IN HINDSIGHT it seems obvious: the Poor Knights should have been a fully protected marine reserve from the start. Instead, the reserve that was created to protect New Zealand’s premier dive location and marine treasure-house permitted fishing in 95 per cent of its area—a matter of considerable regret to many of those who know the Poor Knights best.

Wade Doak, doyen of New Zealand diving, remembers the years leading up to 1981, when the waters around the Poor Knights Islands finally became the country’s second marine reserve, as a period of agonisingly slow progress towards the goal of marine conservation.

“In the context of those times it seemed churlish to cavil over the allowance of recreational fishing,” he told me one evening recently in his Ngunguru home. “It was felt that that amount of fishing was just a sneeze, that it didn’t amount to anything. It was only with time—when the golden snapper and the pink maomao started to disappear—that we became aware that it was dreadful.”

It would take a further 17 years to achieve full protection. Not until 1998 would charts of the Northland coast show crossed-through fish—symbols for “no take”—around the entire Poor Knights group. At last, divers had something to celebrate: the islands had become a “proper” marine reserve.

The act of parliament that legislates the creation of marine reserves was passed in 1971 in order to protect areas of New Zealand “that contain underwater scenery, natural features, or marine life, of such distinctive quality, or so typical, or beautiful, or unique, that their continued preservation is in the national interest”.

Under these terms, the Poor Knights instantly qualified for consideration. Whereas Goat Island, New Zealand’s first marine reserve (created in 1975), represented a typical stretch of Northland coast, the Poor Knights were anything but typical. “Distinctive quality”, “beautiful” and “unique” could have been penned specifically with the islands in mind.

The Poor Knights group—two large islands (Tawhiti Rahi and Aorangi) and ten small—stretches in a 10 km north–south line 24 km off the Whangarei coast. The islands occupy an oceanographic intersection between temperate and subtropical waters. They have some of the country’s lushest kelp forests—a signature habitat of temperate seas—but are also renowned for sightings of such subtropical and tropical icons as cowrie snails and corals, giant salps and paper nautiluses, and gaudily coloured fishes, shrimps and sea urchins. Even turtles and manta rays have been seen.

Such a combination of ecological assets made the Poor Knights a logical choice for a marine reserve, and moves in that direction were started the year after the act was signed into law.