“A very precious part of New Zealand … If you ever get the chance to come here, leap at it. Better still, put it on your bucket list.”
The line sits buried in a cruise blog from 2016, one of a handful of dispatches from travellers who made the long voyage to Rangitāhua, the Kermadec Islands, back when getting there was difficult but still just possible.
For those willing to spend four or five days at sea, the reward was a little taste of the edge of the world.
They wrote of dolphins bow-riding alongside the ship. Seabirds and marine life found nowhere else in New Zealand. Rope-assisted landings on steep coastlines. And peering down at green and blue crater lakes from a steep track.
Read more:
“I’ve got 12 new ticks on my New Zealand bird list,” one visitor wrote. Another described swimming with Galapagos sharks. Others spoke of dawn on deck, scrambling up cliffs at Landing Rock, or just the novelty of reaching somewhere so far removed from ordinary travel.
Their accounts now sit among the last public traces of tourism to the islands.
In the decade since, access to Rangitāhua has all but ceased.
What was once a rare and tightly controlled destination for expedition cruises is now effectively closed to the public.
Landing permits are restricted. Visits are limited to scientists, essential maintenance crews and iwi partners.
Far out in the Pacific, roughly halfway between New Zealand and Tonga, Rangitāhua marks New Zealand’s northernmost frontier, a chain of volcanic islands rising from the Kermadec Ridge, about 1000 kilometres north-east of the mainland.
The islands are well off the main shipping routes and there are no commercial flights. Access has always depended on specialist vessels, research expeditions or the occasional Navy supply run.
Even landing is a challenge. At Raoul Island, visitors arrive by inflatable boat and time their approach between swells before scrambling ashore at Fishing Rock. From there, it’s a three-kilometre walk to the DOC base over steep, exposed ground.
Up until 2020, Raoul, the largest island, was the only one with a permanent government presence.
A weather station was maintained there since the late 1930s, and the current DOC base sits on northern terraces above the cliffs.
That presence ended abruptly in March 2020, when DOC staff were evacuated as Covid-19 took hold. They never returned.
Months later, a formal “stop for safety” was issued following a reassessment of volcanic risk in the wake of the Whakaari/White Island eruption, with concerns about safety and liability.
The risks were not theoretical. In 2006, DOC worker Mark Kearney was killed when the volcano erupted while he was sampling the crater lake. Mihai Muncus-Nagy went missing in 2012 while collecting a water sample from the sea.
Isolation deepened in March 2021 when a 6.5 magnitude earthquake triggered more than 300 landslides, cutting key access routes and destabilising the main landing track.
Because the island remained unmanned, these routes never received the professional safety sign-offs required for public use, rendering them officially unsafe.
In the absence of public access, visits were limited to essential work, such as maintaining geohazard and weather monitoring systems, alongside iwi-led research under the Te Mana o Rangitāhua programme.
For Ngāti Kuri and Te Aupōuri, Rangitāhua (The Burning Sky) is a sentinel marker of their ancestral Pacific voyages.
According to tribal history, the Kurahaupō waka approached the island and was badly damaged.
The crew survived on Rangitāhua for many months, showing incredible endurance as they repaired their vessel using kuri moana (seal) hides and flax mats before finally making landfall at North Cape. This period of survival is woven into the name of Ngāti Kuri.
The legal backbone for their influence was formalised in 2015 in Treaty settlements.
They granted statutory acknowledgements over the Kermadec Islands Nature Reserve, requiring DOC to recognise and take account of iwi interests in how the area is managed.
But for more than a decade the islands were at the centre of a wider political dispute and the collapse of plans to establish a Kermadec Ocean Sanctuary amid tensions between the Crown and iwi.
The relationship is now reflected in the Te Mana o Rangitāhua project, a multi-year, $14 million research programme led by Ngāti Kuri, which builds on Treaty settlement arrangements that require DOC to recognise iwi interests in managing the islands.
That influence became most visible in March 2022, when an application from a Kiwi-owned eco-cruise ship company applied for a commercial guiding and landing permit to bring up to 58 people to the island.
Ngāti Kuri representatives made it clear that their priority was a total “reset” of the island’s mana.
“They emphasise the need to focus on research and management at this time rather than tourism and commercial activities,” an internal Department of Conservation report records, “and question how these activities are contributing to their aspirations to restore the mana of Rangitāhua.”
That position is reinforced in the department’s own conclusion in the 31-page document.
It notes: “Ngāti Kuri as one of two manawhenua for Rangitāhua are leading a restoration project for this special place and they are seeking the department’s support for this, including how public visitation is managed in a way that contributes to the vision of restoring the mana of Rangitāhua.”
By 2025, as the Te Mana o Rangitāhua programme moved into its final stages, officials began revisiting whether the islands could reopen, including options for tightly controlled visits.
The created a new, high-level role ‒ an Islands Programme Lead ‒ who was tasked with “developing a strategy to ensure the future biodiversity of the islands and to propose options that would allow people to return”.
Options included minimal infrastructure such as boardwalks and guided day visits.
But the gates aren’t just swinging open. The strategy ties any future public access to being “informed by the Te Mana o Rangitāhua research ... establishing the scientific and cultural justification for visitation.”
Ngāti Kuri’s Sheridan Waitai was unaware of the proposals and believes DOC shouldn’t move ahead with reopening plans before the completion and presentation of the research programme in June.
“DOC needs to pause so that it can engage in a way that it's ready to learn and understand and rule set,” she said. “Why would they go away and do this reopening plan without us?”
She says historic use has left behind environmental damage and debris and described abandoned materials, including barrels and rusting equipment. The island remains unsafe for general access, she added.
“You guys need to take active responsibility,” she said. “You don't get to open up until you clean up.”
Waitai said that for Ngāti Kuri, the islands are not a location to be managed for human use, but an ancestor to be respected. And any activity must be consistent with the wellbeing of the place.
Access should be subject to a simple test, she said: “How are you contributing to Rangitāhua?
“Rangitāhua is not about people. It’s about the prosperity and abundance and the fullness of that tupuna.”
The role of mana whenua in governing access is not as a veto over Crown decisions, she said, but the exercise of inherent rights and responsibilities.
Professor James Russell, a conservation biologist at the University of Auckland, said access to outlying islands, including the subantarctics and Chatham Islands, has always been strictly controlled, mostly for biosecurity reasons.
“[The] Department of Conservation have a long, proud history of protecting sub Antarctic Islands and the Kermadecs … they’ve got a good history of being advocates for the island … thinking what’s in the island’s best interests,” he said.
He cautioned against treating access, whether scientific or commercial, as inherently benign.
“Just because something is interesting for science doesn’t necessarily mean this is the right place to ask those questions … sometimes people, including scientists, are looking for a reason to go there.
“I don’t think we want to open the doors … I don’t want to see the door open to just anyone wanting to do any science project … every time someone else puts foot there, the probability of invasion and disease goes up.”
Sue Reed-Thomas, DOC’s northern North Island operations director, said Rangitāhua is “one of the most remote and ecologically significant places in Aotearoa New Zealand”, and noted access has always been carefully managed.
“It’s a remote active volcano, with no wharf, no runway for landing, and no fresh water,” she said.
It is classified as a Nature Reserve, a category that prioritises protection over use, and there is no automatic public right of access.
Reed-Thomas said no decisions have been made about reopening to the public, and no infrastructure is currently being installed or funded for that purpose.
“No date has been set for public access to Rangitāhua, and there are currently no decisions about visitor infrastructure,” she said.
DOC has only just begun work on developing a broader programme to address the complexities of future access.
“This work is at an early stage and no roadmap for public access is being implemented at this time.
“DOC will continue working closely with iwi … Any future access arrangements will need to balance protecting the very special natural and cultural values of Rangitāhua with opportunities for people to experience the area.”
Claim damning water report kept from Wellington City councillors
Inside the Tūpuna Maunga Authority’s appeal to chop Auckland exotic trees
Kiwi-founded, global fintech FNZ faces US$4.6 billion reckoning in NZ high court
Reef, rainforest and renewal in Tropical North Queensland
Firefighters facing 'major sewage' departed Moa Point after message to utility
