Discover historic Quail Island

Leper colony, quarantine station and training ground for Antarctic explorers – Quail Island must be in the running for New Zealand’s most interesting small island.

Sitting in the middle of Lyttelton Harbour, Otamahua Quail Island has been many things over the last few hundred years. During Beca Heritage Week, Otamahua Quail Island Ecological Restoration Trust is offering visitors the chance to find out more about its colourful history and work being done to restore its natural environment. 

Quail Island as a quarantine station. Photo from The Weekly Press.

'Explore Otamahua Quail Island' offers the chance to visit the site of New Zealand’s only leper colony with a guided tour of the Island by Otamahua Quail Island Ecological Restoration Trust volunteers. The island has been the site of food gathering for local Maori, early settler farming, quarrying, a leper colony, a quarantine station for humans and animals, and a training ground for Antarctic explorers, including Robert Falcon Scott and Ernest Shackleton, who kept ponies and Siberian dogs in quarantine on the island before their voyages to the ice. There is also a ships' graveyard with the wrecks of 10 hulks in a bay on the north-western side of the island.

In December 1879, 102 children from the Lyttelton Orphanage were admitted to the convalescent sanatorium on the island, including 29 with diphtheria, and it was also used to house people with Spanish flu in 1918, a year when 5471 people across New Zealand died of the disease. It was a leper colony from 1906 until 1925 when the remaining patients were sent to Fiji.

Trust Chairman Ian McLennan said native planting to restore the vegetation of the island, along with removing weeds, has been carried out since 1998. “Before the trust started it was basically just grass and was over-run with rabbits. It is now pest free, with the exception of mice, and more than 80,000 trees have been planted across the island.”

The population of native birds is also increasing with kereru (wood pigeons) and korimako (bellbirds) nesting on the island. Efforts are being made to increase the population of the white flippered penguin, with about 65 sponsored nesting boxes spread across the island to ensure the survival of this species.

The Trust hopes one day to reintroduce native birds that would have once lived on the Island, including tui, fernbird, South Island robin, yellowhead and South Island saddleback. Otamahua is the Maori name for the island which means “the place where children collected seabirds’ eggs”.

Mr McLennan said the history of the island was fascinating and there were many mysteries, including where the island’s hospital building was located and the location of graves for three men who died on the island, and how the tiny King Billy Island, a rocky outcrop just off Quail Island’s coast, got its name. "It's not until you start researching the history that you realise how many buildings were built there. It was almost a small village."

The A Place Apart exhibition reveals the lives of leper colony residents on Quail Island. Photo: c.1924 Leper huts on Quail Island, Lyttelton Museum photograph collection.

You can also learn more about Quail Island's history as a leper colony at the A Place Apart exhibition at the Lyttelton Information Centre, 20 Oxford Terrace. The free exhibition features images from Lyttelton Museum's photograph collection which show the colony site and the lives of the patients who were confined there.   

In October 1923 there were nine men with leprosy on the island. A number of nurses worked and lived at the leprosarium between 1920 and 1925.  They provided medical care, support, and meals for the men.

  * The Explore Otamahua Quail Island tours run on Saturday 15th and Sunday 16th October. Return fares $15 adult, $10 child, or $30 for families. For booking and details contact chairman@quailisland.org.nz or phone 384 5338. Each trip is limited to 30 people.