Daily Photo – Middlemarch
If you’re ever in Connecticut, USA it is highly recommended that you visit the USS Nautilus at the Submarine Force Museum. It was the world’s first nuclear-powered submarine, and is permanently docked on the Thames River which you can walk aboard and explore. In Kiel, Germany at the Laboe Naval Memorial you can visit the U-995, a World War II U-boat. Sydney, Australia has the HMAS Onslow at the Australian National Maritime Museum in Darling Harbour and Kaliningrad, Russia is home to the B-413 at the Museum of the World. What all these nautical museums and submarine attractions have in common (as in fact do most) is that they are located close to significant bodies of water such as a harbour or ocean. Not so in New Zealand. Here in the land of the long white cloud, to see our one and only submarine you have to drive 80 kilometres inland to Middlemarch – its closest water supply being an outside tap! Yet, it is here you’ll find the Platypus, a submarine that’s a nod towards New Zealand’s ingenuity, inventiveness and No 8 wire mentality. The only drawback being, it never really worked and spent more time holding water than being in it!
The brainchild of R.W.Nutall and Antoine-Prosper Payerne, who between them came up with the genius idea of building a submarine that could easily dredge the river beds of Central Otago. The theory was that vast quantities of gold must lay on the Central Otago riverbeds and a submarine seemed the ideal way to access it. If the gold wouldn’t come to them, they would go to the gold, thus ‘The Platypus’ was born.
Of French design, The Platypus submarine was constructed, fitted and finished locally in Dunedin before a series of moderately successful public launches took place, starting in December, 1873. The difficulty was that the vessel took a good dozen people to operate and most rational people didn’t want to have anything to do with the craft. Eventually, when at last a group of brave individuals were persuaded to get in the thing, the testing continued, with mixed results at best. During the last of these trials, things went so badly, when The Platypus eventually resurfaced, the men scrambled out, certain they were about to die. After this, unsurprisingly, support started to wane and before it could be transported to the gold fields, the project collapsed with The Platypus left abandoned on the banks of Pelichet Bay (now Logan Park) for four decades.
The Platypus Project suddenly jumped back to life in the 1920’s when the submarine was dismantled, cut into three sections and sold. The two end sections were purchased by a farmer from the Barewood area near Middlemarch where it was used as a water tank with the middle section disappearing and remains missing. Another 70 years later, the farmer donated the remains to the Middlemarch Museum where it stands for people like me to marvel over. Which, is what I did now.