The human presence in Wellington is said to begin with the explorer Kupe, who travelled to Aotearoa New Zealand from Hawaiki, the ancestral Polynesian homeland of Māori. He left his mark on the land by naming places, such as the islands Matiu and Mākaro in the harbour, before returning home. Following permanent settlement, the rangatira Tara, son of Whātonga and the eponymous ancestor of Ngāi Tara, travelled south from Māhia Peninsula and settled at the harbour, which came to be known as Te Whanganui-a-Tara, the great harbour of Tara. In the seventeenth century Ngāti Ira of Hawke’s Bay joined Ngāi Tara and extensive intermarriage occurred between the two tribes. Other iwi who made a home in the region included Ngāti Kahungunu, Rangitāne, Ngāi Tahu and Ngāti Māmoe.
Te Ātiawa, Ngāti Tama and Ngāti Mutunga migrated south from Taranaki in the 1820s and early 1830s during a period of great upheaval associated with the introduction of Pākehā muskets into te ao Māori. Initially based on the Kāpiti Coast, the Taranaki people moved further south to Wellington, where they became dominant.
Kāinga (villages) were located in the Thorndon area (the future site of the Thomas King Observatory), including Pakuao at the north end of Tinakori Road, Raurimu at the intersection of Hobson Street and Fitzherbert Terrace, Tiakiwai nearby, and Pipitea Pā on the shoreline. Prior to the entrance of the Taranaki tribes, occupancy of Te Whanganui a Tara was concentrated in the eastern and southern coasts, as the western portion of the harbour was seen as vulnerable to attack from the north.
Pākehā Settlement
Thorndon was part of the highly controversial and much disputed purchase of Te Whanganui-a-Tara by the New Zealand Company in 1839 for the site of what became known as Wellington. After the New Zealand Company shifted the fledgling settlement to Lambton Harbour from Petone in April 1840, the northern end became known as Thorndon, after the English home of New Zealand Company director Lord Petre.
The Company divided the new settlement into 1100 town and country sections, which were sold to investors and potential settlers before they had even left England. Company surveyor William Mein Smith prepared the plan for the settlement of Wellington. He chose a rigid grid plan when the settlement was proposed for flat land at Petone, but the unruly terrain at the southern end of the harbour meant a series of inter-connected grids was required in Wellington. The land on which the Thomas King Observatory would be built was within the town belt that circled the new town.
Astronomy in Aotearoa New Zealand
Aotearoa New Zealand has a centuries-old indigenous tradition of tātai arorangi or Māori astronomy, in which astronomical knowledge was applied to practices such as food production, house building and sea navigation. Communities had a good working understanding of tātai arorangi through its application to regular tasks like gardening and hunting, while deeper knowledge resided with tohunga kōkōrangi and tohunga tātai arorangi, the ‘teachers and specialists’.
The negative impacts of Pākehā colonisation had a deleterious effect on the preservation and enactment of this knowledge, yet it was not entirely lost. In the late 20th century traditional methods of sea navigation were revived and in the early 2000s celebrations of Matariki, the Māori new year, grew in popularity.
Between 1769 and 1777 British navigator and explorer James Cook and expedition astronomers made numerous astronomical observations to calculate the latitude and longitude of Aotearoa New Zealand places for navigation and mapping purposes. After 1840 British settlers brought their own tradition of amateur astronomy to the country. Until the late nineteenth century British astronomical research was an almost wholly amateur endeavour with private individuals funding their own work, while many enthusiasts simply enjoyed looking at celestial objects with whatever equipment their means allowed.
In Aotearoa New Zealand astronomy largely remained the province of amateurs until the second half of the twentieth century and there was little scope for dedicated professional astronomical work. Archdeacon Arthur Stock became the country’s first dedicated professional astronomer in 1869 when he was appointed official observer at the Colonial Observatory in Wellington, but this was a part-time post and the only one of its kind. Joseph Ward and John Grigg, both renowned local astronomers active in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, pursued their work on a strictly amateur basis. It was not until 1965, when the Mt John Observatory was established at Lake Tekapo by the universities of Canterbury and Pennsylvania that Aotearoa New Zealand had the capacity to host significant, professional astronomical research.
The importance of amateurs in local astronomy is consistent with the hegemony of ‘gentlemen scientists’ and the concomitant lack of professionalism and government-funded scientific research in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The formation of the New Zealand Geological Survey in 1865 followed by the New Zealand Institute two years later heralded the beginnings of institutional and centralised science, but dominated by well-resourced amateurs, they ‘did not professionalise science…to any large degree’. This only occurred with the formation of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR) in 1926.
It must be noted that local astronomy was not mere stargazing; ‘amateur’ is not intended to connote dilettante. Amateurs made important contributions to astronomical knowledge. Additionally, astronomy was bound up with the establishment of the new colony. The execution of land surveys and maps by surveyors who used astronomical methods and instruments were ‘part of the wider process of colonisation’ in which Māori land was transferred to the Crown and Pākehā settlers. Astronomy was also essential for timekeeping. This, combined with the advent of major astronomical events in the late nineteenth century, such as the transits of Venus in 1874 and 1882 and the transits of Mercury in 1878 and 1881 popularised Pākehā astronomy and spurred local astronomers to ‘systematically observe their patch of southern sky’.
Kelburn Observatories
In Wellington, the seat of government from 1865, what became the suburb of Kelburn evolved into the epicentre of the city’s astronomical activity. The Government's Colonial Observatory was the first astronomical building there, constructed in 1869 for the purpose of time keeping, but it was demolished to make way for Premier Richard Seddon’s grave in 1906. A new site was chosen closer to the top of the hill for the new Hector Observatory (renamed the Dominion Observatory in 1925), which continued to keep New Zealand’s time. The Thomas King Observatory followed in 1912. Two further observatories were built, first the Wellington City Observatory in 1924 (no longer extant), followed by the Carter Observatory (now known as Space Place at Carter Observatory) in 1942. As a group these observatories were the site of a wide range of work beyond the astronomical, including geomagnetism, meteorology, seismology, tidal studies and trigonometrical surveys.
A New Observatory
In 1910 members of the Wellington Philosophical Society (later to merge with the Royal Society of New Zealand) were concerned with the lack of public facilities for astronomical observations and discussed plans for a new observatory. Government Astronomer Charles Adams, Transit Observer at the Colonial Observatory Thomas King, Wellington College master Algernon Gifford and Marist priest and astronomer David Kennedy formed the Astronomical Section of the Wellington Philosophical Society to pursue the planned public observatory and building funds were raised with Government support. An arrangement was made with the Government for the observatory to be constructed on land that was part of the ‘Garden Battery Reserve’, the local naval gun emplacement protecting the harbour.
A timber-framed fibrolite observatory was designed by Government Architect and Society member John Campbell, possibly in his spare time, and was constructed by local builders McLean and Grey in 1912. It was officially called the King Edward VII Memorial Observatory but this name was seldom used. The observatory first housed a 13cm Cooke refractor telescope. When Thomas King died in 1916 his superior 14cm Grubb telescope made in 1882 was donated to the Society by his sister, leading to the renaming of the observatory in his name after the Second World War.
Astronomical Activities
Upon opening regular public open-nights were organised to give the Wellington people a chance to view the heavens. Although the Astronomical Section was somewhat disappointed by low turnouts, occasionally the observatory was overrun with visitors. In 1924, for example, when Mars made a close approach to Earth, police officers were required to control the crowds. Public viewing continued regularly until the 1930s but declined after the Second World War, being eclipsed by the new Carter Observatory.
The Thomas King Observatory has been used for a number of scientific and public uses contributing to the development of astronomy in New Zealand. Government Astronomer Charles Adams made early use of the observatory. As an astronomer he had many interests, coordinating a number of long-running nationwide programmes. Initiated by Adams and continued by staff of the Dominion and Carter observatories, the Thomas King Observatory was used continuously from 1918 until the mid-1960s for the sunspot programme, which combined New Zealand's results with other international findings at Zurich Observatory. In the 1930s other prominent astronomers used the observatory including Ivan Thomsen (later director of the Carter Observatory) and Frank Bateson (one of the founders of the Mt John Observatory). Use declined in the post-war years, but revived in the 1970s and 1980s through extensive use by the newly formed Wellington Astronomical Society (WAS), which took over the building in 1974.
Later History
In 1992 WAS decided to dispose of the observatory. The building had become very rundown and was vandalised in September of that year. WAS wanted to demolish most of the building and salvage the dome but Carter Observatory director Wayne Orchiston successfully argued for a ‘stay of execution’ and it was formally transferred to this institution in 1998, following restoration work. Thomas King’s Grubb telescope was refurbished by astronomer Gordon Hudson in 2001. The observatory was used for public solar observations in the early 2000s. The telescope removed from the building in 2014 following a break-in when it was vandalised. Since 2017 the observatory has hosted occasional artist exhibitions and public programmes organised by Space Place at Carter Observatory.
