Seaview Hospital fire: Building’s long history in Hokitika

It has been a prison, a home for the mentally unwell and a spooky backpackers – and now it is the scene of a suspicious fire.

Seven fire crews raced to Hokitika’s abandoned Seaview Hospital yesterday morning, perched on the hill just north of the town, to find the Kotuku building well alight in a spectacular blaze.

It was out by evening, but the cause of the fire is now under investigation.

Historian Jane Comeau wrote her masters thesis on the hospital – formerly known as Seaview Asylum – and its role in Hokitika’s history.

She said it began as a wing of the jail, housing people who were considered a threat to themselves or others, in 1871.

Public outcry over the treatment of mental patients saw it separated from the main jail building soon afterwards, and given its own superintendent. Psychiatric hospitals often had pretty negative connotations, Comeau said, and often for good reason.

“They’re spooky, they have ghosts, there’s all this trauma – but I think there’s this overlooked element of asylums* where they were a respite for people who didn’t have a lot else for them in their life.”

Many who had been housed there suffered from illnesses they were never going to recover from, like dementia or “tertiary syphilis”, Comeau said – people who “just needed a place to decline”.

But they were not as excluded from society as they would have been in other hospitals around the country.

It was only a 15-minute walk from the Hokitika township, and the doctor would cycle up there every day. The inhabitants would be taken into town for excursions, and people from the town would come up for dances and parties.

Many were cured, and some, when given the chance to leave, chose not to.

“The West Coast was full of itinerant miners, people with nowhere to go, people with few social connections, and sometimes it was a choice between the asylum and nothing at all,” Comeau said.

Paul Breeze, who worked as a nurse at the hospital in the 1990s, said the hospital was a huge employer for Hokitika before dairy took over.

“There was a time when there was hardly a household that didn’t have a member of the family working there,” he said.

The patients who ended up there had often landed in the too-hard basket, he said – but they were treated well.

It became a self-sufficient little community. By the late 1990s it was beginning to grow its own food, and even had its own fire brigade.

Breeze likened it to the iconic British wartime sitcom Dad’s Army – nobody was appropriately trained, but staff from various wards pitched in, driving about in a 1932 Ford V8.

The brigade stayed active until the hospital’s closure in the early 2000s, with only a handful of patients left to transfer elsewhere.

Inside the abandoned hospital

Comeau visited the place herself in 2020.

“You go through the door and there’s a room full of metal bedframes all packed together, and then you walk down a hallway where the ceiling’s partially collapsed, and you go into another room and there’s a couple of old baths with metal railing where the curtains would have gone,” she said.

“And then you would have gone into an old games room, or living room, where there’s a bunch of old chairs and graffiti all over the walls.”

Part of the precinct was used as a backpackers and campsite, called Seaview Lodge and Backpackers, for a number of years.

The earliest review on Tripadvisor was left in December 2013, and according to later reviews, it remained open until February, with one guest calling it “an amazing place”, and “a real curiosity to look around and find ward beds set up”.

The final review, in July, noted: “The place has once again been abandoned and a member of the cleaning staff advised that it’s all closed again, including the hostel.”

“The graveyard is still eerie,” it said.

RNZ understands the building which caught on fire was not one used as part of the backpackers.

*The word asylum is considered outmoded and often offensive, but Jane Comeau uses it here in order to reflect the attitudes towards mental health at the time.

rnz.co.nz