Wild Journeys

by Bruce Ansley

  ‘This’ll do,’ he said, and we dropped the anchor off Waikuku Beach. The Waikuku Flats are a tombolo which join North Cape, once an island itself, to the mainland. He slept soundly, I woke often. On land waves shush in a soothing way. At sea they hiss.

  Later, I met Charlie Petera. A kaumatua of the Ngati Kuri, he was the last surviving Ngati Kuri soldier to have fought in World War II, and one of the last veterans of the 28th Maori Battalion to have seen action overseas when he died in June 2016, at the age of ninety-two.

  Charlie and his wife Katerina were New Zealand’s northernmost residents, owning a house at the north end of Parengarenga Harbour, a little south of Waikuku Beach and the cape. He was born there, crossing the harbour to go to school at Te Hapua. Only a couple of houses remained, and his was the only occupied one, New Zealand’s northernmost house.

  I asked about the light in Tom Bowling Bay. ‘There was once a community in Tom Bowling Bay,’ he said, ‘but it vanished a long time ago.’

  I asked other people. No house there, everyone said, and no light either. Who then owned that ghostly spark of light in the night?

  The map showed a road leading past Tom Bowling Bay and stopping above the Surville Cliffs. North Cape itself is a reserve, a forbidden zone. You must cross Maori land to reach Tom Bowling Bay, or Waikuku Flat. I asked the iwi, the Muriwhenua (North Cape) Incorporation, for permission to drive in and see for myself. No deal. The mystery remained unsolved.

  But that morning, when I awoke off Waikuku Beach, the world was a magical place where anything could happen. The sun shone on dunes a creamy white, housing the bones and artefacts of former residents. Wild horses galloped along Waikuku Beach. We were the only living creatures in our universe. North Cape was just a shape.

  3

  Raiding south

  Tuturau lies deep in the Southland green. It is more a name on a map than a settlement. You take a side road from Mataura to Wyndham. The road follows the Mataura River and about halfway along you pass Tuturau, if you’re alert.

  On a bare hill above the road, with a fine view over Southland’s lush land, a stone monument juts out from a scattering of te kouka, cabbage trees. The monument is a war memorial, like hundreds of others in towns and lonely places. It is a little different from the rest, however.

  The pillar was erected to mark the centennial of the ‘battle’ of Tuturau. The northern chief Te Puoho died here, at the end of the longest overland raid in New Zealand history. The raiders marched 1500 kilometres through dense bush and raging rivers, over mountain passes and impossible headlands. This wasn’t just a wild journey. It was an incredible one.

  At the end of it Te Puoho was killed. He died uselessly, in a doomed and futile quest. His death was so inconsequential that in the twenty-first century he might have been described as ‘collateral damage’.

  Ah, but his raid. That was different. It is his true memorial, an epic adventure ranging the length of the South Island. He hacked, scrambled and climbed his way through country seldom tracked then and still, the best part of two centuries later, unknown to many. There’s a reason for that. I set out to see just how formidable a journey it was, and was beaten to a standstill almost immediately.

  Te Puoho’s plan was simple. He intended to destroy an entire people, the South Island Ngai Tahu.

  Even then Ngai Tahu had been masters of Te Wai Pounamu, the South Island, for some eight centuries. They owned the gold standard of the time, pounamu, jade or greenstone. By the early nineteenth century they’d become successful traders with whalers too.

  Te Puoho planned to lead a taua, a war-party, from Golden Bay down the West Coast, through bush and over mountains, to attack Ngai Tahu settlements along the southern coast and their island strongholds in Foveaux Strait, then force-march the survivors back up the South Island’s east coast, mopping up other settlements as he went. He intended to enslave them all in a great pen he would build at Paturau, on the coast a little south of Farewell Spit.

  Te Puoho was a Ngati Tama chief. The Taranaki iwi were allies of Ngati Toa and enemies of Ngai Tahu. Te Puoho first ran his plan past his ally and de facto superior, Te Rauparaha.

  The Ngati Toa chief wasn’t sure it was a good idea. He’d beaten up the Ngai Tahu along the east coast of the South Island, taken their great pa at Kaiapoi then struck down the mighty Onawe fortress in Akaroa Harbour. But the southerners were regrouping, fighting back, and Te Rauparaha was too good at his work to underrate them.

  Perhaps he felt the Mordor-like eye of the Ngai Tahu chief Tuhawaiki on Ruapuke. Tuhawaiki was known among Pakeha as ‘Bloody Jack’, his reputation enhanced by the massacre of a sealing gang, the sealers killed and eaten.

  Ruapuke is a grim island in Foveaux Strait. Passengers on the Stewart Island ferry pass its dark bulk and might wonder if anyone ever lived there, for Ruapuke hunkers down in this fierce strait, fair square in the path of every storm. Yet Ngai Tahu still inhabit the island, depending on the season.

  At that time, 1836, Ruapuke was the de facto capital of the Ngai Tahu empire. Te Rauparaha’s raids had forced the Ngai Tahu power base southwards into Murihiku. Tuhawaiki’s power had grown with the shift, and some say it was he who’d grabbed Te Rauparaha at Lake Grassmere in Marlborough and forced him off the South Island. The Ngati Toa chief slipped out of his cloak and swam for his life.

  Now Tuhawaiki glared balefully north from his Ruapuke stronghold. Te Rauparaha could see the flaws in Te Puoho’s plan clearly enough. He knew that the Ngati Tama chief was committing the classic mistake of underestimating his enemy. Ngai Tahu would not be easy targets, he warned.

  Te Puoho disagreed. He took a Napoleonic view of his enemy: softies, he declared. Historians have dickered over the details, but he gathered around him a force of somewhere between fifty and one hundred warriors, and some women. From the perspective of the twenty-first century the notion of taking on an entire iwi with so small an army seems optimistic, even without taking into consideration the route they took.

  Historians have also differed over their path, but the scope of the journey is clear enough. In a sentence, they marched down the West Coast, over the Haast Pass through Otago and into Southland. That is talking the talk. Walking the walk was entirely different.

  This was New Zealand in the raw. If they were lucky there’d be a faint track through primeval forest, with its barbed entanglements of understorey. No bridges crossed what are still the roughest rivers in the land. They had no blankets, no food stores, no shoes, no shelter tents, parkas, no solace of any kind unless you count the mad ambition of their leader.

  Well, Te Puoho may have been a deluded tyrant, but no one can doubt his ability to forge his way and leap all hurdles in his path.

  I fell at the first of them.

  The route was easy enough at its beginning. The starting point, Puturau, where Te Puoho planned to set up his holding pens for captured slaves, lies high on the West Coast, a little south of Whanganui Inlet. Today you get there quite quickly, turning off the highway to Farewell Spit at Pakawau and driving over a low saddle. Already you are on the track Te Puoho probably used to reach the coast, for the road follows an old Maori trail.

  You reach a fork. One branch heads north, stopping short of Cape Farewell. The other turns south, clinging to the edge of Whanganui Inlet. The scene starts rearranging itself. You feel dislocated. This might be the twenty-first century, but it could as easily be one hundred years ago.

  The road is narrow, unsealed. The surroundings seem unfamiliar. Forest runs down to the inlet. It’s thick, and green, of the kind that if left to itself wants to be much thicker. The rata is bright red.

  Mangarakau appears, suddenly. Time goes into reverse. Going on two centuries ago this would have been a busy little town. Maori were already living here when the first Europeans arrived in the 1830s. The colonists mined coal, shipping it out through the nearby Whanganui Inlet, whose narrow entrances provided the only shelter on this part of the coast.

  Three decades
later the inlet accommodated coal mining, flax and timber milling. Gold was discovered. Mangarakau became a boom town: ships in the harbour, a tramway, shops, school, post office, farms. But eventually everything ran out, although sawmilling dragged on until 1968. Only the town hall remains, with a visitor centre and museum. The hulk of the scow Kohi, once one of a fleet of uniquely New Zealand craft designed for river bars and shallow harbours, still lies beside the old jetty.

  Te Atiawa groups allied to Ngati Tama had invaded this land, ensuring that Te Puoho would not have to fight his way south past hostile iwi. The terrain, however, remained implacable.

  The road runs from Mangarakau to Paturau, still following the old Maori trail. The centre of civilisation, once. A big Maori village stood here, supplying the hundreds of diggers who came after gold.

  The Maori trail ran onto the beach but the lonely road clings to slightly higher ground, growing ever more meagre.

  Now you’re in no doubt at all. This is another country. The Tasman roars on one side. Waves bash the coast. You can feel salt on your lips. The scrub tilts crazily, barbered by the fierce west wind. Limestone faces rise high.

  At the Anatori River, you stop. The road crosses the river, perhaps. You need a serious four-wheel drive. Even then it stalls four kilometres south, at the Turimawiwi River and its baches.

  Otherwise from here, you walk. As you look south along this lonely landscape, your heart drops another notch. You’re on your own here, in every sense. The first obstacle is the Anatori bluffs, and you have the drop on Te Puoho here, for the road bypasses them.

  You also have the tide tables, because the mouths of the Anaweka River and Big River are dangerous, safe to cross only at low tide, and that’s if the Tasman Sea is not wild — which is rather like hoping an elephant is not big. Beyond them are rock tablelands reaching into the sea.

  At the foot of Kahurangi Point lies a Department of Conservation hut first made from the old lighthouse keepers’ houses. You look around and think, Well, at least Te Puoho didn’t have to live here. Lighthouse keepers and their families did. Their lives were always dramatic. They relied on boats and packhorses to bring supplies, and schedules on this wild coast were erratic. Once, a spat with a landowner prevented supplies getting to the lighthouse at all, stranding a keeper’s wife in Collingwood until it was resolved.

  The 1929 Murchison earthquake smashed the keepers’ house altogether. James Mackay, the government agent infamous for his role in land purchases from Ngai Tahu (he did them far more damage than Te Puoho ever did) investigated this route as a possible bridle track linking Nelson to the West Coast goldfields. He reported, in 1860, that the coast from here to the Heaphy River was ‘a most frightful rocky and precipitous’ one which should be avoided by taking the track inland by the valleys of the Heaphy and Aorere rivers to Collingwood. That, of course, is the route now trodden by thousands on the Heaphy Track.

  Charles Heaphy and Thomas Brunner, the surveyors and explorers, came here, and bargained their right of way down the coast with Te Niho, one of Te Rauparaha’s chiefs, following Te Puoho’s tracks a decade or so later. They reported rocky beaches passable only at low water, and precipitous points ‘which had to be ascended by ropes of flax and supplejack’.

  Very little has changed. Golden Bay author Gerard Hindmarsh called it ‘the impassable coast’ in his book Kahurangi Calling, ‘an area so harsh and inaccessible it remains virtually untouched to this day’. He and three companions bashed their way along it, nevertheless, risking terrain that sometimes terrified them, and joined the select few who’d survived the journey.

  Everything I’d read about this coast, written by trampers more experienced and better equipped than I, came to me as I considered it. Hut book entries record: ‘Whatever you do, do not try to walk down this coast.’ ‘Karamea or bust, and I bust.’

  Perpendicular cliffs. Dense bush, all but impenetrable. Dangerous fords. Gales. Waves of Hokusai proportions. Vertiginous sense of unreality. Seals furious at intrusion. Rocks whose size is measured in storeys. Impracticable. Appalling. Terrifying. Exhausting. No sign of human life present or past. Most of all, beyond help. Many turned back. People who made the journey came out scratched, bruised and scared.

  I considered all of this. I was not Te Puoho, or Heaphy, or Brunner, or Mackay. I was a storyteller. Ahead lay thirty kilometres of the nastiest, bitiest (sandflies compete with seals for the honour), rockiest, riskiest, smelliest (seals), loneliest, wettest country in all New Zealand. Was I stupid enough? Well, yes, but not this time.

  I decided on a detour. I went back up the coast to my car and drove a giant loop through Golden Bay and over the Takaka Hill to Motueka, then down the Motueka River valley and over the Hope Saddle to the Buller and Murchison, then through the Buller Gorge to Westport and up to Karamea to rejoin Te Puoho’s path on the first part of the Heaphy Track, which was very beautiful and oh so civilised, even over the once-feared Kohaihai Bluff. It was the long way round but an easy one and it would have won Te Puoho’s vote as he bashed and crashed his way down the Kahurangi coast.

  My brother Neil knew that coast well. He’d worked in the environmental arm of what was then the Forest Service. He always looked to me as if he’d been made of rata vine himself. He could do the Heaphy Track in a day. One of his stories was about the wreck of the Marudai Maru No 2, a Japanese squid boat. She ran aground on the reef surrounding the Bluff. The crew was winched off and dropped at the Heaphy Hut among surprised trampers.

  Two Forest Service workers and one tramper claimed salvage rights and held off all comers for a couple of days, until the wreck became Crown property and was sold off. But a fair amount of the ship’s gear was circulating by then: my own memento of the wreck was a beautiful braided line which became my anchor warp for the next twenty years.

  Te Puoho must have felt pretty good as he emerged from that part of the coast and surveyed the territory ahead. Well, as good as a man might feel when his mission in life is to wipe out an entire people.

  The Heaphy Track stops at the Kohaihai River and a nice safe swing bridge takes you across to join the road. In the late nineteenth century, well after Te Puoho had been and gone, colonists contemplated a town here on the Kohaihai. The spot was surveyed, and a little map shows what was going to be what: a school here, cemetery there, roads throughout, even a zone for ‘landless natives’, possibly those robbed of their land by Mackay himself. It remained a paper town only, but who knows? Business interests have long lobbied for a road to run from here to Golden Bay, slicing through pristine bush and mountains.

  The Ngatirarua chief Niho rampaged down this coast in the early 1830s, capturing the Ngai Tahu chief Tuhuru and taking him back to Paturau where he was ransomed, the deal including his daughter’s marriage to Niho and the establishment of strongholds controlled by Niho at Mawhera (now Greymouth) and Hokitika. Te Puoho regarded him as an ally.

  A straight road runs along the coast to Karamea. The way south seems wonderfully clear after the thick bush of the Kahurangi coast. A microclimate warms the air. The taua must have revelled in it.

  Lone nikau now stand sentinel. Karamea lies amid its maze of estuaries and its leftover harbour, dried up by the 1929 earthquake. It was completely isolated for two years, because the road was cut too, and it has never shaken that feeling of loneliness. Southwards went the taua, on to Mawhera, along a route by and large followed by today’s highway for the same reason: it was the easiest way.

  A decade after Te Puoho passed this way Heaphy and Brunner crossed the trail of a war-party, almost certainly the Ngati Tama chief’s. They could not get past the Te Miko cliffs north of Punakaiki. A famous sketch by Heaphy shows Brunner at the 200-metre sheer bluff climbing a rata-and-vine ladder, ‘very shaky and rotten’, perhaps Te Puoho’s work, with their dog Rover and rifle being hauled by a flax rope.

  At Mawhera, Te Puoho got a shock. His putative ally Niho would not let him into the pa there, nor the one at Hokitika. No trace of either pa remains
now. The north side of the Hokitika entrance, the more likely site for a pa, is now taken up with mementoes of the old port which early Europeans built there.

  I walked down a track to the southern side of the entrance. It is a whitebaiters’ stronghold now, their palisades made of corrugated iron and plastic and wooden stakes, whatever materials are at hand. The first airline in New Zealand to fly scheduled air services was based at an aerodrome here. A memorial marks the spot, but Niho’s great enterprise has gone for good.

  Some of Niho’s men joined the taua, and with two young Ngai Tahu women to show him the way through the Alps, Te Puoho pressed on down the West Coast. Oh, the determination of the man.

  The coastline south of Hokitika is long and straight, until you reach the Wanganui River at least. Then it becomes cliffy, pierced by the vast rolling West Coast rivers that are still capable of sweeping away the best concrete and steel bridges engineers can devise.

  Te Puoho and his party crossed them all. His exact route has been lost in time, but he must have stuck to the coast as his main source of food. Past the Okarito lagoon where the kotuku breed, past the glaciers pouring icy water into the sea, the mountains squeezing the coast, their black-and-white hulks threatening, past Bruce Bay where Maui is said to have first landed at the end of his epic voyage, over the rocks and cliffs and points and bluffs until he reached the Haast River.

  Most agree that Te Puoho turned away from the coast here, pressing upriver to the Haast Pass, Tioripatea. That route climbs upwards, following the Haast River to the Pass. Even now the place is dangerous. Te Puoho would have followed the track used by the southern people for generations before the first Europeans came along, the Haast River a broad highway leading into mountains green and grim.