AN INTERVIEW WITH KELLY TARLTON

"I found a nucleus of divers already in Christchurch. Three or four guys were making their own gear, regulators out of old aircraft parts for example. But you could actually buy gear then - Atlas had just come on the market - made by the same guy who now makes Moray suits, Alf Dickeson. The first reg I had was a twin hose single stage - leaked like a bloody sieve - damn near drowned me several times".

Kelly learnt to dive the hard and dangerous way - he taught himself. He dived with the Canterbury Underwater Club which included Wade Doak, Jim White and Rob Davey. "I had been a keen photographer while I was mountaineering, so the first thing I did was build an underwater housing for a Paxett 35mm camera. It was made out of sheet copper with a perspex window. Like the reg, it leaked like a sieve - I had a piece of blotting paper stretched between two contacts. When it got wet, a buzzer rang and it was time to come up". 

The expedition fever was still there so Kelly decided to take off for New Guinea with three other divers. That was late 1958. "I made another housing for another Paxett -a cast aluminium one - and bought a Bolex 16mm electric drive movie camera. I put that in a housing made out of a propeller dome from a DC-3 aircraft with a glass port.". The group spent six months in the islands and were the first Europeans to dive Wuvulu. The main objective of the trip was to make a saleable film but when they returned home they found that the High Speed Anschrome (160 ASA) used was unstable in the heat and the result was ruined by green and blue patches. 

Success may have seen Kelly in the movie business. Instead he rejoined the Post Office as an exchange technician. Kelly kept diving and took every opportunity to go on long trips, particularly to New Caledonia. He was one of the first to dive the Poor Knights Islands and decided to move up to Whangarei. After a particularly unfortunate incident with a flooded camera Kelly threw in the underwater photography and became "a mad keen spearo - out to spear the biggest and the best". His ultimate aim was to spear a marlin. 

Fortunately he lost interest in the scheme when the Nikonos camera came on the market, and he went back into underwater photography as a semi-professional, whilst still working at the Post Office. At the suggestion of one of his diving buddies, Kelly helped form a company called Underwater Construction Ltd. They received several good contracts, one in Dunedin, but it was cold, hard work so Kelly moved back up north and concentrated on commercial photography, both underwater and topside. In the meantime Kelly had been in a spearfishing group in the Three Knights islands which found the Elingamite, and later he participated in a trip back to the wreck to find its treasure. The syndicate of four, Wade Doak, John Petit, John Gallagher and Kelly, found $12,000 in gold and silver coins. Not only was this financially rewarding but it gave Kelly a saleable subject for his photography. Wade Doak and Kelly collaborated on several assignments including a book, 'The Elingamite and its Treasure'. 

Kelly then worked on the Boyd wrecked in 1809 in Whangaroa Harbour and in 1968 he set up a small museum in an old customs shed overlooking the harbour, displaying relics from the Boyd and some of the coins from the Elingamite. The small museum was not economical during the winter months so he closed it and decided to build a shipwreck museum at the Bay of Islands where there is a constant flow of tourists. 

"I chased around New Zealand and eventually found an old sugar lighter called the Tui which was being used as a houseboat by a potter. I bought it and eventually got a lease on a piece of foreshore at Waitangi and set up the museum there." Initially the Tui had one mast only and was in a pretty rough state - and so were Kelly's finances. By taking on several underwater contracts he managed to survive the first critical year. Soon after the museum was opened Kelly joined another syndicate to search for the General Grant in the Auckland Islands. They didn't find the wreck. To boost his artifact display, Kelly did a trip around New Zealand diving on many wrecks. The museum display was improving but externally the Tui looked much the same. 

Someone elses misfortune gave Kelly the chance to set up his ship the way he wanted. In 1971 the three-master barque Endeavor 11 was returning from a re-enactment of Captain Cook's landing at Botany Bay when it was caught in a north-easterly storm off North Cape, New Zealand, and wrecked. Kelly bought the masts and rigging from the wreck but ended up flat broke so they lay near the Tui until he could afford to have the ship rigged as a barque. At least he had the material - but where do you find the expertise to rig an old sailing ship? Enter one lone yachtsman. "He came sailing over the horizon one day in a catarmaran - came from England. He had owned a square-rigged ship and was a master boat builder. In fact his father and grandfather had worked on square-rigged ships and he knew the game backwards. Ian Barrett was his name - he was a godsend". Barrett supervised the full rigging of the Tui. Standing there proudly with her three masts aginst the evening sun, the Tui brought in more tourists and her skippper's finances improved. 

After a dive in 1974 on the Tasmania Kelly did research on the ship and found that Isadore Rothschild, a jewellery merchant, had lost a chest of jewellery when she went down off Mahia Peninsular in 1897. Kelly organised several expeditions to the ship which lay heavily buried in sand in 105 ft. of water some four miles offshore. Up to now (1978) Kelly had worked on the wreck for a total of eleven diving months and had recovered over three hundred pieces of jewellery. He managed to track down Rothschild's daughter in Melbourne. The ninety-three year old widow had no interest in the jewellery so he bought the rights to the jewellery, and the ship, from her. The elderly lady was the legal owner as Isadore Rothschild had bought the rights to the ship after it sank, with the intention of raising the vessel with 2,000 rubber balloons. Fortunately for Kelly, he did not succeed. 

Kelly has the jewellery insured for $30,000 but believes it is worth much more. The collection is on display in a large armourplate glassfront safe on the Tui. Kelly has been involved in several maritime archaeology projects over the past few years. In 1974 he discovered the anchors lost by French explorer De Surville in 1769; he was responsible for locating the French frigate L'Alcmene on the west coast of the North Island and found a bronze swivel gun and an iron anchor; and he worked on the historic, and tragic Boyd where the crew were supposedly eaten by Maoris. In May of this year (1978), Kelly was invited to Tahiti to raise an anchor reputed to be lost from one of Cook's vessels in 1773. Film producer David Lean (Dr Zhivago, Ryan's Daughter) made a documentary of the lift to publicise two new films he was making. Despite the fact that the film was a documentary, Kelly was amazed that every action had to be rehearsed and the timing perfect. He had in fact become an actor.

S.I.A.: 
You certainly have the character to be an actor. How did you break into show business? 
Kelly: "It started off with David Lean's assistant Eddie Fowley arriving in New Zealand to find suitable locations to film sections of two new films he was making on the mutiny of the Bounty. As it happened, Muldoon, the New Zealand Prime Minister had been in Tahiti and after a trip around one of the reefs, the manager of the hotel Charlie Le Hartwell, told him that Captain Cooks anchors had been lost on the reef. Muldoon suggested he contact me to look for them. Eddie heard about this and decided to took me up but when he arrived in Paihia I was away on a pipe-line job. In the meantime, Charlie had gone out to a new location shown on one of Cooks charts and within five minutes had found a large anchor. I thought that was the end of it but after a few weeks it was on. Television 2 were going up there to do the documentary, with Peter Osborne and I doing the diving. When David Lean saw the film he didn't like it - because it was too much like a documentary - so he took charge of the whole thing himself. It was quite a good documentary but David Lean wanted it visually perfect otherwise he wouldn't accept it. He is a very fastidious man. Everything had to be perfect and if it wasn't it was done again. In fact we had to move the anchor from 105 ft. of water to 60 ft. and in another location 15 miles away so we could spend longer down there getting the shots right. At times we used a wooden anchor and rehearsed our timing on the beach so that it was absolutely precise. The instructions were tape recorded and played back to us underwater so we moved in exact time sequences in front of the cameras." 

S.I.A.: There seems to be a contradiction here. He wants to do a perfect f ilm, but what he is making is not genuine. 
Kelly: "Well, what I am saying is that he is not interested in it being accurate as long as it is visually perfect on the screen. The anchor must have a white background because it is a dark object for example. Its not a documentary now - its a story of an anchor based on truth. Initially we used airbags to do the lift but David Lean preferred a small crane on a pontoon. We were going to use a decorated double-hulled Tahitian canoe but it was in pretty bad shape. Very few people looking at the film would be able to tell that it wasn't true. We spent much more time lifting it out than we would normally have taken. It took us six weeks to get it up - it should have taken us a day and a half. The anchor is being treated by the Public Works Department in Tahiti and will remain on display on the island. S.I.A. Had anyone bothered to search for the anchor before. Kelly Several amateur divers had searched for it but in the wrong places. Obviously nobody had done any research. There is a place called Cooks Anchorage where most people looked but it was actually in Tahomatara Pass about 5 miles away. Besides, Cook left such an accurate map that he wouldn't have been fifty yards out. 

S.I.A.: Would you regard yourself as a treasure hunter or a maritime archaeologist? 
Kelly:   As a treasure hunter until the last few years but now I am turning to maritime archaeology. There is no such thing as a maritime archaeologist in this part of the world - everyone who is working on some sort of maritime archaeology project started off as something else. There are several people here interested in maritime archaeology but I am sure that they wouldn't call themselves maritime archaeologists either. I would like to think that, as with Robert Stenuit, for example, I could combine the two - you find enough treasure to keep yourself going. I'd like to work it both ways. Certainly the digging up of Spanish treasure is very appealing. If I had a choice, the treasure hunt would probably win. The maritime archaeology job would still probably be there in a few years. I get about 50,000 people through (the museum) each year. It's the personal things that people are intrigued with. A toothbrush that has come off a wreck from 1872 is more interesting than a steam-valve. In the future the exhibits will have less ship fittings and more personal items. The Museum doesn't rely on treasure as a drawcard so I can work on any wreck and still get a good display. But on the other hand, there is nothing like the excitement of treasure. 

S.I.A.: You are obviously putting your artifacts to good purpose. What is your attitude towards scavenging by amateur divers - wreck bashing as it was coined at Oceans '78. 
Kelly: Well - it's a bit hard to say. I can't really condemn them unless they don't conserve the items. People are very tightly possesive of the things when they find them, but in six months times you ask them where the clay pipe is and they say ‘Jesus, I think it's in the shed somewhere'. So the initial thrill of discovery is very high in amateur divers but after a while it becomes just another object which gets broken and thrown out. That's the sad part. I'd be much happier if these things were donated to the local museum where it can be properly recorded and displayed. Virtually no conservation is done by the amateur. This isn't too bad in many instances as most divers concentrate on brass and leave the iron behind. But it is becoming very important for every diver to be aware of the problems of what could happen to the artifact if it is not conserved. 

S.I.A.: With the upsurge in amateur interest in maritime archaeology, do you see yourself using amateurs for some of your work? 
Kelly:   The only problem I see from amateurs is that they are not always available when you want them. I employ professional divers and we work 7 days a week, 8 hours a day. Nearly all of the wrecks I have been working on are over 100 feet or so amateur help on the shallow wrecks in calm conditions would be fine but not on the deeper wrecks. Besides, I can't handle more than 4 divers with the boat that I have, and any more than eight divers on a salvage job becomes too unwieldy. 

S.I.A.: Are there any wrecks around New Zealand that would warrant some sort of maritime archaeology discipline. Kelly:   Yes - there are plenty of wrecks - any wreck over 100 years old should only be excavated under a strict code of ethics and management. 

S.I.A.: Even if they contribute little to general knowledge. 
Kelly:  I'm a bit undecided on this, but I would tend to think that if the construction of the ship is well known the ships hull loses its importance so that I think the main emphasis would lead to plotting where and what the cargo is and what condition it is in. The artifacts then assume the prime importance - for display purposes and for an understanding of what sort of cargoes were coming into the country each year. 

S.I.A.: What is the purpose of plotting in details where the artifacts lie in relation to the ship remains. 
Kelly:  Thats a good question. Once again it is perhaps not so important to plot it so fastidiously as perhaps they have done elsewhere. A general pattern would be sufficient to show how the ship has broken up - this may lead to an indication of where pockets of other material lie. 

S.I.A.: At one stage of your life you spent quite a number of years spearfishing. What is your attitude toward spearfishing now? 
Kelly: I am quite in agreeance with spearfishing for the pot as long as it is done with a degree of moderation but I am not at ail in favour of spearfishing competitions. I have been actively involved with competitions but I now feel that they should be scrapped. There must be some damage done to reef areas - no disasterous damage no species wiped out - yet. But it could happen. I think spearfishing in New Zealand is declining in favour of photography and wrecks - but mainly people just going out and looking. The Poor Knight is a prime example. People just go there to look and to take photographs. With clear water, vertical cliff faces and brilliant colours, the Poor Knight would be very difficult to better anywhere. 

S.I.A.: What have you got planned for the future?
Kelly:   I don't really know. It looks as though I am going to be doing two or three excavations in New Zealand and then possibly branching off overseas for a part of the year either working in with somebody else or perhaps having a look at a few wrecks on my own behalf. 

S.I.A.: Will the museum keep you supported?
Kelly:  That's a difficult question. The cost of salvage operations and running boats has increased astronomically in the last two years and the museum door takings are not going to keep up with this unless there is an upsurge in tourist in visitors. Paihia - where the museum is situated - is very short on accommodation and an artifical brake is therefore applied until more accommodation is available. Door takings are not going to go up in the next few years.

Kelly did go overseas, working briefly with Mel Fisher off Florida, and on his own expedition to find the Lutine treasure off The Netherlands. Neither of these jaunts were particularly profitable. Kelly's museum went from strength to strength and still remains in the family. His major project during his last years was the establishment of Auckland's Underwater World, a remarkable project and a wonderful monument to Kelly Tarlton's initiative. It is tragic that his enthusiasm and drive led to his early death from heart complications that could have been rectified if attended to. He is sadly missed by his family, wife Rosemary, and daughters Nicole and Fiona, and all who knew him.