Revisiting the Ruby Island cabaret.
In October of 1928, the Wānaka correspondent for the Cromwell Argus reported on developments at a local island: “This peaceful little beauty spot is to be the site of a unique and picturesque cabaret. Placed on the highest point, sheltered, yet within full view of the dancing wavelets of the moonlit waters of Wānaka.” Wasn’t newswriting poetic back then?
Ruby Island is the closest island on Lake Wānaka to the Wānaka township. Covering about nine acres, Ruby is set 500 metres off the southwest edges of the lake. In summer, kayaks, paddleboards and open water swimmers circle her shoreline. Tourist boats tie up to the jetty, there for the views and the wildlife, including Giant Weta, Cromwell geckos and scaup ducks.
The island has had a few names, including Roy’s Island, after the settler who is also the namesake for a nearby bay, peak and peninsula. According to the Upper Clutha Historical Society, the first recorded use of “Ruby Island” is in a newspaper ad from January 1885 promoting a tourist outing around Lake Wānaka. No one really knows where the name comes from, although one theory is that it echoes the island’s gem-like shape. It definitely has nothing to do with the codswallop “backstory” behind Wānaka’s Ruby Cinema (to be fair, they never claimed it was true). Run-away Ruby, bastard child of an opium peddler, fled an arranged marriage, settled in Wānaka, worked as a wash maid. Courted by many, rejected them all. She finally found meaning and happiness at an island cabaret. In a dress of red silk she danced and drank whiskey until, one day, she disappeared. Again, codswallop. But the cabaret was real.
In 1927, John and Sybil Hunt bought the Wānaka Ferry Service. John had moved to the region to recover from a bout of TB, and although he was supposed to rest up, he had other ideas. The business came complete with two vessels, MV Tangaroa and the MV Tinaroa, an established mail run up to Minaret Station and to Makaroa, and the services of the launch master, James Weavers. The couple decided to complement the ferry business with a boat-accessed cabaret.
The Otago Daily Times was as excited as the Cromwell Argus, announcing “a cabaret on Ruby Island to cater for those who wish to dance under such romantic conditions … [and] a faster and more up-to-date launch” – this was the MV Aotea, a third boat for the Hunt’s fleet. If you’ve picturing Jazz Age flappers necking champagne and wobbling off into the night, it wasn’t quite that. Or it wasn’t officially that. As our Argus correspondent noted, “the management assures me that the place is to be well conducted, and intoxicants are prohibited on the island.”
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While regional prohibitions have been in place (Ōamaru, for example, was dry from 1905 until 1962!), Aotearoa New Zealand has never had national prohibition, though it came close in 1919 when a referendum saw a nationwide alcohol ban narrowly defeated only after the special votes of 40,000 still-serving World War I troops were counted.
A mandatory nationwide 6pm closing for pubs was, however, introduced, meaning businesses and patrons needed to get creative when the hour got late. One workaround was American-style cabarets, where young people would gather to dance. Some of them, like Auckland’s Dixieland Cabaret, tried to frame themselves as BYO-friendly “private parties”, unsuccessfully. In 1927, Dixieland’s managing director was convicted for allowing customers to drink alcohol openly. So booze would be officially off the cards at the Ruby cabaret, of course.
Patrons of the Ruby Island Cabaret, circa-1930. You’d swear the dapper fellow on the left is Jay Gatsby. PHOTO: Supplied by the Upper Clutha Records Society
The build was a mission. In his book Ruby: A Jewel on Lake Wānaka, Ian T Gazzard quotes a letter Weavers sent to the Southland Times in the 1960s: “It was a tremendous job to build that cabaret. All the timber had to be hauled up from the water’s edge to the top of the island, a height of almost 250 feet, by hand wrench.” But haul they did, and up went a corrugated roof, and in went a perimeter of flag stones (stolen, some say, from local beaches). The wooden dance floor was designed to hold 50 couples, 40 feet by 50 feet set on top of a layer of car tyres, which mimicked perfectly the feeling of the sprung dance floors common at the time.
The lighting was powered by car batteries,a generator made from the repurposed engine of a truck bought in Tarras, and the gramophone was a wind-up affair. As John Hunt later explained, “there was only short records, no long playing records like there are today… it was a full-time job for someone to stand by the gramophone and wind it up and change the records.” That job, apparently, was held by Mrs Hunt, who kept vigil over the machine while everyone danced.
You can almost hear the “onya, mate!” in the wording of a 2005 Queenstown Lakes District Council assessment report on the heritage value of the old building’s foundations: “The application of kiwi ingenuity in the building of the structure, and the power supply is notable.”
When he was 83, James Weavers wrote to another paper, the Otago Daily Times, describing the cabaret’s opening night. “I think most of the adult population of Wānaka turned up, and cars came from many outlying districts … there were couples thronged on the dance floor.” At the helm of the Tangaroa, Weavers began delivering people back home at midnight, and his was the last boat to depart, at 2:30am.
The cabaret became a regular Saturday night affair, the New Year’s parties the stuff of lore. Then there’s the matter of the hooch. There was in fact booze at the cabaret (a lot of booze). Gazzard’s book quotes Evelyn Hutching (nee Bovett), who recalls attending her first dance at the cabaret, in 1928. She wondered why all the young men seemed to disappear at the end of each number. “According to one of my dance partners, those lads in need of a little dutch courage ‘nipped out’ to have a swig from alcohol filled flasks smuggled onto the island in hip pockets.”
The cops were suspicious. The local constable would hide behind a willow tree on the shore and jump onto a Ruby-bound boat just as it was leaving, hoping to catch the cabaret-goers booze-handed. But they were a step ahead of him. If the policeman was on board, one mast light would be dimmed. Upon sighting one light, not two, a lookout on the island would issue a warning, and the liquor was spirited away to a hole somewhere until the coast was clear.
That’s the ticket. PHOTO: Supplied by the Upper Clutha Records Society
To make sure people got home, or at least to encourage them to go home, a warning siren sounded half an hour before the last boats were due to depart for the mainland, and a second warning with 10 minutes to go. Anyone who missed their ride either had to sleep in the bushes, or light a signal fire, at which point the boat might come back. But the fare would be tripled. Jan Gillespie, who wrote a thesis on Ruby Island for New Zealand Natural Heritage, notes that “missing the boat was not uncommon and caused some concern to the church elders of the time.”
Gillespie also recounts that Mrs Hunt remembered the boatman falling into the lake once with the evening’s takings in his pocket. “He could not swim, so they let him flounder around for a while and pushed him under a couple of times before pulling him out.” Mr Hunt retrieved money, took it home, and put it in a hot water cupboard to dry out, only to wake up in the morning with no recollection of what he had done with it all.
The Ruby cabaret ran for three summers before the Depression took its toll. In 1931, a classified ad: FOR SALE, By the Receiver on behalf of the Debenture Holder of ‘The Lake Wānaka Ferry Service, Limited’. The launches Tinaroa, Aotea and Tangaroa, and the Ruby Island Cabaret. “Set out with rustic tables, stools, all cups, saucers, glasses, etc. Frigidaire ice-cream machine. Gramophone with electric pick up and amplifier … Ladies and gentlemen’s dressing rooms.” The Hunts went on to buy a farm in Maungawera, where their family still works the land today. Mrs Hunt later said, “we never made a fortune out of it, but it was an awful lot of fun.”
The cabaret had one more lease of life in 2013, when Lake Wānaka SouNZ Incorporated, the team behind the Rippon and TUKI music festivals, resurrected it for a night. The set-up involved 10 helicopter trips to ferry, among other things, a stage, three Portaloos, a pig spit, two generators and a piano to the site. Two hundred revellers paid $200 a ticket to attend, dancing in period dress to ragtime and jazz. Like the original, it didn’t make money. But it was a night.
In their heritage assessment, the QLDC puts it like this: “The history of the site reflects the era when you had to ‘make your own fun.’ It represents the social way of life in the late 1920s in an isolated small lakeside town and the determination of locals to provide opportunities for social activity.” This rang true again in 2013, and it still does today. In a small place, you make your own fun.
All that is left of the cabaret on Ruby are the foundation piles and the old flag stones demarking the dance floor. You can almost hear the gramophone, see the Tangaroa approaching. There’s a single light on the mast.
LAURA WILLIAMSON
Thank you to the Upper Clutha Historical Society for research help with this story. They’re at uppercluthahistory.org, and in the Wānaka Library, where you can also buy Ian Gazzard’s book.
