In fact, I am slightly more nervous knowing that I am not completely alone: a minute or two earlier, as the Cessna swung and seesawed crazily above the sand, I had seen a lone figure, dressed in overalls, standing on the beach, looking up at us. And now I am alone with that person, whoever it is.
Hemmed in at each end by rocky impassable cliffs and backed by steep overgrown hills, Doughboy Bay is a seriously isolated place. The headlands at either end of the bay almost overlap each other, making it difficult from the beach to catch more than a glimpse of the open sea. To the north is Mason Bay, a challenging ten-hour hike through native forest. Oban is the only town on the island, and it sits on the opposite coast, through 40 kilometres of tangled and untended bush.
I take off my shoes and walk toward the waves. The water is clear and so cold that it numbs my toes. It’s still early, but the sun is already high in the sky, and I have to shield my eyes to see anything. Walking back to the circle left in the sand by the departing airplane, I begin to follow the wheel tracks that extend from it. Two straight dark lines in the sand. I walk between them along the beach until they disappear. And I see no one.
I had come to Stewart Island for five days, boarding an airplane in Invercargill on New Zealand’s South Island for the fifteen-minute flight across the treacherous waters of Foveaux Strait. While I was here to find Fisherman Phil and locate the cave on Doughboy Bay in which he spends weeks every winter with his wife, I wanted to find a piece of ambergris for myself. I had brought with me Rakiura (1940), the definitive history of the island by Basil Howard, and The Stewart Islanders (1970) and In the Grip of an Island (1982) by Olga Sansom, who was born and raised on Stewart Island. From these and other older texts, I had come to understand that Stewart Island has always had a connection with ambergris like nowhere else on Earth. In a sense, I was following Mike Hilton’s ambergris home too. This, at least, was where its journey had ended: on the high-tide line, near the vegetation on Mason Bay — a remote 20-kilometre-long crescent of sand that stretches along Stewart Island’s rugged and exposed west coast. Where its journey had begun, the path it had taken, or even how long it had been floating in the sea before Hilton’s graduate student found it were simply unknown, and mostly unknowable. Even the most reliable and up-to-date computer modelling software cannot tease apart mysteries as complex as these. But its journey had ended here.
If New Zealand is shaped like the letter i— a listing green i adrift in the southern seas — then Stewart Island is a tiny misshapen dot that sits beneath the canted upright: an overgrown, hilly, and half-forgotten dot in a vast and endless ocean. The Maoris settled here first — as early at the thirteenth century — naming the island Rakiura, which means “Land of the Glowing Skies”.
In March 1770 James Cook sailed the HMS Endeavour along the south coast of Stewart Island. He was the first European to do so, narrowly avoiding shipwreck against a long rocky ledge he named The Traps. Rounding the rocky southern coast, Cook concluded that Stewart Island was not an island at all, but a peninsula. Referring to his own sketches, the overlapping outlines of the numerous small islands in Foveaux Strait had deceived him. Accordingly, he named the island South Cape. In early maps drawn from expedition notes, a dotted line tentatively connects the island to the mainland. On the day the Endeavour navigated the southernmost part of New Zealand, Cook celebrated a junior officer’s birthday by ordering that a dog be killed: its hindquarters were roasted; a forequarters went into a pie; and its stomach was used to make a haggis for the Scotsmen aboard. Thirty-four years later, an American sealer named Owen Folger Smith finally discovered Foveaux Strait and navigated its narrowest parts in a whaleboat. He charted the channel, naming it Smith’s Strait. And then in 1809, William W. Stewart, the first officer of the Australian ship Pegasus, determined the island’s northernmost points. The island officially became an island and was marked as such on maps. It was named in Stewart’s honour.
In Rakiura, Howard described Stewart Island as “irregularly triquetrous in outline.” From above, it is shaped like an arrow with a broken tip that points absolutely nowhere. Today around 380 permanent residents call Stewart Island home, a number that has remained stable for several decades. There are a few prominent families — whose numbers are slowly dwindling — and a quiet and steady influx of outsiders to replace them. Almost all of them live in Oban, which is now the only settlement on the island. Strung around Halfmoon Bay, on the island’s sheltered east coast, Oban is little more than a few stores and homes clustered along a winding coastal road, from which a handful of named streets radiate. Over on the west coast, a series of isolated beaches: Smoky Beach, Ruggedy Beach, Big Hellfire and Little Hellfire beaches, Mason Bay, and Doughboy Bay. It is challenging terrain — kilometre after kilometre of exposed and uninhabited coastline. A few weeks earlier, I had arranged to fly from Oban to Doughboy Bay. The pilot would land on the beach at low tide and leave me there, returning twelve hours later during the following low tide, to pick me up.
In 2002, 85 percent of Stewart Island was designated Rakiura National Park and is now protected. In other words, almost all of Stewart Island’s 1,750 square kilometres are unpopulated. Most of its residents live within the couple of square kilometres that contain Oban and Halfmoon Bay. By contrast, Singapore is less than half the size of Stewart Island, with a land area of 700 square kilometres. It has an estimated population of almost five million inhabitants. Elsewhere on Stewart Island, abandoned villages rot into the ground, forgotten: Port Pegasus to the southwest, a booming tin-mining town in the 1890s; the Maori settlements at Port Adventure to the southeast and at Maori Beach on the north coast; all dismantled by the wind and picked over by the gulls a long time ago.
But Oban remains, clinging tenuously to life through commercial fishery and tourism — and stubbornness. It is a small place, in every sense. The Stewart Island telephone directory is a single-sided, laminated piece of paper. In total, there are fewer than three hundred phone numbers on it: plenty of Johnsons, Leasks, and Squires; a number for Conner A (Squirt); and Big Glory Seafoods. There is a general store, but no banks or fast-food outlets. Residents only make their way to the post office after they have heard, passing overhead, the familiar drone of the airplane that delivers their mail. There are cars, but almost nowhere to drive them. There is one school on the island — Halfmoon Bay School, which sits a block or so from the wide and spacious harbour. This year, nineteen students will attend classes there. Older children attend high school classes “in town,” which is how Stewart Islanders refer to Invercargill, the southernmost city on the mainland. Town is also where many Stewart Islanders get their hair cut, boarding a ferry from the wharf in Halfmoon Bay, or taking a flight across the 30-kilometre-wide strait, and stopping off for a quick trim while they stock up on supplies not available on the island. Several times a year, a hairdresser makes it over to Oban from the mainland, converting the fire station into a makeshift salon and cutting the hair of anyone who needs it.
Back on Doughboy Bay, it is midmorning and the tide is coming in. I’m still optimistic that I will find some ambergris eventually if I walk the beach all day. And so I begin to scour the margins in the eerie silence, past half-buried brightly coloured plastic containers and bales of old tangled fishing nets. I pick up an empty Nikka Whisky bottle from Japan and a dented plastic drink bottle with Korean characters printed on its side, and I carry them with me for a while along the beach. The tide is dumping a colourful drift of flotsam from across the world in the bay: shipping pallets, waterlogged coconut shells, an intact lightbulb, clumps of wet kelp and sea lettuce, a half-eaten apple, multicoloured plastic widgets, crumbling Styrofoam boards, empty mussel shells, broken plastic fishing buoys, dead gulls, a pink baby’s sock, a long tangled zipper, ripped from a suitcase, and bleached white piles of driftwood that look, from a distance, like antlers rising from the sand. I look for ambergris among the flotsam. More than any other beach I have visited, the sand at Doughboy Bay is littered with pumice. There
are pieces of it everywhere. Some are as small as a peanut, but others are large and round, like pitted white cannonballs. After just half an hour bending and straightening in the sun, I have grown tired of picking them up, smelling them, and throwing them aside. At the northern end of the bay, I find the Department of Conservation hut, a small ramshackle outpost used by hikers, hunters, and DoC rangers. Following Mike Hilton’s instructions for finding Fisherman Phil’s cave, I slowly make my way south from the hut, through the scrubland and along the thick green edge of the forest. A loud screech rises from somewhere within the dense jumble of trees. Craning my neck nervously to peer through the emerald crosshatch of shadows and trunks, I suspect either a lost penguin, a kaka — a species of large green parrot common on Stewart Island — or a heavily armed hunter who has spent too long in the bush.
Suddenly, I see a flash of colour in the dunes: two blue dome tents, nestled in the shadows at the base of the hills. I can see someone walking toward me through the grass. Theo Chapman is a biodiversity ranger for the Department of Conservation. I ask him what he is doing on Doughboy Bay. He takes a few more steps toward the tide line and stops. “This is marram grass,” he says, pointing to the grass that covers the dunes, growing in bright green clumps between the shore and the forested hills. “It’s very invasive,” he says. Chapman and his fellow rangers are part of a widespread DoC program to eradicate introduced species like marram grass from the west coast dune systems. He turns and points over his shoulder to a pale circle of dry and hollowed stumps, like straws in the sand. “See these rhizomes?” he says. “These are all that’s left from previous treatments.”
Marram grass was introduced to coastal areas by the Ministry of Land more than a hundred years ago. It was planted to combat drifting sands and land erosion — caused by the European immigrants who used to set fire to native grasses growing on the dunes — and quickly replaced indigenous species like pingao grass. The practice was continued into the 1980s, but the Department of Conservation is now attempting to reintroduce native species to long windswept stretches of the west coast.
I tell Chapman that I am on Doughboy Bay to look for ambergris and to find Fisherman Phil and the cave where he spends his winters. A moment later, Chapman has matter-of-factly offered to show me two of the three things I’m trying to find. He walks toward the bush, parts a screen of broad shiny leaves with his forearms, takes a few big steps over a bed of ferns, and disappears into the shadows. We walk up a gentle slope in half-darkness and arrive at a cave opening: Fisherman Phil’s cave. It is quiet and dark. Although we’ve only walked fifteen paces or so from the dunes, I can no longer hear the sea. We have stepped into near silence. I can hear only water falling, dripping occasionally from the rocks and landing in puddles on the ground.
In the shadows of the cave, DoC biodiversity ranger Simon Taylor is preparing for another day on the dunes. He stands beneath the rocky overhang, stretching. I tell him that Fisherman Phil spends his winters here in the cave. “I’ve met him,” says Taylor. “And his wife,” he adds. “I don’t know what her name was, though. Mustang Sally, maybe?” He laughs to himself as he organizes his kit. “He said he was a fisherman, anyway,” Taylor says with a shrug. “He seemed really laid-back.”
Chapman and Taylor show me a homemade bed they found in the cave when they arrived. It belongs, they say, to Fisherman Phil. Lopsided, it sits in the vegetation outside the cave now. It is simply constructed — a rack of mostly straight pieces of driftwood nailed together and strung with green netting. It looks uncomfortable. Grass has begun to grow through it. It’s hard to believe anyone could survive more than a night on such a bed, but Fisherman Phil rises from it each morning in the winter and walks the length of the bay to overturn driftwood and search beneath it for ambergris. The cave is not very deep — maybe 4 metres or so from the entrance to the back wall. On one side of the cave is a gas-powered stove. A drying cloth hangs limply from the washing lines strung between the trees. A fire of paper and trash is burning near the cave entrance, sending a column of dark smoke up into the air. A piece of tarpaulin has been tied above it like a stained sail, to direct to smoke away from the opening. It is working, but the rock wall above the cave is blackened with soot and disappears into the green shadows of the overgrown bush. Near the back wall of the cave, four folding chairs have been arranged side by side. As I quietly survey the scene, a cold droplet of water falls from the branches above the cave and lands in my eye.
“Yeah, we’re pretty feral,” says Taylor, as I wipe my eye with my sleeve.
“That hot shower at the end of it is pretty nice,” agrees Chapman, nodding.
Chapman and Taylor and two other rangers have spent most of the last four months on Doughboy Bay, eradicating marram grass from the dunes. Working for ten days at a time, two of them sleep in tents near the cave among untamed clumps of the grass they are trying to remove, and the other two sleep on bunk beds in the stuffy DoC hut toward the northern end of the bay. After ten days in the dunes, they fly to Oban for four days’ rest before returning to the coast — maybe to Doughboy Bay again, but more likely to Mason Bay — to resume spraying for another ten days. Back and forth, and then back again. By the time I meet them, they are on the eighth day of another ten-day stint. They have been travelling between Oban and the west coast beaches since November. It is now February. They spent most of the Christmas holidays on the beach, spraying marram grass. They seem a little feverish to me. The sun has burned them all various shades of red. They no longer notice the sand flies that settle on us like a black biting blanket whenever we stand still. They are very eager to talk to me about different types of grass.
Then Taylor pulls out a little nugget the colour of wet slate. It sits in his palm like a misshapen nut. Its surface has a waxy sheen to it. He says he’s not sure if it’s ambergris. “I found it yesterday,” he says, “on the high-tide line.” He smelled it, he says with a shrug, before he saw it. “I grew up on a farm,” he explains, “and the smell reminded me of the shearing sheds.”
I take it from him and smell it while Taylor and Chapman look on expectantly with their eyebrows raised, like hopeful prospectors. It is ambergris. This dark slate-coloured little nugget is the reason I had come all the way to Doughboy Bay — the remotest place I had ever been — bouncing and seesawing over an unpeopled coastline in a single-engine Cessna: for this little kernel of ambergris. It is a strange moment in a longer and stranger journey.
“Jono will be back later,” says Taylor, quickly pocketing his ambergris, “and he’s got two larger pieces.”
Stewart Island is 40 kilometres wide and stretches 70 kilometres from north to south. Its highest point is Mount Anglem on the north coast, which rises to 1,000 metres above sea level. Parts of the northern half of the island are flat and swampy, but, elsewhere and in general, the terrain is rugged, green, and hilly. From above, the flat areas are irregular in shape, like a slowly spreading green oil spill. Long thin ridges of hilly granite sit between flattened fingers of swampland, which extend and radiate from the basin of Freshwater River, a little west of Oban, and stretch northwest alongside the base of Thomson Ridge, toward the Ruggedy Mountains, and westward to Mason Bay. Geologically, the island is mostly granite. A long fault line of schists, marbles, and quartzites — running in a soft band — divides the island and has slowly eroded over time to form the swampy depression that occupies part of the northern and western interior.
From a 1936 study of the geomorphology of the island: “The climate of Stewart Island is disagreeable: the prevailing winds sweep across the highlands driving with them banks of cloud and showers of rain, but snow seldom falls — in fact the top of Mount Anglem is snow-clad for only a few weeks in mid-winter.” In fact, rain is one of the most important commodities on Stewart Island — perhaps even more important than ambergris. Most residents rely on rainwater as their sole source of drinking water, collecting it for long-term storage in large tanks. But during my visit, the sky is almost always a c
loudless and uninterrupted blue. The winds that prevent trees from growing on the tops of the grassy, exposed west coast ridge lines are absent, and the air is still.
Tim TeAika knows those ridges better than anyone else. For twenty years, he maintained more than a thousand sturdy sheep there, leasing 4,000 rolling hectares of pastureland that stretched all the way from the coast at Mason Bay and extending inland eastward as far as Freshwater Flats. TeAika is the last surviving member of a breed of men now gone from Stewart Island — he was the last farmer to hold a lease for a sheep run on Stewart Island. He left in 1986. The farmers are all gone now — those pioneering Bunyanesque men who mustered their stock on the west coast, driving them through the wet tussock-filled hollows and across the steep rain-swept ridges above Mason Bay, building their own spartan homesteads there among the sheep and home schooling their children in the remote wilderness.
TeAika is eighty years old now. His hearing is failing, he tells me loudly over the phone. He lives in Invercargill, on the mainland. “There’s a part of the run on the Freshwater Flats,” he recalls softly, “but we only farmed around Mason Bay. There was about 5,000-odd acres there on our farm and that’s all we used. The rest was too rough.”
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