Islands of the Gulf

by Shirley Maddock

  Recently I had the chance to look through diaries kept by Sir George Grey’s long-serving estate carpenter, Thomas Osborne, who, during all that halcyon period, kept a meticulous daily record of weather, events and visitors to the island. He also kept a note of shipping that shows how extensive the Gulf’s merchant fleet was — steamers like Rose Casey, the Rotomahana and the Clansmen were evidently regular callers, as were scows and schooners such as the Spray, Saucy Kate, Rebel, Vixen, Perseverance and Tay. Nowadays, spruce tour boats, packed with trippers out for a day on an island, are the most frequent visitors. Sir George would have approved, for he was a most generous host and liked to see as many people as possible enjoying his gardens. Picnic parties used to come by the steamer load, some even bringing their own brass band, and a Kawau March, published in the eighties and dedicated to Grey, shows how numerous these jolly occasions were. His house, freed as it is now from the ugly additions made for the hotel dining room and bar, looks, I suspect, handsomer than ever it did. Gone, too, are the matchbox annexes of staff quarters and tourist flats, while the grounds, in Kawau’s balmy, sub-tropical climate, are in fine trim, much planting having been done and with more in progress.

  Inside the Mansion House are some of Grey’s own pictures, ornaments, books and furniture which have been variously acquired and returned to their original home. The fine Viennese chandelier in the drawing room opportunely came up at an auction, while a generous bequest from a Northland family brought a collection containing some of the most bizarre and fanciful late-Regency cabinetmaking imaginable. A giant four-poster bed with an elaborately carved wooden canopy is among the pieces, as is a gargantuan drawing-room suite of sofa and armchairs adorned with grimacing rosewood monkeys. But the cultured aura of a nineteenth-century gentleman’s house is most successfully invoked.

  The walks are one of the pleasanter amenities made by the Maritime Park. Broad, tree-shaded and carpeted with soft pine needles or springy grass, they offer restful saunters round the coastal perimeter or into the interior. The peaceful little island cemetery is reached by one track, while another follows the headlands down to Copper Mine Bay and benches are provided at tactful intervals for better enjoyment of the spectacular Gulf views. On your rambles you might encounter one of Kawau’s large-eyed, graceful wallabies or some alertly darting wekas, a flightless native rail. Peacocks add style and a period feeling to the Mansion House lawns — but watch where you sit because their droppings are everywhere. The peacocks expect to share your lunch and, while we were trying hard to eat ours, a woman nearby was beating off an importunate peahen with a cake-tin lid.

  Kawau, perhaps more than any other of the Gulf islands, is vastly changed from its primaeval state. The principal villains were fire, in pre-European and more recent times, wholesale logging of the bush and the voracious feeding habits of introduced animals. Grey himself, ardent horticulturalist as he was, radically altered the existing ecology both with his importation of foreign-born creatures and his lavish exotic plantings. Much damage was done, though, long before Kawau became his and the copper-miners can be allotted a share of the blame. They needed timber for their mining operations and their houses and, after mining had ceased and the men moved off to more profitable fields, they left behind cattle and pigs to roam wild. Osborne’s diary for the period in the 1860s, when Maori prisoners of war were brought here from the Waikato, complains about the ravages made by these free-ranging beasts. He mentions that the Maoris were not only permitted but actively encouraged to shoot as many as possible. Osborne himself was the owner of a formidable pig-dog called Tiger and found ample employment for him.

  These days the ubiquitous pine dominates the wooded areas and opossum and wallaby have gnawed coastal groves of pohutukawa down to the bone. The few surviving stands of kauri appear in good health, however, and show up much more conspicuously in higher reaches of the bush than was the case even fifteen years ago.

  A sense of leisured enjoyment, admired and written about by so many of the people who received Grey’s hospitality, has long been one of the outstanding features of Kawau and it is good to find that agreeable quality is still abundantly evident.

  * * *

  The further limits of the Gulf, unless you own a boat of sufficient size, are now only readily accessible by air. One recent morning, as I had done so often before, I waited at Auckland’s Mechanics Bay to climb aboard an amphibian and take off for Great Barrier Island. Here at the waterfront office there were changes too, since the gleeful regime of Captain Ladd; operations are conducted briskly and efficiently, with no time for whimsy, and the little signpost with the lowest finger pointing to “Anywhere” disappeared long ago. I did enjoy a notice on the counter, though, advising travellers that the Management expected any pets carried to be suitably confined and tranquillised for the trip.

  The half-hour flight, once the city, inner harbour and Rangitoto are left behind, presents a superb and all-embracing prospect of the Gulf. “Your islands are all still there!” my friendly neighbour shouted over the engine noise. Away to the east I glimpsed the Moko Hinaus and remembered visiting the three families who used to be required for the operation of the lighthouse. The beacon is automated now and the three spacious old houses, with their glossy taupata hedges, have been demolished. Briefly, Tiri Tiri Matangi was beneath us, then behind, the beautiful tower sheer and graceful as ever. Its great light is still tended by human hand and, since the island became part of the Maritime Park, its scope is being widened to that of sanctuary. The original bush cover, almost all gone, is to be augmented, as on Motutapu, with extensive planting in hopes of attracting birdlife. Rare species, such as the Little Spotted Kiwi, are to be liberated here, while a suitable spot on adjacent Wood Island has been chosen as a colony for tuatara lizards. Well-behaved visitors will be encouraged to come to Tiri, as they are to other Park territories, and, as rubbish disposal is always an awkwardness on islands, no bins will be provided — parties will be on their honour to carry their garbage home.

  Little Barrier, regretfully, I did not revisit, as bad weather prevented our landing and another opportunity did not occur. All the news from there is good, as the last feral cat was recently shot and has, I understand, been stuffed and mounted as a trophy. Poor pussy cat but fortunate stitchbirds. I remember fruitless hours spent scrambling about the wildwood in hopes of seeing one; now, minus felines, Little Barrier suits the breed so well that sightings are commonplace. Future conservationists may well face a situation, when hitherto endangered species reproduce with such prodigal vigour, that sanctuaries will be stacked shoulder to shoulder on every available branch with stitchbirds, their distinctive cries clearly audible in Auckland.

  That morning, as we flew northward, Little Barrier remained aloof and distant, while the long, mountainous form of Great Barrier lay directly ahead, looking as splendidly Gothic as ever.

  Our first touchdown was at Tryphena, where we discharged mail, cargo and half our passengers. Immediately apparent are all the holiday homes sprung up on the hillside behind the beach; an unsightly concrete-block edifice, containing shops and post office, was a less pleasing addition. The sand and the little pohutukawa-crowned bluffs, though, showed white as ever and the water as clear. The aircraft took off again, with its customary exhilarating splash, and made short work of the remaining stretch of coast between here and Port FitzRoy. The pilot did not choose to come in by way of the “back door” and whistle down the scary little enclave known as Ladd’s Canyon, but took, as I hoped he would, the grand entrance over a mosaic formed by multitudes of lesser islands. These guard the entrance to the long, sheltered sound which old Barrier-ites would always tell you was big enough and deep enough to accommodate the British Navy. Our own smaller New Zealand counterpart continues to hold regular exercises here and, at the summer-holiday peak, a thousand or more pleasure craft might be at anchor, but early March could only show a handful of yachts about its bays. At Port FitzRoy itself some fishing boats were moored, all floating fam
ily homes whose children are rowed ashore each morning to catch a Forestry vehicle that delivers them to Okiwi School.

  This is only one of the many facilities provided by the Forest Service, whose scope extends well beyond mere forest management. It is the main employer of labour, roading is a major responsibility undertaken and the Service, together with the elected island council, jointly see to the administration and execution of local affairs. Great Barrier is one of the few places in New Zealand to have a female county clerk and in recent years a small but purposeful group of women have been elected to council office. Like Waiheke, Great Barrier has declared itself a nuclear free zone and, while opinion was not unanimous, its citizens have also voted against long-abandoned mining operations being resumed.

  Difficulties spawned by remorselessly rising costs have hit Great Barrier harder, perhaps, than anywhere else in the Gulf and, with shipping shrunk almost to vanishing point, the amphibians are their most reliable link with the mainland, albeit a fairly costly one. Yet the last census in 1981 showed that inhabitants number almost twice as many as in the middle sixties. The two schools at Okiwi and Tryphena have been enlarged because of their augmented rolls and, in another parallel with Waiheke, many young people have arrived, looking for alternative ways of living. Some have succeeded in making a relatively productive life, some barely manage to exist, while others have packed up and gone. Barrier was never an easy place to earn a living and the Labour Department gives emphasis to this hard fact of life by refusing to register for dole payments unemployed persons resident here.

  Not all, perhaps, remember that when European settlers first came to Great Barrier survival meant self-reliance to a daunting degree. You were obliged to cook on a fire outside, because home was a flimsy, highly inflammable nikau whare, and you cooked what you had raised or caught. If you or your child were ill or injured you did your desperate best, although this often proved to be not nearly good enough. Now, when radio can summon helicopters in minutes to whisk you back to the workaday world, permanently avoiding the mainstream is harder than you think.

  On a quiet stretch of FitzRoy Harbour is the biggest and most successful self-contained colony, the Orama Community, founded in 1962 by a Hamilton couple called Neville and Dorothy Winger. To a picturesque old farmhouse and a clutch of cabins has been gradually added a complex of large modern buildings. Here live permanent residents and students, together with a shifting population of what are termed ‘Seekers’ who have come looking for solutions to problems and difficulties too much for them to handle in the world outside. Religious publishing and farming are two of the most productive activities in an orderly, well-disciplined routine of study, work and prayer. Well over a hundred people regard Orama as home and family groups contribute nearly fifty primary-age children to the school at Okiwi. Visitors are made most welcome, but there is a strong impression that this purposeful place prefers to follow its own well-plotted course outside the everyday run of island matters.

  Whaling cauldrons and brightly painted waggon wheels are still dotted about the grassy landing at FitzRoy, but the store has been enlarged and the vintage petrol pump, like a soda syphon, has been replaced by the modern variety. A small lock-up shed contains the local library, opened at stated times, and the post office and telephone exchange is adjacent to the store instead of being off the late Mrs Reg Cooper’s kitchen at Glenfern Boarding House. The fine grove of kauri growing beside the road at the top of the harbour is noticeably bigger and the signpost by the wharf, giving the distance as 50 km between here and Tryphena, is as telling a reminder as ever just how big Great Barrier is — more extensive than many a principality of old.

  Wolf Young, kindly and immensely capable, is the Chief Ranger of the Forest Service these days and he saw to it that I managed to cover as much ground on the island as possible in the few days which were all I had. At Katherine Bay, where descendants of the Barrier’s original people, the Ngatitai, hold ancestral lands, I found the quaint old house of Mr Toby Davies had gone, as had the kauri-shingled barn; but his nephew Gordon has built a comfortable home further up from the beach and two separate projects for building family maraes are well advanced.

  Activities at Barrier over the 150 or so years of European involvement have rarely profited the island and its inhabitants or left anything behind but scars. Kauri was felled here even as early as the closing years of the 18th century and, when milling finally ceased during the World War II, uncounted millions of feet of timber had been shipped out. Whaling was an industry just as prodigal of resources, until wholesale slaughter finally put an end to the trade. Similarly, mining flourished at various times, with copper extracted in the middle years of the 19th century and reasonable quantities of gold and silver produced later. Gumdigging was a fairly long-term business, too.

  With Wolf Young’s aid, we went looking, as before, at those places where men had toiled so hard, not always for much ultimate reward. Sailing round the northern coast to where the Wairarapa was wrecked in 1894, the bright blue cuprous-stained rocks and the tunnels laboriously hacked out of those fearsome cliffs are visible as ever. Oreville, once a township near White Cliffs in the interior lands of Barrier, was where thousands of ounces of gold and silver were brought out between the 1890s and the date in 1910 when operations petered out. In recent years, when general duties permit, Forestry parties have been clearing away the mantle of vines and scrub that has gradually covered over the huge Oreville battery, whose engulfed concrete ruins steeply descend the hillside in a series of broad levels. Viewed from below, the old battery most impressively suggests some Aztec or Inca pyramid freshly reclaimed from the jungle.

  On the high, exposed backbone of Great Barrier, we threaded the narrow path through Windy Canyon, an apt name; from this trail one can look across to country once richly clothed in kauri and other native bush, which suffered grievous damage from a great fire in the 1890s. The blaze started in a gumdiggers’ camp and smouldered intermittently for years after. Only now, nearly a century later, are there positive signs of the ruined forest regenerating.

  There are two heartening developments to report on the kauri. First, there are achievements in the nursery planted by the Forestry Service near the Kaiarara Stream. In its higher reaches stands the huge dam that we tramped to during our original islands’ brief. The dam, apart from a few big timber supports fallen, looks much as before, but in the nursery, where we filmed ‘youngling’ trees not much taller than a big man, those carefully nurtured specimens now attain between ten and thirteen metres in height and their slender trunks have thickened to a most impressive degree. Kauri in surviving stands of bush shows signs of growth almost as marked and many trees have matured spectacularly. However, this has not been achieved entirely without assistance, for Forestry workers ‘release’ selected trees by ringbarking lesser growth, such as manuka, which have protected the sapling when young but which must later perish to satisfy the kauri’s pressing appetite for light and space.

  A development in exotic planting is also in progress in a sheltered valley, where an ambitious horticultural project is coming to fruition. Murray Mabey, son of an established Island farming family and chairman of the County Council, has introduced plantings of Central American mountain fruits such as the babaco and peppino. He and his wife, Helen, have worked prodigiously to establish shelter belts, to fence, irrigate and prepare the way for row upon row of these lush tropical plants. They present a surprising picture in country more traditionally given to pastoral farming. The Mabeys have also developed an extensive propagating nursery and the large amount of skill and dedication they are bestowing on their scheme augurs a prosperous outcome.

  The Barrier needs such positive gestures.

  Long ago, a notable attempt at a shipbuilding industry was made when the Stirlingshire was built and launched at Nagle’s Cove in 1847. Four hundred tons, ribbed with pohutukawa, she was the first kauri-timbered ship to sail to England. A long, deep scarring near the beach still shows where her c
radle stood while she was under construction. Just off shore, on a tiny islet, is a lofty Norfolk pine planted to commemorate the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria, surely one of the furthest flung demonstrations of loyalty made to the imperial matriarch!

  When we headed for Nagle’s Cove in the Forestry launch, sea, sky and land lay quiet and perfect, their colours muted by the early light of an autumn morning. The gentle susurration of the wake and the engine’s steady beat were the only sounds and no one else seemed to be abroad as we came abreast of Wellington Head where, at the cliff’s edge, one can still see a little corrugated hut in which a solitary look-out man used to be lodged, spotting for whales. We had the ocean to ourselves, it seemed. Then in the distance we spied a sail, which presently revealed itself as a more extensive ketch rig, catching what little wind there was to help speed a big, handsome whaleboat. It was a sight totally unexpected and a thrilling vision from the past, as the long oars rose and fell in steady unison until they were abreast of us. It was no illusion though, for the whaleboat, with its spanking paint and gleaming brass, is a proud possession of the New Zealand Navy and the crew were midshipmen on a training exercise. They were soon gone as, with bare brown backs and muscular arms working, they sought to extend the distance between us. Oars slicing the lucent water, sun catching the bleached rock of cliff and headland and white sail crisp against the washed perfection of the sky, they presented a glimpse of piercing beauty such as Barrier will bestow from time to time and thus help one to understand why she has such power to enthral.

  If I were to write another book about the Gulf, inevitably it would be a vastly different one. When Don Whyte and I first began our Hauraki odyssey, I suspect my view of history was what a perceptive friend characterises as the “and then, and then” manner of looking at the past, when you see the reflections on the surface but do not look for the shadows underneath. In those days, too, I was able to talk to men and women born in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, who, like Uncle Ted Day, the Reg Coopers, Toby Davies and old Tom Dawn, were not only blessed with phenomenal memories, but were born raconteurs. Like the storytellers of old, you could sit with them, as I loved to do, while they yarned away about the old days, so perhaps a narrative approach, rather than one that analyses cause and effect, was a natural outcome.