The Wairarapa region has a long history of Māori occupation, with the first arrivals settling in Palliser Bay in the late 1300s. Small communities were established on the east side of the bay and were supported by fishing, hunting and kūmara cultivation. By 1600 these communities had disappeared, most likely in response to resource depletion related to population growth. Two major earthquakes the previous century may also have been contributing factors. Early iwi groups were Waitaha and Ngāti Māmoe, both of whom subsequently left Wairarapa for Te Waipounamu/South Island. Some of these people may also have moved inland to the central Ruamāhanga valley area, where permanent settlements were located after the coast was abandoned. Later arrivals were Ngāti Ira, Rangitāne and Ngāti Kahungunu. Ngāti Ira later relocated to Te Whanganui-a-Tara /Wellington, while Rangitāne and Ngāti Kahungunu forged a largely peaceable co-existence in Wairarapa, with conflict tempered by intermarriage.
During the so-called musket wars period, the region was invaded on a number of occasions, in the early 1820s by Ngāti Whātua and Ngāti Maniapoto, and from the mid-1820s through the following decade by Taranaki tribes, in particular Te Āti Awa. Rangitāne people found a temporary safe haven in the Puketoi and Tararua mountain ranges, while Ngāti Kahungunu made a series of migrations north to Nukutaurua on the Māhia Peninsula. However, Ngāti Kahungunu leaders kept an eye on their Wairarapa rohe and sent taua or war parties back to fight the invaders. They returned for good in the early 1840s when peace was made with Te Āti Awa. The western boundary between the two iwi was the Remutaka and Tararua ranges, of which the Ngāti Kahungunu rangatira Tūtepākihirangi said: ‘I will call those mountains our shoulders; the streams that fall down on this side are for you to drink; on the other side for us’.
By then Pākehā explorers were assessing the settlement potential of Wairarapa and in 1844 Wellington settlers leased grazing land off Ngāti Kahungunu and brought the first sheep and cattle into the region. The first land sales occurred in 1853, including the Ōwhanga block, on which the future town of Featherston would be founded. The town was surveyed in 1856 and named after Isaac Featherston, the superintendent of the Wellington province. It had previously been the site of Henry Burling’s accommodation house and known as Burlings; Kawaewae and Paeotumokai were the Māori names for the area. Featherston was divided into town and suburban sections. It was on the 200-acre suburban section 258 that a timber astronomical observatory would be built by retired public servant Stephen Carkeek just over a decade later.
Stephen Carkeek
Stephen Carkeek was born in Swansea, Wales, in 1815. His father Morgan Carkeek was a sea captain and Stephen followed in his footsteps, spending his youth and early adulthood at sea. He and Martha Piotti were married in Sydney, Australia in 1838 and settled with their first child Frances in Aotearoa/New Zealand in 1841. Carkeek worked for the Customs Service in Russell before moving to Nelson where he was Collector of Customs from 1842 to 1849. That year the family transferred to Wellington following Carkeek’s appointment as the Collector of Customs there. In addition to his customs work he was briefly a member of the Legislative Council (1851-52). He purchased Wellington Town Acre 479 on Boulcott Street in 1853 and built a house on the corner where the street curved west to meet The Terrace.
Just when Carkeek developed an interest in astronomy is unclear. He is likely to have been exposed to it during his time at sea, due to the use of astronomy in nautical navigation, but there is no known evidence of any direct engagement during his time in Nelson. He had clearly developed considerable expertise by the early 1860s, when he instigated and supervised the construction of New Zealand’s first timeball station at the customs building on Wellington’s waterfront.
Astronomy in New Zealand
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’.
Between 1769 and 1777 British navigator and explorer James Cook and expedition astronomers made numerous astronomical observations to calculate the latitude and longitude of New Zealand places for navigation and mapping purposes. After 1840 British settlers brought their own tradition of amateur astronomy to New Zealand. 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 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. Carkeek’s contemporary Archdeacon Arthur Stock became New Zealand’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 New Zealand 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 New Zealand had the capacity to host significant, professional astronomical research.
The importance of amateurs in New Zealand 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 in the generation following Carkeek (Ward and Griggs for instance) 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. Over time amateur astronomy became very popular – in 1954 the director of the Carter Observatory suggested that New Zealand of all countries had the most astronomical society members per head of population.
Wellington Timeball
Timeballs provided accurate time once a day and were used by visiting sea captains to reset the ship chronometer (a portable timekeeping device) to local time. The Wellington timeball, which became operational in 1864, dropped at noon each day apart from Sunday. The drop time was determined by an astronomical clock and transit instrument (a small telescope). Carkeek, whose ‘scientific attainments’, according to a local newspaper, were ‘well known’, instigated the timeball, spent the first fourth months of its operation modifying and refining its mechanisms and subsequently established the site’s latitude and longitude by astronomical means. His work on the timeball was an early instance of professional astronomy and he was one of the few astronomers of his era to work in both the amateur and professional realms. The timeball was part of a wider move to institute an accurate timekeeping service in colonial New Zealand, which culminated in the establishment of a nationwide standard time in 1868. Standard time had a major impact on everyday life, influencing for example work hours and schedules and leisure time. In 1869 the Colonial Observatory, from which official time in New Zealand was set by measuring the transit of stars, was built in the Wellington Botanic Garden.
Construction of Carkeek’s Observatory
It is not known whether Carkeek had an astronomical observatory at his Boulcott Street home in Wellington; he at least owned instruments, including a telescope which was stolen when his house was burgled in early 1866. In April that year Carkeek took early retirement from the government service, likely due to long-standing ill health, and was granted a pension.
The Boulcott Street house was put up for sale in May 1866 and Carkeek, Martha and their youngest child Ellen moved to the South Wairarapa district, where they leased suburban section 258, now a sheep farm called Torohanga, approximately five kilometres south of Featherston. They had taken up residence by late October 1866, when the couple wrote letters from the farm to their eldest daughter Frances Stewart. In May 1870 Torohanga was advertised for sale and the Carkeeks purchased it the following month. Carkeek immersed himself in the Featherston community, becoming the chair of the school committee, a member of the Agricultural and Pastoral Association and a local magistrate.
Ill health and sheep farming notwithstanding, the move to Featherston must have allowed Carkeek more time for astronomy because he built a small timber astronomical observatory between the edges of the farmhouse garden and the road to Featherston. The precise year of construction is unknown. Circa 1867 is typically given in secondary sources and is fair conjecture based on Carkeek’s removal to Featherston the previous year. In the first half of 1869 the Wairarapa Standard published monthly meteorological observations made by Carkeek from his farm and described ‘the instruments being sheltered from the wind and sun’, which may suggest the existence of a shelter-giving observatory. The first known recorded mention of Carkeek’s observatory occurs in March 1871 and it appears to have been well-established by then. The Wellington Independent reported on flooding that encroached on his property, noting that ‘Mr Carkeek had just had his observatory refitted, and shelves with valuable books raised from the floor, the outsides of which became covered with mud, but fortunately the insides are very little damaged.’ Based on the surviving evidence, a construction date of circa 1867 is feasible.
The layout of the timber building was typical of modest nineteenth century observatories built by amateur astronomers in the western world. It was comprised of an octagonal equatorial room with a revolving canvas dome, a rectangular transit annex, and timber floor without footings, and is believed to have housed a 10.2cm refracting telescope in the equatorial room and transit telescope of between 4.5 to 6.4cms in the transit annex. The refracting telescope was used for monitoring astronomical objects (planets, comets, stars), while the transit telescope was used to determine geographical locations and time by tracking the north-south path of stars across the meridian.
Carkeek would likely have been aware of the simple observatory built by Admiral William Smyth in Bedford, England in the late 1820s which became a much-emulated model. Like Carkeek’s building, the Bedford Observatory was an equatorial room with attached rectangular transit annex. Though the Bedford equatorial room was spherical rather than octagonal, the dome metal-clad and the building resting on a concrete or brick foundation, Carkeek’s observatory owed much to its basic design despite not sharing these particular features.
It was also very similar to English astronomer and inventor Edward Berthon’s well-known Romsey Observatory (designed circa 1863), a timber building with a nonagonal equatorial room, revolving canvas dome, rectangular transit annex and timber floor that allowed for air circulation. Berthon claimed his design afforded the observatory ‘freedom from damp’ and high temperatures, critical in a building housing sensitive instruments. He argued that brick or stone observatories were unnecessarily expensive and furthermore, that light-weight timber structures produced better astronomical results.
The Romsey was specifically designed as a low-cost model for amateur astronomers, able to be built ‘by any village carpenter… in less than a fortnight’ and is believed to be the first such model explicitly aimed at amateurs. Berthon published basic architectural drawings and instructions for this model in 1871, following ‘a great many [that were built] in the last seven or eight years with uniform results’ and it proved very popular with amateurs. This was a development upon his even simpler twelve-sided ‘inexpensive garden’ observatory published in 1864. Whether Carkeek knew about Berthon’s designs is unknown but regardless of any direct connection, the shared characteristics and materials places his observatory within the Romsey mould.
Other contemporary New Zealand astronomers recorded as having their own personal observatories include surveyors Henry Jackson in the Hutt Valley and John Turnbull Thomson in Dunedin, Arthur Stock in Wellington and meteorologist Henry Skey in Dunedin, while Thames-based John Grigg built two timber observatories similar to Carkeek’s in the 1880s and 1890s. None of these have survived, leaving Carkeek’s observatory as the single extant example of this type of structure in New Zealand.
Carkeek’s Astronomical Work
In 1871 Jackson and Thomson wrote that ‘…Carkeek had for many years pursued observations for longitude by lunars, Jupiter’s satellites, lunar eclipses, and moon culminations’. Longitude calculations were critical to the work of surveyors, geographers and mariners and the observations pursued by Carkeek were typical activities for serious astronomers of the period. He is not known to have published, but fellow astronomers like Jackson and Thomson were clearly aware of his work.
Carkeek was well-placed to observe the much-anticipated transit of Venus on 9 December 1874. By tracking the passage of Venus across the sun, astronomers could work out ‘one of astronomy’s fundamental yardsticks’, the distance between the sun and the earth known as the ‘astronomical unit’. The entire transit would be visible from New Zealand and its offshore islands and this attracted official transit parties from England, France, Germany and the United States of America, drawing New Zealand into an internationally-significant exercise.
Prior to the transit, Astronomer Royal George Biddell Airy, of the Royal Observatory Greenwich in England, had corresponded with the New Zealand government regarding an appropriate location and the loan of astronomical instruments for the English observation station. James Hector, director of the Geological Survey and Colonial Museum, suggested Carkeek as one of the few locals who might ‘furnish such instruments’. In the event, the English brought their own instruments and portable observation huts and Carkeek declined an invitation to participate in their observation at Burnham in Christchurch.
There is no record of Carkeek following the transit at his own observatory but he is highly likely to have done so or at least have attempted to – like most of New Zealand, Wairarapa was clouded over on the day of the transit, wholly obscuring the sun. The 1874 transit and the next one in 1882, along with transits of Mercury in 1878 and 1881 and the appearance of a number of bright comets in those decades, popularised astronomy and spurred local astronomers to ‘systematically observe their patch of southern sky’.
Carkeek’s Death and Legacy
Carkeek died suddenly on 27 November 1878 aged 63. He had just returned to Torohanga from a visit to Tauranga, where his daughter Ellen Sheath lived. Reportedly ‘so pleased with the voyage and district that he resolved to spend the remainder of his life at the seaside’, he bought a property there during his visit. He had already planned to sell Torohanga, having ‘become tired of sheep-farming’. At the time of his death Carkeek was recognised for his public service and contribution to astronomy. One obituary referred to him as ‘the first astronomer in the Colony’, and another described him as ‘widely-known as an astronomer [who] always took a deep interest in astronomical matters’, noting his establishment of the Wellington timeball.
While Carkeek’s precise contribution to astronomical research and its practical application beyond the timeball is unclear due to the loss of his papers and apparent lack of publication, his work was recognised and valued by peers such as Jackson, Thomson and Hector. Carkeek was acknowledged in New Zealand as an observatory expert and advised the Philosophical Institute of Canterbury on the costs associated with establishing a small observatory in 1872. Contemporary reference to his ‘accumulated astronomical observations’ suggests Carkeek engaged in serious astronomical activity and produced a body of work known of in his life time and recognised at his death.
Later History
Within two weeks of Carkeek’s death, Torohanga, the livestock and household furniture were put up for sale, but the property was bought in at auction. Martha Carkeek returned to Tauranga and Torohanga passed to the couple’s children. Carkeek’s ‘numerous valuable notes and observations’ were apparently promised to the Wairarapa Standard before he died, but there is no record of this happening. At least one telescope ended up with the Carkeek’s daughter Frances Stewart and her husband John Tiffen Stewart. In 1882 this telescope was offered on loan to chief surveyor John Marchant for his observation of the second transit of Venus but he instead borrowed a 4-inch Browning refractor from a David Grey of Wellington.
In 1880 Torohanga was leased to Charles Welby Jackson and from 1885 to William Hodder, who bought it in 1896, ushering in over 100 years of Hodder family ownership. The farmhouse was destroyed by fire at an unknown date and the garden was turned over to livestock. The observatory became a store for farm equipment with the dome, floor and two walls of the equatorial room removed to facilitate access.
In the late 1980s Syd Cretney of the Wellington Astronomical Society (WSA), ‘rediscovered’ the observatory after researching Carkeek’s history. Members of the WSA, the Royal Astronomical Society of New Zealand, the Martinborough Dark Sky Society and historians of astronomy have made periodic visits to the observatory since then, monitoring its physical condition and conducting research into its history. In 2015 the original Carkeek farmland, including the observatory site, was purchased by the South Wairarapa District Council and a land covenant was placed over the observatory by the Hodder family, compelling the new owner to ‘take all reasonable steps to ensure the preservation’ of the site.
In the twenty-first century the Wairarapa region is recognised for its dark skies and star-gazing activities. Stonehenge Aotearoa, inspired by the English Stonehenge, opened in Carterton in 2005 and observation tours were offered at Star Field near Martinborough from late 2019. The Carkeek Observatory is near the proposed South Wairarapa International Dark Sky Reserve applied for by the Martinborough Dark Sky Society in 2017. In support of this proposal the three Wairarapa local authorities and the New Zealand Transport Agency adopted softer street and highway lighting and businesses were encouraged to become ‘dark sky friendly’. If the reserve application is successful the Carkeek Observatory ‘will likely become a significant stop-over for astronomy buffs and any night sky enthusiasts’.
tracking the north-south path of stars across the meridian.pite not sharing these particular features.
