User:Noracrentiss/sandbox/Kelly Tarlton

AN INVENTOR & PIONEER

Kelly’s award citation also paid homage to his pioneering of curved acrylic tunnels that enable visitors to view sea creatures and their habitats from beneath - a ground-breaking development that has been emulated internationally since its inception in 1984. Did you know that the curved acrylic tunnels were molded in an oven Kelly built!

Kelly also constructed the first buoyancy compensator suit in New Zealand, using waterproof canvas for the body and a piece of garden hose to connect the snorkel mouthpiece.

A RECORD HOLDER

Kelly Tarlton also set the New Zealand free-diving depth record in Queen Charlotte Sound, reaching a whopping 24m. Kelly determined to better his record, would dive down to 34.7m!

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https://collections.tepapa.govt.nz/topic/1027 re De Surville ship anchors

https://www.nzgeo.com/stories/kelly-tarlton/ Life story

Item about stolen treasure post KT's death: https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/2838670/Gang-has-the-Tarlton-haul-thief-claims

Kelly Tarlton Museum of Shipwrecks Nat Lib item https://natlib.govt.nz/records/23058730?search%5Bi%5D%5Bname_authority_id%5D=-106467&search%5Bpath%5D=items

Research notes on finding De Surville' s anchor https://natlib.govt.nz/records/23031276?search%5Bi%5D%5Bname_authority_id%5D=-106467&search%5Bpath%5D=items

Photo of Wade Doak with coins from wreck: https://natlib.govt.nz/records/23011740?search%5Bi%5D%5Bname_authority_id%5D=-106467&search%5Bpath%5D=items

Report on the wreckage of the Martha at Tauranga: https://natlib.govt.nz/records/22509024?search%5Bi%5D%5Bname_authority_id%5D=-106467&search%5Bpath%5D=items

Kelly Tarlton's Underwater World: https://www.engineeringnz.org/programmes/heritage/heritage-records/kelly-tarltons-underwater-world/  Heritage recognition IPENZ “Engineering to 1990” project"This item of New Zealand’s engineering heritage was recognised as part of the IPENZ “Engineering to 1990” project, which the Institution organised to help celebrate the country’s sesquicentenary in 1990. A plaque was unveiled to mark the significance of this underwater world as part of the development of the nation."

Thesis on conservation education: https://openrepository.aut.ac.nz/bitstream/handle/10292/15012/FanR.pdf?sequence=3&isAllowed=y

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DRAFT ARTICLE STARTS HERE

Kelvin Ewart Tarlton (31 October 1937 -  17 March 1985) was an innovator, diver, salvage operator and marine life enthusiast who established Kelly Tarlton's Underwater World.

Early Life
Tarlton was born at Te Kōpuru, near Dargaville, New Zealand where he spent his childhood. His parents were Elsie Alexander and Ewart Fritz Tarlton. At the age of 12, Tarlton moved with his family to Auckland where he attended Pasadena Intermediate School. The family later moved to Christchurch, where Tarlton attended Christchurch Boys’ High School. After leaving school, he joined the Christchurch office of the Post and Telegraph Department (subsequently known as the New Zealand Post Office. In 1961, he qualified as a telephone exchange technician.

Early Career
Tarlton's love for outdoor adventure had begun when he was a teenager. In 1956, he planned to go on a mountain climbing trip in the Andes but political unrest in Peru forced the cancellation of the trip. Around that time, he saw pioneering maritime explorer and filmmaker Jacques Cousteau's film The Silent World. This introduced him to the underwater environment. He purchased an aqualung and his friend Rob Hall took him for his first dive shortly afterwards. He became a member of the Canterbury Underwater Club, where he met divers who became lifelong friends as well as diving pioneers.

Scuba diving was a relatively new pursuit in the 1950s and diving equipment was expensive and difficult to obtain. Tarlton and his friends crafted some of their own gear out of reclaimed machinery using old aircraft parts and tyre tubes. Tarlton's improvisational skills with equipment became a hallmark of his career.

Tarlton built an underwater unit for his camera, and several local and international publications published his photographs. As well as scuba diving, Tarlton took up spear fishing, and in 1959 set a New Zealand free diving record at Curious Cove, Queen Charlotte Sound. reaching a depth of 24 metres.

In 1959, aged 21, Tarlton organised an expedition to the Hermit Islands in the Bismarck Archipelago, north of New Guinea. During a period of four months he and a small team of fellow divers collected marine specimens along with ethnological material from Wuvulu Island and the Hermit Islands.

Tarlton obtained a transfer within the Post Office to Whāngārei to be closer to the excellent diving conditions around the Poor Knight Islands, off Northland’s eastern coast. Tarlton and his companions discovered many new marine species, photographs of which he sold to news outlets to provide funds for his diving activities. He developed a partnership with Jan and Wade Doak, who wrote the articles which accompanied Tarlton’s photographs.

Career
In 1966, when aged 29, Tarlton resigned from his Post Office job in order to take up diving full-time. His preference was to explore shipwrecks, but as the financial rewards were uncerrtain, he engaged in underwater construction work with the company he formed in 1966, Underwater Construction Ltd. The company was involved with construction of the container port at Port Chalmers in 1967.

1967 Elingamite, a wreck located off the Three Kings Islands, in January 1967. Items recovered from the ship included a large consignment of valuable coins. STOLEN ITEMS

1968 Tarlton salvaged cannon balls and other items from the wreck of the Boyd in  Whangaroa Harbour. The ship was involved in what became known as the Boyd Massacre in 1809. The relics and other items salvaged from previous wrecks formed the basis of the Boyd Gallery, a small museum which Tarleton established in a former shipping store on the Whangaroa waterfront. The popularity of the museum convinced Tarlton that a larger shipwreck museum could be a success. The museum was run by Tarlton's wife Rosemary and helped provide sufficient financial security to allow Tarlton to continue exploring shipwrecks.

THEFT https://ngataonga.org.nz/collections/catalogue/catalogue-item?record_id=242785

https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/private-eye-on-trail-of-tarltons-treasures/XUZKYKXYN3435SLP5H4ONH6PD4/

In 1970 General Grant off the sub-Antarctic Auckland Islands.

From 1970 Tarlton worked for himself largely as a shipwreck explorer but also carried out salvage operations. He raised the fishing trawler Jay Belinda from Mangonui Harbour, constructed a water intake for New Zealand Steel in the middle of the Waikato River, and laid a pipeline into the seabed across part of Tauranga Harbour.

In 1970 with financial assistance from a friend, he opened Kelly Tarlton’s Museum of Shipwrecks at Waitangi, located on the renovated three-masted barque Tui,

In January 1974, Tarlton was the first to locate one of the anchors dropped from Jean François de Surville’s St Jean Baptiste in Doubtless Bay in 1769. He had located a copy of an original French map of the bay in the Alexander Turnbull Library. This map included geographic details which did not appear on other maps, particularly the magnetic variation for 1769. This information proved to be crucial to plotting de Surville’s coordinates. Using this new information, Tarlton selected a likely search area and quickly found the first anchor. A second anchor was found soon afterwards by another diver, and in 1982, Tarlton located the third anchor. The anchors are historically significant, being the oldest authenticated relics of European contact with New Zealand. Tarlton and fellow diver Mike Bearsley donated the first anchor to the nation and it was mounted in the lobby of Te Papa Tongarewa in Wellington.

in 1974 while searching for the Rothschild treasure believed lost in the Tasmania, Tarlton and colleagues Pat Ryan and John Dearling salvaged items worth then about 2.000 pounds.

In 1975, Tarlton unsuccessfully searched again for the General Grant

1976 Tarlton said another expedition was looking at a ship that wasn't the General Grant

nla.gov.au/nla.news-article250316379

In 1977 he completed a course on marine archaeology and conservation in Perth, Western Australia. In the same year, he searched for the cannon from the trading vessel Endeavour, New Zealand’s earliest recorded wreck (1795) which he located and helped retrieve in 1984.

In 1977 Tarlton salvaged a gimbal-mounted swivel gun from the Alcmène (or l'Alcmene ?) which was wrecked in in a storm on 3 June 1851. Among the objects which were eventually on display were the items salvaged from l' Alcmène,  at Baylys Beach off the coast near Dargaville.

https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/251042408?searchTerm=kelly%20tarlton Article on the Baylys Beach findIn 1978 Tarlton and Lyle Mortimer were reported as saying they believed they were on track to locate over 20M pounds worth of bullion from the wrecked Lutine off the Netherlands Coast.

In June 1980 he led a salvage search for the Lutine  but again  called it off, made arrangment with Lloyds of London.

In 1983 General Grant again. Were claims substantiated?

the 1980s and 1990s, Tarlton led dives on shipwrecks both in New Zealand and around the world. MORE DETAILS

Innovations

Throughout his life, Tarlton used his skills to create equipment for use in his dives. In 1968, he developed a suction dredge. He used this on several wrecks, including the Elingamite, where it helped to clear the wreck and secure items for his museum collection. In 1976 he engineered a sluice system powered by the jet motor of his launch to blow sand off a wreck. Two years later in 1980 while searching for the wreck of the Lutine he devised very large prop-wash units to excavate 6- to 9-metre holes in the seafloor sand which allowed divers to search for debris.

USE THIS:

Innovations shown on poster at KT Sea Life p106 Thesis

Kelly Tarlton’s Underwater World
From his earliest days as a diver, Tarlton had a vision of building a large aquarium. Pursuit of this dream was supported by his wife and the project gained traction in the late 1970s. After considering several possible aquarium designs he opted for a structure that incorporated a viewing tunnel that ran through the middle of a large tank. The original intention was to build the aquarium at Paihia, in Northland where Tarlton and his wife were living at the time. Resistance to the project from local authorities in the area led to him opting to build the aquarium in disused sewage tanks on Auckland’s Tamaki Drive. Construction of the aquarium began in 1984 with Tarlton himself designing much of the aquarium and constructing various elements with the help of family and friends.

When Kelly Tarlton’s Underwater World opened in 1985 after 10 months of construction, it contained 20 sharks and 1000 fish. Instantly successful, Underwater World welcomed its 100,000th visitor only seven weeks after opening. On 17 March 1985, Tarlton died in his sleep of heart failure, aged 47.

Awards and recognition

Tarlton set the New Zealand free-diving depth record in Queen Charlotte Sound, reaching 24m. He later determined to better his record and dived down to 34.7m. SOURCE

In 2012 Tarlton was posthumously inducted into the International Scuba Diving Hall of Fame.

In 2018 he was honoured by the International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions with inclusion in their Hall of Fame which recognises individuals whose work has made a significant and lasting contribution to international tourism. An estimated 11.5 million people had visited Kelly Tarlton’s Underwater World by the time of its 30th anniversary in 2015. Tarlton’s innovative aquarium design has since been copied around the world.

Kelly Tarlton Award

https://www.underwaterheritage.co.nz/kelly-tarlton-award

Personal Life
Tarlton married Rosemary Hastie at Ōkaihau on 27 March 1965. They had two daughters, Nicole and Fiona. On 17 March 1985, Tarlton died in his sleep of heart failure, aged 47.