Summer read: It’s become a popular location for ironic Google reviews and jokey claims of residence. But Disappointment Island is far more than just a silly meme, writes Louise Fisher.

First published March 14, 2021

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Four hundred seventy-five kilometres off the southern coast of the South Island lie the seven uninhabited islands known collectively as the Auckland Islands. While they have strong historic cultural and spiritual significance to Ngāi Tahu, the Auckland Islands are, in general, visited only by biologists and conservation workers. Still, one of the seven – the tiny Disappointment Island – has managed to take the internet by storm

If you’re not a local, you may have first come across Disappointment Island via Snapchat; in recent years it’s become a popular place to locate yourself on the social media platform’s Snap Map. After all, why say you’re at home, when you could claim to be hanging out on a subantarctic island with a hilariously ironic name? As the island’s notoriety has grown, so have the memes. From traditional image memes on Instagram and Facebook, to reviews on Google, to videos on TikTok and Youtube racking up millions of views, Disappointment Island has became an internet culture favourite. One fan even took the meme a step further getting the island tattooed on their neck for the world to see.

While many have heard of the island, no one seems to know how it got its name and why, exactly, it is so disappointing. Still, there’s been plenty of speculation as to the origin of the name. The lack of resources on the island. The number of shipwrecks off its coast. Some think it was named after the Îles du Désappointement, a group of islands in French Polynesia. So what’s the truth? The island’s fascinating history may provide some clues.

Disappointment Island is a 566 hectare scrap of land with a a rugged coastline, thick tussock and zero trees. An internationally recognised and protected seabird habitat, the island is home to over 100,000 white-capped mollyhawk, a type of albatross, which represents 95% of their total population. Its teeming bird life also includes the tiny Auckland Island rail, which was believed extinct until it was rediscovered on nearby Adams Island in 1966.

But there’s more to this island than just a lot of birds. Over the years, Disappointment Island and its neighbours have been the site of a number of shipwrecks resulting in loss of life and rumours of buried treasure in the waters below. The first known shipwreck in the Auckland Islands came in January 1864, a month after the Grafton, a 56-tonne schooner, left Sydney for the Campbell Islands. On its homeward journey the ship hit heavy winds and was pulled off course towards the Auckland Islands, where it hit a rocky cove and was destroyed. The five men aboard were able to make it to Auckland Island, the main island in the group, where they waited for close to a year to be rescued. The men lived on wild pigs, birds and fish, and even managed to make “passable beer” out of a root found on the island. Eventually, it being apparent that no rescue was on its way, three of the men set out in a dinghy and managed to sail the 450km journey to Rakiura/Stewart Island. It is possible that they passed Disappointment Island en-route and stopped to look for resources and help – only to be disappointed. At Stewart Island, however, they were able to find help, and eventually funds were raised for a rescue mission for the two remaining sailors.

A few months after the wreck of the Grafton, the Invercauld, a 1000 tonne shipping vessel, met the same fate, being swept into the Auckland Islands en-route to Peru from Melbourne. The ship hit the cliffs off the coast of Auckland Island on the 11th May 1864 and was destroyed. Nineteen of the 25 crew members made it to shore with supplies, but they ran out of food and water within a few days. In desperation, the men climbed the 600-metre cliffs above the shore and trekked through the bush, making it to Port Ross at the far north of the island. Incredibly, the Invercauld men were unaware that the Grafton wreck had occurred just months before at the opposite end of the island, and that its survivors were still stranded there. The following months were challenging for the Invercauld’s 19 survivors, only three of whom ultimately survived. As Don Rowe recounts in his recent feature on the Grafton and Invercauld shipwrecks for NZ Geographic, two of the men, Fred Hawser and William Harvey, got in a fight one night that resulted in Harvey kicking Hawser out of their shelter and into cold.

“In the morning, the frozen earth proved impossible to excavate, and Hawser’s corpse was interred beneath a pile of boughs,” writes Rowe.

With food in painfully short supply, desperation took hold. According to Robert Holding, one of the few survivors of the wreck, a few days after Hawser’s body was discovered, “the mate and myself found that Harvey had been eating some of Fritz.”

The three Invercauld survivors were eventually found and rescued in May 1865 by the Portuguese ship Julian – unwittingly leaving behind the Grafton men at the other end of the island.

Still the shipwrecks continued. In 1866 the American ship General Grant crashed into the cliffs off Disappointment Island during a violent storm. Of the 83 on board, 68 drowned. Only 15 managed to board smaller boats and escape to shores of Disappointment Island, where they slept overnight. Once they realised there was nothing of use there, they sailed to Port Ross on the main island, where they lived for the next nine months. Eventually, their distress signal was seen, and the men, of whom only 10 ultimately survived, were rescued.

As a result of the growing number of shipwrecks, the New Zealand government built a network of Castaway Depots, including a number on the Auckland Islands. These huts were stocked with essential supplies, giving those stranded on the islands a chance of survival – and even, when the refill ship arrived every six months or so, of rescue.

These depots would soon prove a life saver. In February 1907, the Dundonald left Sydney en route to England with a cargo of wheat and gold, and 28 men on board. Things went wrong right from the start, with gale winds pushing the ship off course. Its compass began to act erratically, sending the ship further off course and into the Auckland Islands’ path. On March 7, the Dundonald sank after running ashore on Disappointment Island’s west coast. Twelve men drowned; another died of exposure shortly afterwards. For the next seven months, the remaining 15 men kept themselves alive on the inhospitable island. It wasn’t easy. Other than birds and fish, which first needed to be caught, the only other faintly edible stuff was stilbocarpa, or Macquarie Island cabbage, a plant with large, rhubarb-like leaves. With no wood to construct shelter, many of the men slept in holes dug in the earth. It rained incessantly.

After seven months, the survivors were willing to risk it all to escape Disappointment Island. They managed to build a small boat and sail to Auckland Island, seven kilometres away, then trekked 15 kilometres to the Castaway Depot on the opposite coast. There they were able to get meat, biscuits, clothes and other supplies that lasted them the six weeks until the next drop off – and the chance of rescue – arrived. The 15 men were taken to Bluff and some time later, the shipwreck was located. However the more than 70 kgs of gold (valued at roughly NZ$316 million in today’s money) that it was carrying has never been recovered.

Whoever eventually finds the Dundonald treasure will clearly be anything but disappointed, but for bird lovers, the island is already misnamed. Bird expert Colin Miskelly visited Disappointment Island in 2018 and decided that there were “few places on the planet with a more inappropriate name”. Miskelly believes the island got its name from explorers looking for safe harbour, freshwater, wood and food, but were left disappointed. These days few people ever visit the island; since the Dundonald wreck, only 10 people are known to have camped there, including the four people in Miskelly’s crew.

Whatever its origins, we should be glad that someone came up with such a pessimistic name for this tiny subantarctic island. The name that has become a meme has kept Disappointment Island on the map – and given us all a reason to discover its fascinating seafaring history.

Summer read: Nadine Anne Hura re-examines the colonial fiction of the nuclear family behind the white picket fence, and goes in search of ancestral narratives that better match our lived reality. [Original illustrations by Te Kahureremoa Taumata.]

First published March 28, 2021

I once wrote a children’s story about a little girl who learns to measure her father’s absence by the falling and freezing and unfurling of the seasons. She sits at her bedroom window and waits as the days and weeks and months slip by, or perhaps it’s years – the story is intentionally vague – until eventually she is stripped of all expectation for his return.

When Bella comes home one day to find her father’s familiar shape leaning against his car in the driveway, her heart skips a beat. He tilts his chin in her direction and grins, and Bella can’t help herself. She’d know that grin anywhere. She drops her bag and steps into his outstretched arms.

“I’m sorry, Bub,” her dad says, jaw tightly clenched. “It’s been too long.”

Bella breathes in his scent. “It’s OK. I got good at waiting.”

The editors liked everything about the story except the ending.

“It’s not clear where the father‘s been,” they said with a tone of frustration. “It just seems a bit implausible that a father could be absent for such a long time without an explanation.”

If I hadn’t been crying on the inside I would have laughed. Only someone who’s never had an unreliable parent could think that not seeing your father for years without an explanation is implausible. In my world, a more curious phenomenon is a story in which the father isn’t absent.

The editors suggested I could resolve the ending with just a few subtle tweaks. Trying to be helpful, they suggested Bella’s dad could be in prison.

Prison?

Everything inside me flinched.

I tried not to be angry. But the effort required to live down stereotypes that criminalise Māori simply because the narrative is plausible to Pākehā isn’t just intellectual or political, it’s emotional.

How to explain that not all absent fathers are in prison? Some absent fathers have professional, high-paying jobs in government departments. Some absent fathers have boats and planes on which they take other people’s kids fishing and flying. Some absent fathers are jewellers or stock brokers or diplomats or pilots or chefs. Some absent fathers live just down the road or over the hill.

I hung up the phone and opened my laptop. The screen stared back at me blankly.

There are as many reasons for the vanishing acts performed by fathers as there are kids who are waiting. 

Got-a-new-partner-and-kids-reasons. Mining-for-gold-in-Aussie-reasons. Working-nightshift-reasons. Denied-access-reasons. Hurts-too-much-to-see-you-reasons. Dodging-child-support-reasons. You’ll-never-know-and-best-not-ask-reasons.

The cursor continued to blink but my fingers wouldn’t move.

I wanted to tell the editors that in real life, the waiting doesn’t end when Bella’s dad turns up one sunny Saturday morning. There’s no tidy explanation for where he’s been, nor is there any guarantee he’ll stick around. This pattern of waiting will become Bella’s normal. Her dad will drift in and out of her life like an offshore breeze until eventually, she will learn how to go about her days without always watching the horizon.

Absence is a powerful teacher. Separation forces us to grow. No one said it would be easy. If not for the distance between Rangi and Papa, how would their children have experienced the light?

Giving up on a parent who is absent is not the same as releasing them. The day I opened the door to find my father standing on the front step I was 17 and well fortified. But all the years rehearsing the interrogation I would deliver on this day came to nothing. He was shorter than I imagined, and his dimples were deeper than the photographs captured. He took me out to get a feed but his car broke down on the motorway and I felt bad for him. No one is ever quite what they seem.

Fathers aren’t the only ones swept away or snared or seized. Think of Rona, watching from a lonely crevice in the moon as her children are tucked into bed and coaxed to sleep by their father. Feel the distance her flesh cannot close.

Think of Hinepūkohurangi, whose freedom could not be contained by any man. Do not try to hold on to a woman like Hinepūkohurangi, for she is ethereal.

Think of Taranga, swaddling her last-born child in her hair and letting him slip from her fingers. Now there’s a story that wouldn’t pass the Pākehā plausibility test. What mother in her right mind would cast her child to the sea?

A woman who had mad faith.

Taranga released her child because it was all she could do. Life can be cruel and unfair, and sometimes parents find themselves faced with impossible choices. But Taranga knew the power of her tikitiki, and she wanted her son to live. Not just live, but to grow up and fulfil his destiny.

Māui’s whole life was shaped by his mother’s courage and wisdom. His longing to find her defined him. The search gave him purpose and direction – Māui tikitiki a Taranga.

Separation is ordinary. Life is full of struggle and sacrifice. Sometimes, the most reliable relationships we have are those that whāngai and nurture us: grandparents, step-parents, adopted parents, sisters, cousins, aunties, uncles, the mother of our best friend.

Remember the one who gave Māui her jawbone?

It makes me wonder about the generations of harm caused by the colonial fiction of the nuclear family behind the white picket fence. It’s hard not to feel aggrieved when we are constantly measuring our expectations against a norm that doesn’t match our lived reality. 

When my marriage ended it took me a further six months to actually leave. Those nights were spent wrestling in the dark with feelings of failure. My best mate asked me if I could name what I felt like I was losing and I replied “the idea of us”. The vows I made at the altar were nothing compared to the promises I made to myself as a child: I would not leave. I would stick it out, through thick and thin. I would stay.

I didn’t realise until later that leaving isn’t synonymous with failure, and loyalty to the act of breathing is more important than conforming to cultural expectations that want to straight-jacket us into predetermined roles. At one point, sitting in the car outside my brother’s house, I asked if there was something wrong with us; if leaving was somehow part of our DNA. The rain was so loud against the glass I could barely hear what he said, but I still remember the look on his face. It made me realise that siblings are passengers of fate, which feels like a Pākehā way of saying whakapapa, and whatever doesn’t drive you apart will eventually drag you together. 

If my brother were here today I would tell him that it’s not us who are wrong, it’s the stories we’ve been told that are wrong. Stories that put our fathers in jail instead of out in the garden. Stories that tell us that any kind of family that deviates from the norm of two heterosexual parents under the same roof is “diverse”. Stories that describe homes of solo parents as “broken”. My brother’s kids now face a future without him. They had become accustomed to his absences before, but the distance now is final: untraversable except through story. I want to find a way to explain that no one is ever quite what they seem – not Taranga, not even Māui.  

A few months after the kids and I moved into our new place, a favourite teapot was smashed. I found my daughter on the kitchen floor surrounded by bits of crockery. She was a tangle of hair and hot tears. I got down on the floor beside her and pulled her onto my lap. I told her what I knew to be true: Sometimes things break. It’s not the end of the world. I found some glue and a paintbrush and I watched her repair the teapot piece by jagged piece. 

Like the art of kintsugi, I told her that families aren’t broken if one parent leaves, they are just remade differently. Learning to accept absence and separation is hard, but it’s normal. The cracks and gaps become part of our story. I told her it takes courage to stay, but it also takes courage to leave, and the most important thing in the end is mad faith.

Rarely do we get the chance to negotiate or appeal the history we are born into, let alone interrogate reasons. Like the earliest stories that have ever been told, our identities are shaped by the longing we live with and the struggles we overcome. 

A story that doesn’t tie up neatly in the end doesn’t make it less worthy of telling. It just makes it closer to the truth.

The Sunday Essay is supported by Creative New Zealand.

We are here thanks to you. The Spinoff’s journalism is funded by its members – click here to learn more about how you can support us from as little as $1.