Seaview Hospital - Seaview Lighthouse - Hungerford Mausoleum

Sunny when it is not raining, with views of the Tasman Sea, usually windswept, and always mysterious, Seaview is a slightly elevated plateau just to the north of Hokitika township. It is virtually abandoned by all except those buried there, after serving the population in a variety of ways over a century and a half.

At one point, the 150 acre facility was the largest employer in Hokitika, and served as the South Island's primary mental health inpatient facility. Teeming with over 500 residents and hundreds of staff, the facilities once included a thirty cell jail, a chapel, swimming pool, sports grounds, tennis courts. It is no accident that this facility was located in the midst of a gold-digging region, mining was a hard and lonely occupation, and over 200 miners were reported to have 'lost their minds' or 'gone lunatic' before 1875.

But the location was first the home to the Hokitika Gaol, necessarily built here in 1866 to house rowdy miners away from the Hokitika Town Centre. The area was then only accessible by boat. The next facility to be built upon the site alongside the Mahinapua Creek was the Westland General Hospital and a small associated psychiatric ward, called Southspit which was soon overflowing, creating an unfortunate and messy situation where 'lunatics' were double bunked with criminals in the jail.

The need for a proper facilities could not be ignored and Seaview Asylum (later more politically correctly named 'psychiatric hospital') came to be officially built here also in the 1870s, in the scattered villa style of accommodation being used at Porirua, Seacliff, Sunnyside and Kingseat.

An excellent short doco made for the 125th anniversary of Seaview Psychiatric Hospital in 1997 covers the hospital's history. Four large buildings held seven dormitories, thirty-seven rooms, two dining rooms, toilets and washing facilities, and a padded cell. There was an onsite nursing school and various other facilities. When European philosophy regarding deinstitutionalisation began infiltrating the new Zealand Health system, from the 1990s, Seaview was ever so gradually wound up. It was closed for good in 2002.

Seaview's oldest surviving structure is the Lighthouse, dating to 1879. The Hokitika bar was famous for wrecking hundreds of ships and this platform just above the town was chosen as the site for the lighthouse in 1875. The designer of the lamp, a Mr John Blackett, was responsible for several of these timber framed structures at critical locale's around the New Zealand coastline. Not many survive, but the one at Tuhawaiki - Jack's Point does, over on the other side of the Island. The lamp of the day, a fifth series dioptic, was powered by the town gas supply and shone an amazing 16 miles out to sea in good conditions. Unfortunately it was always in poor conditions that the bar proved a problem for incoming and outgoing vessels, and casualties continued. Shipping was replaced by road and rail into Hokitika by the 1920s, but a series of fortunate and hard fought events have preserved this structure. It is now heritage protected.

Another Heritage curiosity here is directly in the centre of the Hokitika Cemetary. It is an exceptionally grand mausoleum for the Hungerford family, who no longer live in the area. Most of it's marble plaques are empty except for two sad and unfulfilling inscriptions for the deaths of two Hungerford baby boys, dating to 1873 and 1874, and another for the later death of a Mr Thomas Christian, the 52 year old baliff of the Hokitika Court, who died suddenly from a cold. Grand monuments like this are rare in New Zealand cemeteries and this is the only one on the West Coast, and all the more strange because it is largely unused and the family do not feature in local history.

There is accommodation here now called the Seaview Lodge and Kotuku Hostel. The Chapel of the Holy Spirit, part of the Parish of St Mary's, still holds mass, and other curiosities and structures abound in the grounds. The only other visitors might be the New Zealand Defence Forces and Police who sometimes use the rundown facilities as a set for exercises in Search and Rescue, disorder and warfare. And the glowworms! In the dell off the main highway.

Access: Recently the north and south access roads have been closed off, as the area becomes more dilapidated. It is still possible to walk up, and there is a track from the back of Hokitika Airport through to the cemetery.