As told to Elisabeth Easther
My grandmother was from the Chathams. She left when she was about 28 and returned when she was 58. Although my mum had been brought up in Auckland, when she visited her mother out here, she came back to [mainland] New Zealand and said we should move here. There were four of us kids, and we set off in a Kombi van with just $100. I was 6 at the time. Growing up, it was very back to basics — no electricity, no plumbing; but there were lots of good times. I had a huge passion for horses from a very young age and the Christmas before we moved, I was given a bridle. That was one of the attractions. We could never afford horses in Auckland but we could here and as soon as we arrived, I got a horse, and from then on I lived on horseback.
For high school, I went to Epsom Girls Grammar and I loved it, but I moved home as soon as I left school to get into the fishing industry. I loved diving and being fit, and I was the first female crayfish diver out here. After I'd done a season on the cray boats, I bought a boat and a truck and a paua quota. I was just 18 at the time.
When I was about 23, the hotel came up for sale. I'd saved a bit of money, so I bought it with my dad. I don't really overthink things, and when an opportunity comes up I tend to jump and think about it later. Back then we had just six single rooms. I used to cook for our house guests and they all ate in the kitchen at a little table. That first year, there was a scampi boat in port on New Year's Eve and all these fishermen ended up having this huge brawl: "New Zealanders" v Chatham Islanders. There were broken windows, furniture was thrown over the sea wall and it was chaos, blood everywhere, but I just had to let it play out. That was 1990. It was like the Wild West back then, there wasn't really any tourism.
Just before 2000 it dawned on us that people might want to come here for the millennium, to be the first to see the sun. Craig Emeny, he owns Air Chathams and his godmother owned a travel agency — she got a group of 20 people to come down and that was the start of tourism. But it can't ever get too big. There are only so many beds, plus there's the perception of the weather being bad (which it's not), and the price of the airfare. Those things will always protect us from being overdeveloped.
