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Ruby Island has a real history nobody can quite pin down — and a made-up one everybody loves telling.
Before it was Ruby Island, the small forested island just off Wānaka township went by several other names. Early surveyors called it Merino Island, in keeping with a run of pastoral names given to nearby islands. Local Māori knew it as Matakitaki, meaning to gaze upon. For a time it was Roys Island, after one of the district's earliest pioneer settlers. The first recorded use of "Ruby Island" only turns up in an 1885 newspaper advertisement for a lake excursion, and even local historians admit nobody is entirely sure why the name stuck. The leading theory is simply that the island's shape and the light on the water reminded someone of a gemstone.
A jewel on the water, and a story nobody can quite verify.
Head into town and ask at Ruby's Cinema — Wānaka's boutique cinema and bar named after the island — and you'll get a very different answer, one the cinema is upfront about not being true. Their version tells of a young woman named Ruby, born from a scandalous match between a respectable Dunedin family and an enterprising trader with a hand in some shadier businesses on the side. As the story goes, Ruby fled an arranged marriage and made her way south to the young town then known as Pembroke, working hard through the week and living for her Sunday picnics out on the little island in Roy's Bay.
The legend gets going properly when word spreads that a cabaret dance floor and tea rooms are being built on the island — the one real historical event the whole tale is loosely hung on. Ruby is drawn to it instantly. She's courted by half the district and turns every one of them down, more at home with her circle of friends than with any of her suitors. When her family back in Dunedin catches wind of where she's ended up and sends someone looking for her, the island — and her network of friends — hide her well enough that the search is eventually called off. In the story's telling, she goes on to meet someone at one of the cabaret nights, disappears off to Melbourne for a new life, and, depending on who's doing the telling, is later reunited with her father and takes over the family business.
The cinema has never claimed any of it is true, and it isn't — but the cabaret at the centre of the story absolutely was. For a few short years in the late 1920s, Ruby Island really did host Saturday-night dances that became the stuff of local legend in their own right, minus the runaway heiress. If the real version of Wanaka's wildest nightlife interests you more than the made-up one, we've told that story separately too. Either way, next time you're picnicking on Ruby Island, you'll know there's more than one story about how it got its name — even if only one of them checks out.
Ruby Island is one of the stops on our half-day and full-day lake tours.
