Gerry Clark was an amateur ornithologist, explorer, ship’s captain and boat builder. His opening words in his book of the Totorore Expedition describe him well: “I love the sea, I love birds, I love adventure. In what better way could I indulge myself, in these latter years of my life, than to undertake an expedition in the great Southern Ocean?”
For over three years he and his volunteer crew-members explored some of the most forbidding coastlines, often in terrible weather, documenting bird life. He continued this work in expeditions to the offshore islands of Aotearoa New Zealand in his beloved home-built yacht, Totorore, until 1999 when he was lost at sea with his boat off the Antipodes Islands.
In 2017, Gerry’s daughter, Elsa, donated his archives and related objects to the New Zealand Maritime Museum Hui Te Ananui o Tangaroa. The collection comprises approximately six thousand items, including almost 4000 colour slides, densely detailed journals, correspondence, and expedition reports. There are ships’ logs, manuscripts, loose photographs, audio cassettes of Clark recounting the journey whilst at sea, transcripts, bird counts in notebooks and published books. The collection not only captures the courage, sense of adventure and scientific aptitude of Clark, and his colleagues, but also provides a reference point to measure change in seabird populations.
Speaker: Nicholas Keenleyside, Collection Specialist