Place through the lens: Matiu/Somes Island II

Some additional place-laden photography from Matiu/Somes Island, situated in Wellington Harbour.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Place through the lens: Matiu/Somes Island

Some photography from Matiu/Somes Island, in Wellington Harbour. With its deep and complex history, relative abundance of protected native flora and fauna, and unique location – positioned within the midst of a significant urban area yet effectively isolated – this island location always provides a strong sense of its place for me.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mokopuna: Place in isolation

This past weekend I booked passage on one of the ferries specially arranged to cruise past the Mokopuna Island Project, a temporary art installation by Mike Ting and located on the island of the same name.  Mokopuna Island is a small outcropping of volcanic rock, roughly 200 metres by 80 metres in size, situated adjacent and to the north of Matiu/Somes Island in the middle of Wellington Harbour.

Mokopuna would not likely be well known, as there are many such small uninhabited volcanic bits sticking out of the local waters, were it not for a short-term resident just over 100 years ago.  In July 1903 Kim Lee, a Chinese immigrant to Wellington, having been (mis-) diagnosed with leprosy, was sent to Matiu/Somes Island, which owing to its geographic isolation, served as a quarantine station.  Due to the nature of his supposed illness, the fears and prejudices of the others quarantined with him and his own laments regarding his fate, Lee was subsequently banished to Mokopuna Island, an even more isolated location, across 50 metres of water from the northern tip of Matiu/Somes.

Kim Lee lived a solitary and difficult existence on this piece of rock for just a matter of months, until his death there in March 1904.  Some have speculated he died of a broken heart, for he had just prior to his death learned of the passing of his mother in China, who it is believed took her own life, having received reports of what she understood to be her son’s lifelong quarantine in far-away New Zealand.  Lee had indicated that it was the hope of getting well and saving up to visit his mother in China that kept him alive through his ordeal on Mokopuna.

…I know that I won’t die here, that when I get away from this place, I’ll go back to the village where the tower watches over the carp ponds, and I’ll see my mother again.

While enduring his solitude, Kim Lee suffered the trials of the small, exposed island, subject to the wind, rain and cold that is common to the area much of the year.  The spartan and diminutive wooden hut that was his home was not adequate for such conditions and so he often slept in a small cave near the shore, which he indicated sometimes flooded at high tide.

Food and supplies were carried to him on a rowboat by the local lighthouse keeper, or during rough weather transferred via a zip line strung across the stretch of water between Matiu/Somes and Mokopuna.  Other than that lighthouse keep, Lee’s only human contact was with Dr. Valintine, a local physician who had been assigned to monitor Lee’s condition with weekly visits to Mokopuna.

Kim Lee’s tragic story served as backdrop and impetus for the project by Mike Ting, to explore themes of “isolation, vulnerability and social responsibility in New Zealand’s post-1980s socio-political context.” Those like myself wishing to experience this temporary art installation, the nature of which was not revealed prior to the day, were taken to Mokopuna on a harbour ferry. For these special sailings the return to Wellington from Days Bay passed to the north of Matiu/Somes, rather than along the customary southern route.

The day was wet, windy and particularly grey, with clouds hovering low over the water obscuring any view of coastline while we were in the middle of the harbour. With what I did know of Kim Lee’s story at the time, it seemed a fitting atmosphere in which to experience an artistic homage to such a heart-rending history. The combination of the close weather and uncertainty about just what we were to experience, created a mood of uneasy anticipation on board the ferry as we made our slow approach to Mokopuna.

Close in on the east side of the island, as the engines were powered down, we were sheltered from the prevailing winds and a calm quiet engulfed our vessel. In this silence, a single blast from the ferry’s horn announced our arrival as if to alert the ghost of Kim Lee himself. From the top deck we all scanned the shoreline, looking for some sign of this installation, the artist himself perhaps, but there was nothing – just the DOC sign warning away potential landings on the protected island and a landscape of scrub brush and gnarled volcanic rock, punctuated here and there with arches and small caves.

The silence and lack of obvious activity continued for some time it seemed when there arose from an unseen source on the island a loud and maniacal laugh that in the still, carried far across the water. It repeated multiple times, over the course of several minutes, its source never revealed. Surely this was meant to represent the voice of Lee and its form suggested a level of lunacy. Perhaps the oppressive isolation on this rock in the harbour had turned his mind and he had succumbed to madness.

There was nothing else but that laugh. No explanation, no visual clues, no tangible human forms with which to give the artistic expression context. But in its singularity, its clarity across the calm and confined waters alongside Mokopuna, that choice of auditory presentation was powerfully felt. Its unexpectedness too, arising without warning from somewhere within the bush along the shoreline, added to its effectiveness.

Then as suddenly as it had started the mournful laughter stopped, the ferry engines were powered up and we began the trip back to Wellington. As we rounded the northern point of Mokopuna Island, the wet wind hit those of us on the upper deck as a gale and we were left in that drastically changed environment to mull over what we had just experienced.

 

After docking back at Queen’s Wharf, each of us disembarking from the ferry was presented with a Mokopuna Island Project brochure, which in addition to two selections speaking to the artist’s themes, included a Final Thoughts section by Kim Lee himself. These poignant words from the human source, recorded it would seem while he was quarantined on Mokopuna, provided whole new dimensions to his story and the isolation he experienced those last months of his life.

Along with the experience at Mokopuna Island itself, this got me thinking more closely about geographic isolation and the way it might weave into the fabric of place. In previous posts I’ve spoken about the way place can be leveraged to create and even promote a community identity. How, connecting individuals who share an awareness of their common location, it can in fact bring otherwise disenfranchised individuals into that community.

But in the case of Mokopuna Island, place is revealed and experienced within the context of isolation, of separation, of loneliness. It is the segregation experienced by Kim Lee, tragically within sight of the large urban centre of Wellington in which he would never again participate, that for him gives rise to and supports an awareness of place. A consequence of the cultural prejudices and medical misconceptions of the time, this sense of isolated place only served to accentuate the unpleasant realities of Lee’s experience as a Chinese minority in early twentieth century New Zealand.

Yet taking into consideration Lee’s recorded thoughts, it is not that simple. For intertwined with and clearly influencing his in situ sense of place on Mokopuna, is his displaced sense of place associated with both his family village in China and the community of his new life as an immigrant in Wellington. It is these more affirmative senses of place that both contrast with the grim reality that has befallen him in his current location, and provide him hope and an amazingly philosophical take on a condition and fate that would likely plunge others into utter despair.

Months of isolation could have driven me mad, confronting myself with only myself, admitting to what I fear, to my regrets, to what my life means. But even though I’m living on a rock in the middle of nowhere, I feel like my life has moved on in some way that it wouldn’t have otherwise….I have learned that solitude provides a space in my mind where I do have some power. I can sit on this rock, look back at Wellington, and imagine it’s home.

 

So what to make of this? What is there to be taken away from Kim Lee’s experience on Mokopuna to help me better comprehend sense of place?

I think when considering such a place sense that has been sourced from and moulded so significantly by isolation, it’s not productive to consider its value ultimately in terms of community, at least not in the same way as I’ve done previously. But that’s not to say that interestingly enough, place cannot in fact still generate those shared connections amongst a set of location-linked individuals and in doing so create something resembling a community, even if it is transient and temporary.

I suspect all of us who experienced the trip to Mokopuna Island on that grey morning last weekend, accosted unexpectedly with that disturbing laugh emanating unseen from the bush near the shore, knew in that moment a heightened awareness of the unique circumstances of the location before us. Though it represented but one artist’s ideas about the ongoing meaning of the historical events associated with that setting, it added in some way to the sensitivities of all of us in witness. We were gifted with insight, if on different levels and of different varieties, into a solitary existence on this small bit of volcanic rock and what then this place truly is.

And I would likewise guess that even while finding ourselves plunged almost immediately into a new environmental condition, we all took something of that new or renewed sense of Mokopuna Island with us, back to our much different lives, where it might influence our own personally held senses of place.

In that we are connected. In that something of a community has resulted and persists.

 

Source for the details of Kim Lee’s experience and his quotes: Ting, Mike. Mokopuna Island project brochure. Wellington, New Zealand. 14 March, 2015.