What’s it like to live on Rotoroa island in the Hauraki Gulf?

Rotoroa Island, on the eastern side of Waiheke, was formerly a Salvation Island rehab facility for alcoholics but is now a wildlife sanctuary open to the public. Photo / Richard Hodder

Rotoroa Island is a wildlife sanctuary on the eastern side of Waiheke in the Hauraki Gulf. Privately owned, the island is open to the public for day trips, holiday stays and conservation experiences. But what is it like to live, work and raise a child there, fulltime? Milly Lucas, the island’s assistant manager, reveals what her alternative lifestyle is really like.

I grew up in West Auckland in suburbia, with a large family and great influences on my life. My aunties and uncles did all sorts of things, helping out whenever someone needed a hand. That was instilled in me as a very young person - you can do anything; you just need to give it a go. I’ve always had the attitude in life that you just jump in there and see what happens.

Growing up I was quite introverted, I never really had a massive group of friends, I wasn’t out partying all the time - that came later, as it does for every teenage girl. But I’ve always enjoyed my own company. I’ve never been one to want the world around me all at one time.

Milly Lucas is the Assistant Island Manager on Rotoroa Island, a wildlife sanctuary in the Hauraki Gulf.

I always loved being out in the garden with mum and my nanas. I have family that owned nurseries and live in rural areas around New Zealand, so I always knew I wanted to have a natural green area around me. I think that’s very grounding for me.

My husband Glen and I met through a mutual friend back in 2005. It was kind of love at first sight. We hung out a few times, had mutual connections over life and within three months I moved in. Our son Olly was born in 2011.

My career background was in pharmacy and early childhood and Glen was an arborist. When we met, he was one of only two people qualified in New Zealand to destroy myrtle rust, so he was flying around New Zealand doing all sorts of jobs - and I felt like a single mum, pretty much.

My husband would come home on the weekend and he’d be so tired that he’d sleep all day Saturday and then Sunday he was packing his bags up to fly back out the next day to go somewhere else.

After 18 months of that we were like, “that’s enough”. We wanted a change and we thought what better than to jump into something like conservation to create a more relaxed, natural life and a nurturing kind of balance.

I always knew that being with Glen we would have an interesting life. Just listening to his stories from his childhood, I always knew it was going to be a wild ride. But I never envisioned us living on remote islands and doing this kind of work, it never really occurred to me. But then he started to get more into the environmental side of things and opportunities started to unfold for us from there.

Glen got a job on Motutapu Island, employed as the Restoration Trust’s first ranger, and I was a fulltime volunteer.

I love the natural side of the world we live in, love being out in nature, love listening to our taonga species in the bush and love swimming in the water so it all came to fruition when we decided to make that big change.

Milly Lucas, with husband Glen and son Olly. Milly and Glen are the island managers for Rotoroa, a remote island in the Hauraki Gulf and the three live there fulltime.

I was home-schooling Ollie and then I was volunteering in the trust’s nursery, doing all sorts of jobs, from helping germinate seeds, to cleaning, moving trees around, trimming trees, looking after the homestead and running a retail arm to help generate revenue and business for them.

We were there for just over a year and we stepped away for three to five months and had some down time, to reflect on where we were going to go next.

Then we saw Rotoroa Island was looking for new managers. We lined up with everybody else and put in our resumes. I think it was the balance of our previous stint on Motutapu, our life skills and our can-do attitude that made them decide we would be the perfect match.

Managing an island is a very complex thing. Our skillset here is infrastructure, retail, accommodation, tourism, native birds, flora and fauna, regeneration, conflict management, de-escalation, relationship building... it’s diverse and there’s no such thing as a normal day.

The reality of the job is that it’s all-consuming - in good ways and bad. We are sole charge of the island - everything falls on us. But we enjoy the challenges that it throws at us, and we enjoy watching the results.

We have actively grown our regular volunteer pool as well as relieving rangers. I love to teach people what I’m learning and pass on that knowledge and inspire people. It’s especially important for the younger generation - we want them to have the same aspirations to continue making New Zealand clean, green and the best it can be. If we’re not sharing the knowledge that we’re gaining, it’s going to get lost.

Visitors can stay on Rotoroa Island's bach accommodation, or visit for the day thanks to a regular ferry service.

The most challenging part of living so remotely is not being able to connect with your family and friends as much as you want to or need to. Glen and I both lost very close family members in the five years we’ve been here. We’re both family-oriented people so it was hard - and still is hard. We have great supportive trust members and colleagues that came in when we needed them. Like many jobs you have in your career sometimes you just can’t get to some of these things.

Every job has its ups and downs and for us, the hard part is the difficult people that come to the island. Boaties bring dogs to the island and then decide that they’re going to argue with us about it. We’re only reiterating and reinforcing the trust’s rules. This is a private island and it’s been opened to the public with a landing fee system for recreational boaties to help cover the cost of public facilities like toilets, barbecues, and our visitor centre. However, it’s also a wildlife sanctuary with endangered taonga species – so no dogs allowed. Getting that message across to people is quite hard. And we’ve had people abusing us, spitting at us, because they believe they have the right to do whatever they want. It’s just so frustrating.

A lot of people haven’t had the opportunity to learn about the Hauraki Gulf itself and what is out here. If you’d asked me 10, 15 years ago what islands were in the Hauraki Gulf, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you there were 64 offshore islands and that some of them are private islands that people either inhabit or use as holiday destinations.

Just like your house is private land, these islands are private land for the owners. Getting that information conveyed to people that have access to come out here, it’s quite hard for them to understand that not everything is owned by our Government and that they don’t have the right to come and do whatever they want, whenever they want.

It’s definitely a challenge, definitely frustrating. But I always try and pare it back to teaching people something. And until I got into this line of work and started learning these things, I didn’t know any better. I was exactly like them. Until I learned.

What I’ve learned about myself is how resilient I am. And how much stronger I can be as a person. Especially for the islander community. We can all come together and we’re all just a phone call away from each other, even if it’s just for a rant about something that’s happened. We are as strong as we are together.

Interacting with native species has deepened Milly Lucas' understanding of New Zealand's unique ecology.

I’m really honoured that the trust has given me qualifications and a skillset to now interact with our native taonga species and I want nothing more than to use those skills as much as I can in whatever I do next.

I’m a licensed takahē handler and vaccinator and I’m now a captive and wild adult and chick kiwi handler as well. So I can use my skills in a different range of networks throughout New Zealand doing a range of different things. I would just really love to continue doing that work.

I’ve only been a licensed kiwi handler for a couple of months now but have been able to be a part of the network for a couple of years. And I’ve seen birds from 2 or 3 weeks old, to 6 to 10 years old, and I now watch through everybody else’s eyes how special that is.

It’s a unique thing the trust has set up here. Rotoroa is a kiwi creche, with chicks being transported here to live safely while they grow big enough to fend for themselves in the wild.

We regularly hold special release days where the public can come and see a kiwi chick up close. Often there’s up to 300 people on the island and being able to see the birds without the barrier of a glass enclosure means they can actually make that connection about the importance of conservation.

I feel I’ve found my niche now in life. A lot of people move from career to career because they don’t know what to do and they sometimes don’t get the opportunities that I’ve been blessed to have.

Milly Lucas' resilience and dedication reflect the spirit of environmental stewardship on Rotoroa Island.

It’s been lovely watching Ollie grow up and flourish into his own person here, without any external influence on who he is as a person. But it’s also been really hard. As a parent, you think back to your days of growing up and you went and played team sports, but he’s never had that opportunity since he was 6. We’ve got a little bit of that parent guilt that we should have maybe kept him in school or sent him to boarding school somewhere.

But then when you take a step back, he is a beautiful child and he’s flourished. Although he has more of a mature head on his shoulders than any other 12-year-old does, he is still really grounded as a person.

I’m by far not the perfect parent in terms of balancing schoolwork and a 24/7 job alongside being a wife. There is no balance, really. But on the days off and the quiet days, we rein it all in and bring it back together. We enjoy our time together and we work through things as much as possible.

Ollie knows what he wants and I think that’s what’s helped us make the informed decision that we must step away from the island after five years.

When we do leave, I will miss the relationships that we have fostered with our volunteers, our staff and volunteers, the trust, and our guests. We get a lot of guests that come back once or twice a year every year to stay in our bach accommodation and we’ve become quite friendly and close with them. We’ll miss the people the most.

For more information about visiting Rotoroa Island for day trips, booking accommodation or helping the trust’s work, see exploregroup.co.nz/auckland/rotoroa-island and rotoroa.org.nz.