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Wānaka's closest island has burned more than once — and each fire changed what grows there today.
Ruby Island sits barely a kilometre offshore from Wānaka township, which makes it the most visited of the lake's islands — and, over roughly the last 120 years, one of the most fire-affected. Repeated fires have swept through the island's bush, each one setting back whatever native regrowth had managed to establish since the last.
The most damaging of the recent fires struck in 1992, undoing years of replanting work by local volunteer groups in a single afternoon. It was serious enough to prompt an actual change in how the island was managed — rather than just replanting and hoping, the community installed water tanks on the island in 1995 specifically for irrigation and fire control.
After 1992, the plan changed from replanting after fires to preventing the next one.
Ruby Island's fire history sits alongside a stranger chapter — the Ruby Island Cabaret, a Saturday-night dance hall the Hunt family ran on the island through the late 1920s and early 1930s. Fire wasn't what ended the cabaret (the Depression did), but the island's later fires did erase most physical trace of it, leaving the story to survive mostly in old photographs and newspaper clippings rather than anything still standing on the ground.
Since 1995, the Ruby Island Management Committee — a group of local volunteers — has looked after the island's ongoing restoration, running community planting days and maintaining the fire infrastructure that's kept the worst from repeating. A total fire ban and smokefree policy now apply year-round, which sounds strict until you know exactly why.
Cruise past it yourself on our half-day lake tour, which visits Ruby Island on afternoon departures.
