Ruby Island's Cabaret: Tea Parties, Prohibition, and Watching for the Law

A Cabaret Built By Hand, One Log At A Time

In 1927, John and Sybil Hunt bought the Wānaka Ferry Service and, alongside it, an idea: turn tiny Ruby Island into somewhere people would actually want to go. They got a permit and a ten-year lease, then set about building a proper dance floor on the island's high point. With no roads to the site, beech logs cut at sawmills up in Makarora had to be towed the length of the lake and then hauled up nearly 250 feet by hand. The result was a sprung 40-by-50-foot dance floor, laid over a base of car tyres to mimic the bounce of the sprung floors popular at the time, under a corrugated roof, ringed by flagstones more than a few locals still swear were borrowed from nearby beaches.

Tea Rooms By Day, Something Else By Night

On paper, what the Hunts had built was a tea room — rustic tables, a kitchen run by an old navy chef, scones and cream served up by Sybil herself. Officially, that's exactly what Saturday nights on the island were too. Unofficially, this was Otago in the late 1920s, when pubs across the district — Wānaka, Hāwea, Luggate, Cardrona — were shutting their doors by 6pm and social options for a night out were thin on the ground. Liquor at the cabaret wasn't supposed to exist. In practice, it very much did.

Officially, a tea party. Unofficially, the best night out in the district.

Keeping a Watch on the Water

Locals who attended as young adults later recalled how the arrangement actually worked: smuggled liquor circulated quietly through the crowd, while revellers kept a lookout for boats crossing from the mainland that might be carrying the local constable. If a warning went up, bottles disappeared fast, and by the time any boat reached shore, it was just a room full of people dancing to a gramophone and drinking tea. Whether anyone was ever actually caught is a different question — the stories that survive tend to be about the getting away with it, not the getting caught.

The End of the Party

The cabaret ran through until 1930, when the Hunts moved on to farm at Maungawera and the launches and equipment went up for sale — a classified ad for the sale even listed the ice-cream machine and the gramophone among the assets. A later heritage assessment of the site summed the whole era up simply: in an isolated small lakeside town, if you wanted a social life, you built it yourself. The dance floor's schist foundations are still there today, an easy stop on the walk around the island, and in 2013 the whole thing was even revived for one nostalgic night — complete with a pig spit and 200 guests in period dress, ferried out by helicopter instead of ferry.

See the foundation stones for yourself on our half-day and full-day lake tours.