slip in the early 60s
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| Shell about to be unloaded at Lyttelton |
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| Otamahua on the sheltered southern side of the island with the Stock Jetty in the distance |
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