Salvation Island

TIM WATKINS Tim Watkin visits Rotoroa Island with his father who lived there when alcoholics were criminals and his dad was a Salvation Army major.

I had heard the stories throughout my life, occasionally at the dinner table, more often in the car on a summer holiday when my father had time to remember.

They were stories of Salvation Army life 50 or more years ago: him sleeping in a basinette while a brass band practised around him; attending six different primary schools; my grandparents selling The War Cry in Te Aroha pubs and, radically for the time, insisting on education and good nutrition for the orphans at the Eltham Boys' Home.

And there was the story of his year on Rotoroa Island. That was fondly told. Life on an island - even an island to which alcoholics were sent to dry out in the care and protection of Salvation Army staff - meant adventure for an 11-year-old boy. With no other children there, it was a private kingdom of land and sea to explore, battle and conquer.

Standing on Pier Z at Westhaven marina on an indecisive summer's day, waiting as the boat to Rotoroa is loaded, there's still something of that eager 11-year-old about my father. He's 76 now and hasn't been back to Rotoroa since.



There's a blur of chatter on the wharf. Alongside us is a group from the army's continuing care programme heading out to Rotoroa for their Christmas party. They've each done stints on the island in darker days, but today they're all laughter and light - returning in temperate triumph.

Supplies are carried down the gangplank, most notably box after box of ginger beer - no temptation is allowed on this island. We follow on board and cast off.

As the Sovereign-sponsored catamaran churns past Waiheke, Dad, known as Wattie, tells me it was 1937 when my grandparents, then Major Jabez and Ethel Watkin, brought him to the island. The Depression had passed, but the dark clouds of war were gathering.

After years of church work, Granddad had tired of being sent to a new town every year and the financial insecurity. Parish officers were paid only after all the other bills were covered, so wages varied -there was one week during the Depression when his pay was sixpence.

The shift to social work, and this remote gulf island, was a step towards surety. Granddad was to be second in command on Rotoroa and after his year there went on to postings of several years or more in charge at the Eltham Boys' Home, the Epsom Lodge men's hostel and the People's Palace in Christchurch.

As my father and I arrive at the island 65 years on, the dark, clotted clouds finally choose to rain. In the drizzle we wander along the pohutukawa- and agapanthus-lined path curving for several hundred metres from the wharf to the island's cluster of buildings.

On crunching gravel we walk back through the years to an 11-year-old's memories, to days when my father was most a boy.

It looks like an old holiday camp - two slightly pot-holed tennis courts, a volleyball net on a patch of lawn, a kids' playground and some cabin-like accommodation. The phoenix palms still stand in straight, sober rows, but the "beautiful gardens" Dad remembers are gone, as is the piggery he says was over to the right.

Behind, on the hill, the house where he lived for that year survives, fresh and neat and still home to serving officers. There used to be a big dormitory beside it, dominating the hillside, but that burned down in 1973.

Now there's an administration building, a chapel, newer dormitories and a dining hall for the 55 drug or alcohol addicts who can be accommodated here at one time. The staff call them clients. Dad refers to them as inmates. Much changes in 65 years.

But inmates they were. In those days alcoholics known to police were considered criminals. Rotoroa was a sentence in lieu of prison, and an escape attempt warranted up to three months in jail.

According to the Habitual Drunkards' Act 1906, anyone convicted of inebriation three times within nine months could be sent to an approved institution, such as Rotoroa, for one to two years.

"They had committed minor offences, really. Drunk, breaking things, being a nuisance," Dad says as we walk up the path. "They were really guys who couldn't take their booze and they came here to dry out [and] stay for 12 months.

"A lot of them made it their home. They didn't have any family. They went back to Auckland after their sentence, would go to the nearest pub, get boozed up, break a window, come back on the next boat. It was," he adds after the slightest pause, "a marvellous place."

T HOSE who know of Rotoroa Island most often refer to it as the drunks' island. So it has been since Christmas Eve 1910 when the first patients moved in, and since then Rotoroa has been a refuge for those drowning in their addiction to alcohol or drugs.

The irony of the nickname is that the island has always been dry. The rules here are simple: no drink, no drugs.

To those who go to the island for treatment and a way out of their addiction, Rotoroa is more commonly known as Miracle Island, says Major Des Buckner, who has been the officer in charge on Rotoroa for the last two years. "So many of them go away from here completely changed."

The Salvation Army bought Rotoroa from the Ruthe family in September 1908 on the prompting of the New Zealand Governor Lord Plunkett. The army had opened a rehabilitation institution under the new Drunkards' Act on Pakatoa Island in 1907 and Plunkett wanted a separate men's-only facility. (Women moved to Rotoroa only when the army sold Pakatoa in 1949.)

The Rotoroa Inebriates Institution was officially opened on January 17, 1911. In those days, the alcoholics were expected to go cold turkey, often going directly from pub to cell to court to island.

"They came straight out," my father says. "They suffered."

What they found on arrival was a farm, with a dairy herd, butchery, piggery and vegetable gardens. They were there to work.

Dad spent a lot of time around the old men. He remembers, in particular the man who ran the piggery and who used to carve wooden toys for him.

While officers such as my grandfather counselled the men, the programme then operated on the notion that a hard day's work would help them back on to the straight and narrow.

Buckner says, "We were rehabilitating them to work ethics and things like that, but there was no treatment or dealing with the disease."

Changes to the programme began to reflect changing attitudes towards alcoholism in 1966, when the Alcoholism and Drug Addictions Act was introduced. Alcoholism was recognised not as a mark of bad character, but as a health issue.

The administration of Rotoroa passed from the Justice to the Health Department and clients started to come less often from the courts, and more from doctor, family or self-referrals. Through the following three decades, treatment has evolved as the understanding of addictions has developed.

The clientele has changed too. They aren't just old drunks now, but are often younger and addicted to drugs rather than drink.

The army still runs a farm on the island, with nearly 900 sheep and a newly established breeding herd of 30 cattle. But it's worked by a couple of volunteers who have been clean for six months and wanted to come back to help out.

Nowadays those coming out for treatment have already gone through a comprehensive assessment at the Bridge programme's offices in Mt Eden.

"When the comprehensive's done," Buckner explains, "they're given a date for entry into the programme. They have to detox at least a week before and they've got to be sober when they come in.

" We're not here to detox. The thing's changed because of what we're funded for ... Now what we do is all education.

The programme is based around the AA 12-step model and includes individual and group therapy.

A Christian message is central to the recovery programme. Buckner makes no apologies for that. He lectures on spirituality once a week and on Sunday there's what's called Recovery church.

"It's bright, free and easy. Not the normal thing you'd see or say at a church."

Weekdays start at 7 am with breakfast and work duties. Attendance is compulsory. In fact the entire programme, from the readings and announcements in what's called the Spirit Lifter at 9 am, right through to 5 pm, is compulsory.

The schedule depends on the day - for example, on Monday morning it starts with group therapy. The afternoons generally involve lectures on everything from liver damage to communication skills. The programme also teaches life skills, from crafts and reading to cooking and budgeting.

Robert Mita, one of the island's five counsellors, says while all these sessions help clients deal with their addiction, that's never the whole story. Underneath the addiction lie any number of problems, such as abuse, mental illness, or violence.

For all the efforts of these staff and the hundreds before them, the statistics are, well, sobering. Repeat visits to the island are common. Mita says that out of every 10 addicts in New Zealand over any one year, two will stay clean, two will die and the other six will go in and out, cleaning up and relapsing.

C HEWING over lunch and more memories as we sit at a picnic table outside the dorms, my father and I start chatting to clients sitting on the porch having a cigarette. Dad's telling them about how it was.

"I was in correspondence school and we had a little launch and we used to go out in the midstream and meet the boat that used to run from Auckland to Coromandel.

"Boy, she was rough at times. In a storm we'd be trying to crane the stuff down from the boat to the launch. We'd bring it back into Rotoroa. Then if I'd done my school stuff, I could go out with the guy and take [supplies] round to Pakatoa. Pakatoa was for the women then."

One client leans forward and raises a hand to shade his eyes. "That would've been trouble, an island full of women."

Dad: "They thought I was a delightful little boy. Had a marvellous time with the old ladies over there."

I ask the guys whether the programme's helping them. "You soon find out how you got here," says one. "They know how to bring it out of you. They make you aware."

"Awareness is your best weapon in any battle," says another. "You've got to know your enemy."

He never would have learned that if he'd just been locked up, he adds. "Jail's no good, mate. They're not dealing with problems, not looking for solutions."

Buckner agrees. A lot of the people who come to Rotoroa have been in prison and it hasn't solved anything. "What we endeavour to do here is give them a new outlook on life so that they can go out there and do something different, instead of going back to the old ways."

Former clients say the mix of therapy, island tranquillity and the care and wisdom of staff can transform lives.

"Rotoroa is magical," says Robin Shannon, who was living on the streets when the army found him and has now been sober for two years. Nevertheless, don't get the idea a hug and a chat makes everything better. "Not that many people will make recovery first time round. The odds are against it," he says.

The island isn't a place for easy shrugs and half measures. Here, addiction is met front-on by abstinence.

The camp's two detention cells and the fact that the officer in charge used to carry a sidearm bear witness to the reality that the confrontation sometimes turns violent. "You get people who are angry, break windows and things like that, " Buckner says.

But the modern treatment methods seem to be more effective than the old. The sidearm is gone and the cells are now full of sports gear.

Billington says people in treatment on the mainland can always find a way to sneak out and find a bottle. On the island, that's not an option. There's no way off or on, except the army's launch. Boaties wanting to land are politely refused. There is water everywhere, and not a drop to drink.

That doesn't stop the yearning, however. In Dad's day desperate inmates would write to friends in town. "They'd make contact by letter. They'd be off the beach at 5 o'clock on Wednesday the 21st sort of thing, and the mate would drop off a barrel of beer."

Billington says when he was there, some of the clients actually brewed beer on the island and beer cans would still be found washed up on the beach.

S OMETIME this year the island will change again. An $11.9 million rebuilding project is planned, pending resource consent approval and sufficient funds.

"Just about everything here goes and will be reconstructed," Buckner says.

Why the redevelopment? "The age of the facility. The fact that we are getting more clients and it just needs an upgrade. We will go from 55 beds to 88."

The units will be smaller, so that men and women can be kept separate without so many beds lying empty.

As pragmatic as most of his generation, Dad shrugs at the changes. The sun's hot now and the sheltered bay that's Rotoroa's front door is a picture of calm.

"You've got to accept the change," he says. "But it's the same atmosphere, the general pattern is still there."

And the same spirit. And the same need. Before I join him on the boat, I have one last chat to a woman sitting on another porch. We touch on her battle to beat the bottle - the same old story. It could be 1937, or any year since, for that matter.

She comments, as she rolls a cigarette: "If I'd known about this place years ago I might have saved a few brain cells."

Salvation by the grace of God



Border:

Head1: Saved by the grace of God


Caption1: John Billington


Body1: J OHN BILLINGTON went to Rotoroa Island six times for treatment. Through the '80s, as his addiction to alcohol steadily corroded his life, it became almost an annual retreat. He would dry out on the island, but the sobriety never lasted.

"I'd never last more than three months without drinking again," he says. "If it wasn't for the army's patience with me, I would have died. There's absolutely no doubt about it."

He had worked as a self-employed carpenter, was married, had two sons. He had a nice home in Manurewa and two cars. The glasses of wine every night eased his insecurities.

"I grew up lonely inside. Man, alcohol was the magic cure for inferiority complexes and a nervous disposition.

"The glasses in the evening multiplied. I didn't think much of it because my mates drank like that. Then I started to need the stuff in order to cope. Whenever a problem came along I turned to alcohol to help me solve it."

But alcohol was a cruel companion. It took his marriage, kids, home, and driver's licence.

"From 1983 to 1991 it was a series of hospitalisations, police cells, detoxes, and living on the street, with periods of sobriety."

Through it all, the army kept taking him in until he hit rock bottom and was ready to change.

Billington's addiction came to a head in April 1991 when he was living in a caravan in Whangarei. He launched into a five-day binge, involving meths and valium. Afterwards, he found he'd demolished the caravan, leaving blood on the walls. There was a burnhole in his bicep from when he'd fallen asleep smoking.

"The Salvation Army turned up on my doorstep and took me down to the Bridge programme in Auckland. When I woke up I was a very, very sick man," says Billington, now an officer with the Salvation Army.

"The nurse told me they did not expect me to come through it. I got down on my knees and said 'Lord, I just can't take it anymore'. I went back to bed and I remember waking the next morning and I felt something in my heart that I hadn't felt for years and years and that feeling was hope."

Billington, now in parish work in Tokoroa, says that only the grace of God saved him. Since that day, April 4, 1991, he's never had a desire to drink.