by Matt Vance
Although Turbott’s experience was in ornithology his passion for the wider natural world was unrivalled. From his extensive journal he produced a definitive account of his time coastwatching that was finally published in 2002 under the modest title Year Away. You know you are in for a good read when in the acknowledgements you find statements such as: ‘That my often illegible handwritten draft was translated into faultless typescript by Patricia Kessler, of Remuera Secretarial Services, could be regarded as almost a miracle.’
The real miracle was that Turbott had enjoyed his enforced isolation so much. While some people would consider a year’s confinement on Auckland Island unbearable, Turbott revelled in it. In between recording weather data and looking out to sea for enemy ships that didn’t appear, he threw himself into exploring the wonders of the wildlife.
On June 6, 1944 he experienced his first snowfall. In true island fashion, the snow blew away next day in a gale. At the time he was reading Reaching for the Stars by American journalist Nora Waln; it was ‘good reading, evocative of Germany just before the war and snowy Christmas scenes’. Waln had lived in Germany for four years and the book, published in 1938, was a damning exposé of Hitler and the Nazis. Reading was a favourite pastime at the station on long winter nights. The large library comprised such wildly varying genres as history and science fiction. Charles Fleming gave Turbott a copy of War and Peace shortly before he departed north, saying, ‘It’s just the thing.’ Turbott read it three times.
The only member of the coastwatching party who was never seen reading was Les Clifton. This was largely because he was working feverishly on a manuscript at every opportunity. ‘Whether Les was writing a novel, history or adventure story we never discovered, but he could be seen at almost any time of the day considering, deleting and rewriting as he bent over the well-worn pages,’ Turbott writes. There is no record of the manuscript being published.
In Turbott’s journal there is one stark entry for June 27, 1944: ‘Allan Eden taught me to play cribbage.’ The card game had the sort of characteristics that made it ideal for long periods of confinement in bad weather. It rapidly became a perpetual tournament, with the running score marked on a red and yellow trig flag hanging in the hut. The year-end tallying revealed that Eden, the group’s leader and head surveyor, had soundly thrashed all comers.
Such studious pastimes were occasionally interrupted by the need for a party. Any excuse would do. Turbott recalled: ‘The crew of the relief vessel Ranui came ashore with a fiddle and this was regarded as a good reason for a special rum issue.’ After music and singing someone came up with the idea of reviving the Sub Antarctic Observer, a short news publication that had enjoyed two issues in the past. ‘This led to lengthy speeches – mostly with little point – for and against, as the evening wore on. A committee was proposed. As a writer, Les Clifton was the obvious choice for editor.’
In the morning nothing came of it.
Like cribbage, cooking was considered a pastime vital to morale. A storeroom was packed with every conceivable ingredient and utensil. The standards expected from the rostered cook escalated throughout the year. Breakfasts were easy, with porridge a favourite, followed by bacon and baked beans. Even the worst cooks in the group succeeded in making a batch of scones.
Dinners were based around the Pacific scourge, bully beef. This was euphemistically referred to as ‘spiced mutton’ or ‘corned beef’ but renaming it made it no more palatable. To offer a change the Ranui deposited a flock of sheep on Ocean Island, not far from Port Ross. When the urge for mutton overcame the men and the weather cooperated, they would make a short dash by dinghy to collect a victim for the oven. Near the end the flock of sheep was somewhat depleted. By Christmas 1944 the last two remaining were used for what Allan Eden referred to as a ‘bumper Christmas dinner’.
With massive supplies of yeast and flour on hand, breadmaking was a competitive sport. The loaves were baked on an Orion coal range fuelled by a constant supply of cut rata. Mixtures and temperatures were subject to considerable experimentation. As Turbott put it, ‘There were some dire failures, but after a year we all finally managed to produce quite satisfactory loaves.’
Fresh vegetables were harder to obtain. While gardens were ruled out because they would be visible from the air, this turned out to be irrelevant. Not only were the island’s peaty acid soil, low temperatures and high rainfall against the vegetable gardener, so was history. Nearly a century earlier an attempt had been made to colonise the islands. The Enderby Settlement, as it was known, was erected on the northern arm of Port Ross by the Southern Whale Fishery Company in 1850 to cash in on the whaling bonanza in the Southern Ocean. Unfortunately, by the time the settlement was set up most of the whale stocks had been plundered. In two and a half years, only 2,000 barrels of oil and ten tons of whalebone were procured.
The small community struggled to grow enough produce to be self-sufficient. R.E. Malone, an officer on HMS Fantome, visited the settlement and summed up the growing conditions: ‘The potatoes are about an inch and a half in diameter and bad and the turnips run down like miserable radishes.’ That the settlers had any food at all was largely due to the horticultural nous of a group of Māori who had also settled in Port Ross, fleeing the Chatham Islands when there was not enough land there for all the people in their iwi, Ngāti Mutunga, who had invaded from New Zealand. In the end the tough growing conditions, together with sustained and violent boozing by a population consisting predominantly of male whalers, helped bring down the settlement.
While there were some superb naturalists among the wartime coastwatchers, there were only a few competent cooks, and the preparation of precious items such as the fresh mutton was largely left to them. Everyone else was let loose on supposedly simple recipes. One of the curiosities of Turbott’s journal is his references to the baking of jam rolls. He and the other young men on the lonely outpost had clearly had plenty of time to experiment with such high-risk cookery.
It’s likely they had been furnished with the Edmonds Cookery Book, which was, and still is, a culinary bible in New Zealand homes. The book’s recipe for jam roll comes with a list of ten essential tips. Ignore any of these and the result will be failure. Some are friendly: ‘Have the eggs at room temperature.’ Others sound more like orders: ‘Fold in dry ingredients very gently – use an up down and over movement – don’t stir!’
Remains of coastwatchers’ hut, Carnley Harbour, Auckland Island.
Turbott noted one of the more spectacular efforts. ‘Len Hoskin had a particular urge to bake a jam roll, but throughout our stay his attempts always resulted in a despairing shout of “burnt” or “collapsed”. … Len would have used around 150 tins of jam without producing a recognisable product.’
Housekeeping on the island was a less enjoyable chore, and made worse by having to battle the New Zealand blue blowfly. Known as Calliphora quadrimaculata in biological circles, these flies are infamous for depositing their eggs on woollen clothing and tents. The Auckland Island variety had perfected this habit to an alarming degree. On the day he arrived Turbott noticed a calendar in the station’s mess. Underneath in large bold letters was written: ‘EVERY DAY IS FLY-DAY.’
This was falsely thought to be one of Bob Falla’s many puns. Turbott recalls, ‘The shock of the first [fly] attack was memorable – blankets or clothing, used or clean, and not stowed away, would be suddenly glued together with a filthy egg-mass!’
Ranui crewman George Bish, on discovering a particularly nasty assault on his favourite woollen trousers, dropped his usual jovial demeanour and let fly with a string of expletives, followed by the crowning statement ‘blue-arsed maggot-blowing bastards!’.
Packing clothing in flyproof containers before dawn became a habit. Despite this, the attacks would return sporadically. An entry in Turbott’s journal contains perhaps the most depressing line in modern literature: ‘Flies have blown the inside of my slippers right to the toes.’
Naturally, food was n
ot immune to the pests’ attentions. Although onions and leeks were untouched, a sack of Brussels sprouts was blown beyond recognition.
In 1945 the Aucklands’ coastwatching station was abandoned. Over the entire five years only two ships had been spotted, one westbound and one eastbound. Both were Allied merchant vessels. Not a single enemy ship had hoved into sight.
Each time I visit the coastwatchers’ huts less of them remains. The ravages of damp, wind and the vandalism of passing fishing-boat crews is hastening their disintegration. They totter at a drunken angle, propped up by the encroaching rata forest and circled by broken bottles and rusty tins, some of which may contain the remnants of Len Hoskin’s failed jam. In the bush that surrounds them lurk a fly, a weevil, a spider, a springtail and a stone fly, all with the species name turbotti.
Meanwhile, in New Zealand’s National Library, reside twenty-seven bulletins on the natural history of the Auckland Islands, gleaned from the Cape Expedition and containing a level of detail not seen before or since. In 1998 the islands, their value enhanced by notes written by young men who observed natural phenomena in lieu of invading fleets, sacrificed their slippers, and boldly ignored the cardinal rules of jam roll production, were acknowledged as part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
‘Placemakers I’, painting by Bill Hammond, 1996.
Ornithology
50°49′S
Back in the city after a long summer in the south I wandered into my local art gallery. Strange creatures with human bodies and the heads of birds stared at me from the walls. They looked as though they were expecting an intruder.
Artist Bill Hammond’s vision of birdland had been inspired by a visit he’d paid to the Auckland Islands in 1989. In the exhibition’s catalogue there was a photograph of Hammond on one of the islands, Enderby, startled by the camera’s flash. Like this blinding white light, his experience in the Aucklands seems to have been an epiphany, igniting an idea that would shape his work for the next thirty years.
Along with two photographers, Laurence Aberhart and Lloyd Godman, and painter Gerda Leenards, Hammond had been chosen for New Zealand’s first Art in the Subantarctic programme, which was intended to attract publicity to the country’s conservation efforts in forgotten outposts. Before this the only people allowed to set foot on many of the islands had been scientists and Department of Conservation staff charged with removing the exotic pests whose forbears had been set free on the islands to provide food for shipwrecked sailors. These valiant souls spent their days shooting and trapping goats, pigs and rats. As the artists splashed ashore they eyed them suspiciously, fearful of what these interlopers might do to their beloved islands.
The idea of sending artists and photographers to the deep south was not exactly new. Members of the famous polar expeditions of Robert Falcon Scott and Ernest Shackleton had recognised the importance of having their work recorded. They had also understood the power of the image to help raise money for what were at best dubious commercial propositions. Photography, although still in its infancy and beset with cumbersome equipment, had become the medium of choice for the savvy explorer. It added a here-and-now to the otherness of things out of sight over the horizon.
By the time the artists’ programme came to fruition, the need to record had morphed into the need to communicate the experience of the south to those who would never go there. The place did to the artists what it had done to many of the early explorers: it attempted to bounce them back. The toughest stuck at it, although it would usually take years after their return home for the islands to filter into their art. The rest remained transfixed and stuttering, their notebooks still blank as they shuffled on board the boat for the voyage home. Some confessed to having been overwhelmed and drunk a lot of the time.
On that first expedition the participants endured the sort of mandatory beating dished out by the Southern Ocean. The sea was so rough it took two attempts to get them ashore on Enderby, the northernmost of the Aucklands. After being deposited in naval fashion they were billeted in huts made of car packing cases. Their hosts were a small group of pest eradicators. There was drinking, revelry and even sometimes sketching. Hammond described Enderby as ‘a paradise free from predators. You feel like a time traveller, as if you have just stumbled upon it – primeval forests, ratas like Walt Disney would make. It’s a beautiful place but it’s also full of ghosts, shipwrecks, death.’
Bill Hammond and rata, Enderby Island, photographed by Lloyd Godman, 1989.
The island is the sort of place where you can lose whole days just walking and observing. You walk to keep warm, leaning into the wind until the island demands you stop and look. When you do, you discover surprising things, such as the faint whistle of a royal albatross’s wings as it flies within a few feet of your head, or the phenomenon of a waterfall flowing upwards, blown aloft by the wind. You see a collection of Dr Seuss-like megaherbs, and a profusion of birds and insects. You also experience the region’s awful weather.
By its very nature, Enderby is profoundly affecting. Most who go there depart with not only a great collection of photos but a feeling they cannot quite put their finger on. The artist then has to do something with this feeling – ingest it, dwell on it and create something out of it.
During their homeward journey on a New Zealand navy frigate, the Southland, the artists had company in the form of the governor-general of New Zealand. With calmer seas the navy decided to stop the ship for some target practice. The crew deployed a buoy and spent a leisurely hour pounding it with small arms fire. Sir Paul was asked if he would like a shot. He promptly missed the buoy and bagged a black-browed albatross. There is no record of the horror that gripped the watching gallery of artists and sailors.
The image of an otherworldly birdland and its fragile inhabitants stayed with Bill Hammond. A couple of years later it manifested itself in a series of paintings inspired by the actions of Walter Lawry Buller. Born in 1838 to a missionary family in the north, Buller became a prominent ornithologist. In his time, collecting birds by shooting them was a common practice that helped bring about the extinction of many of New Zealand’s bird species. Although Buller suggested bird sanctuaries be established, lobbied for formal protection for endangered birds, and recorded their beauty in A History of the Birds of New Zealand, published in 1873, he was cast as a villain and became the scapegoat for the wider ills of habitat destruction and the introduction of exotic pests to colonial New Zealand. His case was not improved by his penchant for the shotgun and its barrels smoking close to New Zealand’s beautiful huia. He famously gloried in shooting and killing a breeding pair of the gravely endangered bird.
Bill Hammond’s anthropomorphic birds initially referenced Buller’s victims but rapidly mutated into something different. God-like and uncomfortably watchful, the creatures took up human habits such as wearing sneakers, smoking and playing pool.
I sat on one of the plush benches in the gallery with my chin in my hands and for a moment drifted off and went south, as fishermen say. My fellow gallery-goers were transformed into Salvin’s albatrosses and fulmar prions, the brown-uniformed security guards into giant petrels, and the air conditioning hummed with the beating of wings.
Sitka spruce, Campbell Island.
Lonely tree
52°33′S
In 1973 a Libyan truck driver was on a long haul through the Niger section of the Sahara Desert. The truck, loaded with salt, was following a thinly marked track along the sands. The driver swigged cheap whisky to pass the time. As the truck swayed to the rhythm of the ruts, the driver fell asleep at the wheel. He awoke to an abrupt bang and his truck lurching into a slow roll. He had hit the only tree for 400 kilometres and thereby extinguished the last survivor of a once great forest.
The unfortunate tree, an acacia, was known as l’arbre du Ténéré. For 300 years it had, according to Guinness World Records, been the loneliest tree in the world. The forest of which it was part had once covered the central region of the African continent
. Over centuries the climate had changed. Desert winds had marched the Saharan sands south and the forest had slowly perished. By some time in the early twentieth century all that remained was a small group of thorny yellow-flowered acacias. Within a decade all but one had died; l’arbre du Ténéré was left standing on its own.
The tree became a vital landmark for travellers and caravans passing through the hostile terrain. During the winter of 1938 to 1939 the French military coordinated the digging of a nearby well to aid its soldiers on desert patrols: engineers had discovered that the tree’s root system was drawing water from a source thirty-five metres underground. In the decades that followed, caravans transporting salt, grain and dates across the Sahara often stopped to draw water from the well. The tree appeared on large-scale maps of the desert as a reference point and was referred to by some travellers as a living lighthouse.
By the 1970s the sinuous arms of progress had reached the Sahara. Trucks had replaced camels as the preferred mode of transport. Unlike a camel, a truck usually requires its driver to be sober, which is asking a lot on a monotonous desert road, as the Libyan driver had shown. The remains of the famous tree were trucked to Niger’s National Museum in the country’s capital, Niamey. A monument of recycled pipes, fuel barrels and discarded truck parts was constructed on the site where the tree had stood.
With the loneliest tree in the world now replaced by an ersatz shrine, eyes turned south to Campbell Island and a stunted Sitka spruce that was now its successor as the tree furthest from its nearest neighbour.
