Kelly Tarlton

Kelly Tarlton was a diver and treasure hunter who spent his life underwater and, right at the end of it, built the attraction that still carries his name. Auckland’s Underwater World opened in 1985 with an idea nobody had quite pulled off before: a moving walkway that carried visitors through a clear acrylic tunnel while sharks and stingrays swam overhead.

Treasure and Shipwrecks

Before the aquarium, Tarlton made his name on New Zealand’s shipwrecks. He was one of the country’s most accomplished divers, recovering artefacts and treasure from wrecks around the coast, most famously the Elingamite, which had gone down with a cargo of coins off the Three Kings Islands. He turned that fascination into a business, opening a Museum of Shipwrecks at Waitangi in the Bay of Islands to display what he had brought up from the seabed.

Underwater World

His biggest idea was to let ordinary people see the underwater world without getting wet. Working in a set of disused stormwater tanks beneath Tamaki Drive in Orakei, Tarlton and his team engineered curved acrylic tunnels strong enough to hold back the water and clear enough to disappear, so a visitor on the walkway felt surrounded by the sea. The build stretched his money and his health to the limit, and he did much of the problem-solving himself.

The Legacy

Tarlton died of a heart attack in 1985, only weeks after Underwater World opened to the public. The walk-through tunnel design he proved in Auckland went on to be copied by aquariums around the world. The attraction, now run as a Sea Life aquarium, still bears his name, a rare case of a New Zealand founder whose single finished project became a template for an entire industry.

Kelly Tarlton features in our guide to the most famous New Zealand entrepreneurs.