Hatch, Victorian Villain or Forgotten Hero

A one-hander, it recounts the life of Joseph Hatch, who lived from 1837 to 1928. He was a New Zealand entrepreneur and politician, but is best (well, only) remembered for harvesting penguins and elephant seals for their oil on the sub-Antarctic Macquarie Island in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In three decades more than two million penguins were killed.

He was born in London and worked in printing and perfumery before emigrating to Australia in 1856. After five years with a firm of wholesale druggists in Melbourne he was sent to set up a branch in Dunedin, in the South Island of New Zealand. He went on to run a successful pharmacy in Invercargill and became a prominent and respectable citizen, serving as mayor of the city and then as its MP from 1884 to 1887. His business interests proliferated: he established a bone mill and manufactured soap, candles, glycerine, sheep-dip and rabbit poison.

His biographer describes him as "a man of boundless energy" and notes that for many years there was scarcely an organisation in Invercargill in which Hatch did not take some part:

He had decided opinions and made them known to all concerned. He was a gifted speaker, provocative, persuasive and entertaining, and in his career used this to good effect. With supreme confidence in his own judgement and a complete unwillingness to consult, his public life was often marred by conflict. As a final solution Hatch on several occasions called a public meeting to gain public support. He could be relied on to draw a crowd and generally carry them with him, even if it sometimes meant bending the truth.

In the 1880s he became increasingly involved in the sea-elephant oiling industry. The New Zealand government had been restricting the seal-killing season since 1873 in an effort to save the animals from extinction. In 1886 one of Hatch's ships drew public attention when it went to rescue shipwreck survivors in the Auckland Islands: seal skins were found on board, and Hatch had a lot of explaining to do. He was hoping to be re-elected to Parliament at the time and called a public meeting to explain himself. For the first time in his public-speaking career he failed to win over his audience. He lost the next election.

By 1889 there were fewer sea-elephant bulls, but the Norwegians had developed a technology that could extract oil from meat and bone as well as blubber, and from smaller animals such as penguins. Hatch quickly saw the potential of the penguins, which included rockhoppers, kings, royals and gentoos, and took advantage of the lack of restrictions imposed by the Tasmanian government, which administered the bleak and inhospitable Macquarie Island, halfway between New Zealand and the Antarctic Circle.

His activities were under constant scrutiny and much criticised. At a meeting in 1891 he claimed that the question of protecting the penguins was "ridiculous nonsense", because compared with the huge numbers living there few birds were killed.

Hatch leased the island from the Tasmanian government in 1902 and moved to Hobart in 1912. After returning from the Australasian Antarctic Expedition in 1914, Sir Douglas Mawson campaigned to have Macquarie Island set aside as a nature reserve. This drew the attention of the press, which focused on cruelty to penguins. Hatch had to deny English and Australian newspaper reports that his sealers herded penguins into digesters to be boiled alive.

By 1919 the concern had grown into possibly the first international campaign to preserve wildlife, with Antarctic explorers like Mawson, Frank Hurley and Apsley Cherry-Garrard involved. They were joined by H. G. Wells, Baron Walter Rothschild, The Times of London and the Seamen's Union. By now even the Tasmanian government was losing interest (and face), and Hatch's lease on Macquarie Island was not renewed in 1920. Within a few years his business had collapsed and he lost his properties in Invercargill and Hobart. He died in Tasmania on 2 September 1928.

The play I am being asked to see will, I am told, do what Hatch did in 1920: try to clear his name and justify his actions. It offers "alarming insights into the country's record on conservation". The subtitle, Victorian Villain or Forgotten Hero, is really a question to the audience, who are asked to choose their preferred answer. In the twenty-first century, and particularly in New Zealand, the odds must be in favour of the former.