Lindsay Hazley and Henry. Photo: Southland Museum
The main handler of Invercargill's celebrity tuatara Henry is retiring this month, after a friendship dating back more than five decades.
Lindsay Hazley met Henry back in 1970, then a schoolboy volunteering at Southland Museum, where the reptile lived.
Henry would go on to become the most famous of the museum's 70 tuatara, becoming a first-time father in 2009 when he was already more than 100 years old.
"The tuatara had never bred in captivity, and I wanted to breed the hell out of these guys," Hazley told RNZ on Friday.
His association with the native reptile began way back in the 1960s. Hazley would wag school to help out at the museum, and in 1972 they hired him full-time.
Henry arrived in 1970 from Stephens Island, the museum wanting to show off "living history". But little did they realise at the time, Southland did not have the ideal climate for showing off tuatara.
"We built an outdoor enclosure in the 1970s and we struggled with the cold - the tuatara basically hibernated eight months of the year," Hazley said.
Eventually they built a "tuatarium", where the lizards thrived.
"Produced probably over 160, 180 tuatara in the last 30 years, and we've probably had about 60, 70 tuatara gone to different zoos around New Zealand."
But it was not all plain sailing. They struggled for years to find Henry, named for the king who married six times, a mate.
"He attacked every tuatara that went near him, so he spent about 15 years in solitary confinement," Hazley explained.
Lindsay Hazley with Henry the tuatara outside the Southland Museum and Art Gallery building Photo: Kavinda Herath
It wasn't until the 2000s they realised a growth on his bottom was a tumour. Once it was removed, the 111-year-old Henry "had a personality transplant" and hit it off with Mildred, who was approximately in her 70s.
Henry and the other tuatara at Southland Museum were recently moved to a temporary home while the museum undergoes long-awaited geotechnical work.
But with no one really sure how long tuatara can live - Hazley suspects it could be up to 200 years - it was likely Henry would live long enough to return to his home of more than five decades.
As for Hazley, he has spent his final shifts training up the next generation of tuatara carers, and recently told the Otago Daily Times he might write a book about his career.
