Radio, Radio: The Pirates of Hauraki
A sneak preview of the newest chapter of Rock N Roll Archaeology, Episode 23, due in about a week!
Out in the Gulf of Hauraki, the summer storm was unexpectedly strong. The Pirate Radio Ship Tiri was forced to haul anchor and run before the wind. Running for her life and for the lives of her crew. Making all haste for the shelter of Whangaparapara Harbor, an inlet on the lee side of the Great Barrier Island.
She made it, barely. Still broadcasting.
But the Tiri was in trouble, beaten badly by the storm. Her hull was compromised, the mast was down. DJ Paul Lineham interrupted the music mid-song and called Mayday–ship and crew were in grave peril.
The engine sputtered one last time and failed. The deck and pilot house went dark. Navigation and propulsion were gone. A few minutes of backup power for the transmitter was all they had left. Lineham put out a final Mayday, announced they were abandoning ship, and signed off. After a couple more minutes of pre-taped promos, Radio Hauraki abruptly went off the air.
Moments later, adrift in darkness and distress, Tiri hit the rocks.
Aotearoa (Ow TEE uh row uh) is Maori (MAU Ree) for “land of the long white cloud.” Those clouds helped guide early Polynesian navigators to what we now call the North Island of New Zealand.
Those Polynesian explorers found Aotearoa pretty recently, just 800 years ago. It’s the last sizable chunk of land on our planet to be settled by humans. Their Maori descendants–nearly a million of them, about 17% of the population in New Zealand–are still there. Today, the Oceanic nation of New Zealand is a prosperous, multicultural democracy. It comes in right behind Switzerland as the Number Two nation in the world on the 2023 International Human Freedom Index.
Rock on, New Zealand.
The Gulf of Hauraki (prn How RACK ee) is a vast natural lagoon, guarded at the entrance by the Great Barrier Island. Nestled deep within the Gulf is the city of Auckland, New Zealand’s largest. The Gulf of Hauraki is large enough to have a little patch out in the middle that is not within three nautical miles of any coast, so technically at least, it’s international waters.
It’s also pretty shallow. Three miles out to sea, a small vessel can drop anchor fore and aft, and safely settle in for a while. Any experienced sailor will tell you though: safety is a relative–and very transitory–thing at sea.
Neptune’s powers are vast, his patience infinite, and he wants you dead.
MV–stands for Merchant Vessel–the MV Tiri first took to sea way back in 1931. For decades, she served as a coastal freighter for her builders, the GT Niccol Shipping Firm, plying her inter-island trade in New Zealand waters. Hull of oak and keel of iron, 101 feet stem to stern; displacement 169 tons. Shallow draft, powered by a chuggy diesel rated at maybe 200 horsepower, on a good day. A small superstructure at the aft for navigation and living quarters. A deck below that, the engine room.
Just fore of the engine room, amidships, the Tiri’s cargo hold was stuffed with radio gear–transmitting an AM signal at 1480 Kilohertz.
On December 4th, 1966, she dropped anchor in the gulf, and Radio Hauraki went on the air.
NZBC effectively banned the Rolling Stones’ hit Ruby Tuesday, simply because it was on the flip side…of Let’s Spend the Night Together.
Obviously that song was too dangerous for the good of our morality so it was promptly banned. Things were that ridiculous, but mercifully all that changed when Radio Hauraki eventually made its point.
That’s Kiwi Journalist Gordon Brown, writing about Radio Hauraki in August of 2014.
David Gapes was also a journalist…by day, and a music fan by night, raised in Wellington, now living in Auckland. David, his wife Wendy, and his old friend Derek Lowe, joined forces with Chris Parkinson and Denis O’Callahan. This small group started Radio Hauraki.
The New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation, or NZBC, was formed by legislation in 1962. Like its bigger, older cousin, the BBC, it was an independent, quasi-government agency that provided radio and television content, set standards–and most important to our story–issued broadcasting licenses and assigned frequencies to would-be private stations.
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That’s all fine in the abstract, but in the real world, the NZBC was in no hurry to grant broadcasting licenses to private competitors. They had a nice little monopoly going. So in 1964, when the Radio Hauraki upstarts tried to get the proper licenses, everything got lost in a bureaucratic maze. Nearly two years went by, nothing doing.
So they got a creaky old boat, the Tiri, patched her up, and stuffed a transmitter in her cargo hold.
After one failed attempt to launch, where Tiri was actually boarded and seized by the Auckland Marine Department, the five of them took the department to court, and won.
The Tiri was released from impound, and early one December morning she quietly slipped her berth in Auckland Harbor, and put out to sea. Three miles out geographically, to be exact; but legally, still in a very inexact, ill-defined gray area. Strictly speaking, they weren’t doing anything illegal, but…it wasn’t entirely legal either.
Thing is though: Radio Hauraki was an immediate SMASH. It was meeting a BIG unmet need, and the market did what markets do in those instances: it responded. Radio Hauraki also did something never done before in New Zealand: they gave airplay and promotional opportunities to homegrown musicians.
That’s a function, by the way, of local broadcasting that is pretty much irreplaceable. Lose the local radio station, and the local music scene will suffer.
But we digress.
So: listeners loved Radio Hauraki and clamored for more, and advertisers wanted in.
Within months, they had achieved market saturation: over a million listeners in this very small country. Basically, the entire radio-listening population of New Zealand would tune in at some point during their day. Young people embraced Radio Hauraki with a cult-like fervor.
Radio Hauraki played local artists, like we said, and of course, the latest rock and pop hits from the UK and America. There was no room to store records out at sea, so most of the programming was pre taped on land and shuttled out to the Tiri.
They said that private radio wouldn’t work, but here is the staff of Radio Hauraki–or two-thirds of it–gathered for a first birthday picture…the rest of the 60-strong staff is swinging on the radio ship Tiri…
These shining faces are part of the success story led by co-directors Derek Lowe and David Gapes.
The New Zealand Herald ran that caption underneath a group photo of the Radio Hauraki team. Standing in the back, flashing a big grin, a relatively new hire, already popular with listeners, DeeJay Rick Grant. Rick was taking his turn ashore that day, so he got in on the group photo.
Out in the Gulf, the Pirates kept the old gal afloat and running somehow, and there was not one moment of dead air that entire first year. They dodged authorities, shuttled crew and tapes and provisions out to the Tiri on small boats in the dead of night, even hired a float plane when their supply boats got intercepted and turned around.
So it went, until the night of January 28th, 1968, when disaster struck.
Cold, wet, and miserable–but thankfully alive–the entire crew was rescued off the beach late the following day. The Tiri was a total loss. They did manage to come back and salvage the transmitter.
But ad space was selling, they had saved the transmitter…and try as they might, the NZBC had yet to shut them down…so fast-talking, born salesman David Gapes found a local moneybags who floated them a loan.
Tiri II put to sea a month later. Couple months after that, on April 28th, 1968, another storm forced her aground, but Tiri II was up and running again in a few days. A couple other times they got busted for drifting into territorial waters while broadcasting, and had to suspend briefly.
But Radio Hauraki was back on the air, to stay. In December of 1968, they became New Zealand’s first 24-hour radio station.
Finally, in 1970, the NZ authorities granted them a shore-based broadcast license. Tiri II turned legit, and turned her bow towards Auckland. They had spent 1,111 days at sea.
But as we said earlier, Neptune is endlessly patient, and in the end, he got his wish. On the voyage home, as the crew celebrated, in a tragic and bitterly ironic twist of fate, Radio Hauraki’s popular new DeeJay Rick Grant was lost overboard and drowned.
Radio Hauraki lives on though. It broadcasts music, news, and commentary to this day, as an online streaming service, and: on the air with live DJs.
