Islands of the Gulf

by Shirley Maddock

  Twenty years earlier they would have found inhabitants there who were sorely in need of salvation. In the latter half of the 18th century the Ngatitai of Kawau enjoyed a reputation as lively as a nest of Barbary pirates. They had five thousand acres of hills and forest they could retreat to if they were invaded and from their lookouts on the high cliffs they could be ready to attack any passing canoe and leave their victim no time to escape. A small, especially delicate spotted shark teemed in these waters and many a fishing party chancing their luck with the Ngatitai found that they were the catch and not the shark. Kawau means sea bird, but the literal translation is cormorant or shag and I wonder if it were human cormorants the island was named for.

  In the early part of the 19th century a war party made up of Ngapuhi and other northern mainland tribes agreed to set aside their more intellectual differences in the common cause of subduing Kawau. In the resulting battle the pirates were destroyed, their women and children taken as slaves and the island struck into that solitude Marsden and Butler discovered when they camped there for the night.

  The landscape is one of low scrub-covered hills to the north and quite high and commanding cliffs in the south. Only a few stands of native bush have survived and the predominant tree is pine. The sand at Kawau is a deep bright yellow and the longest stretch of it is at Vivian Bay. Mansion House Bay is the best known (though the sand is shingle there) and the prettiest is Lady’s Bay, protected by steep banks of the same glowing yellow as the sand. Only about a hundred people live at Kawau all the year round. Many of them have retired from the mainland, the others run the shop and the post office, the boarding house and the hotel. In the summer the population rises sharply when all the beach cottages are opened and as well there are hundreds more who live in their boats, use Kawau for a base and are the most zealous off-shore citizens you could find.

  The last century or so of Kawau’s history divides into three distinct eras, the manganese and copper mining which began with colonial government in 1840 and then petered out in the early sixties, the island kingdom of Sir George Grey, when he made it a symbolic retreat from political life, and Kawau as it is now, a holiday place where no one comes to work or at least not very hard, an island whose proper function is to be visited and for pleasure.

  We are a nation conspicuously lacking in ruins. We have to dig for our shadowy aboriginal past and Historical Societies, now that New Zealand history is believed in and sought after, must strain at very few gnats when it comes to tangible relics of the halcyon time known as the Early Days. Kawau has two magnificent ruins, the smelting works and the engine house built a hundred and twenty years ago for the copper mines. When Mr Marsden and Mr Butler were touring the Hauraki Gulf, the heyday of the whaling and the timber trade was just beginning. The vast tracts of mainland not in bush were covered with fern and scrub, so farming did not attract the speculator anxious for a quick return, but there was always the chance in virgin country of striking gold and on Kawau it was second best, it was manganese and copper.

  Ships coming close in shore noticed that the rocks on the south coast were stained green at high water and they carried reports back to Sydney that the island might be rich in manganese. A man called Henry Taylor came over from Sydney in 1837 and negotiated with Pomare II, a Ngapuhi chief, for the sale of Kawau. A company was formed in Scotland — it was a very roundabout business — and in 1840 the mine was begun. Manganese was being worked at Waiheke and in other parts of the Gulf with moderate success. It was carried back to England as ballast until there were other more profitable cargoes to send home and manganese was no longer economic. When the copper seam on Kawau was discovered in 1841 the manganese was forgotten, and by 1845 about 400 people were living there, mainly Cornish miners and their wives and families.

  The seam they were tapping off South Head was rich, but the most workable ore had to be brought from under the sea and they drove three shafts at nine, eighteen and twenty-four fathoms. In spite of the danger and difficulties involved, the prospects were inviting enough for a second company to be formed in 1845. It was headed by Frederick Whitaker, an enterprising land speculator who did rather better in politics than he did with mining, twice holding office as premier and who was knighted by Queen Victoria. The original company were deeply hostile to the newcomers and refused to allow Whitaker’s miners to live on Kawau, so they had to camp on Motuketekete, an island a few miles south, and be ferried back and forth each day to the mines.

  1846 was the bumper year when twelve hundred tons were exported but the year after it slumped to a hundred and sixty-five. In 1848 the figures rose again but the dangers of mining under the sea, industrial disputes and continued flooding in the shafts set Kawau’s prospects toppling and after 1858 not much copper was worked. The miners drifted off to Great Barrier where fresh lodes had been discovered or to the more alluring goldfields of Australia and Otago and in 1862 the company was wound up, the machinery sold and only the ruins left as legacy.

  Long streaks of silver and green and turquoise have eaten into the rocks at South Head, pouring down towards the mine shaft to reflect in the dank surface of the pool at the entrance to it. Even the pebbles on the shore are stained an antique cuprous blue.

  On the point is the chimney and the stone keep of the engine-house. Wind and weather have gouged out the blocks, set them askew on their foundations and planted seedling trees on the top of the wall. You can sail quite close in shore to see it, but it looks best from the headland. The path begins as a road at Mansion House Bay and then, when it forks, narrows down to an earthen track that wanders through the pines and loses itself in the ti-tree. There are no sheep or cattle here, no rabbit burrows in the clay banks, only wallaby droppings on the ground, but as wallabies prefer to wander at night you would be lucky to catch one by daylight. If you sit on the last headland, opposite on the further point you see the romantic little ruin, like a Rhenish castle or some fanciful and long forgotten folly.

  * * *

  There are few pleasanter early morning sounds than the gentle slop of calm water on the hull of an anchored boat, or pleasanter sensations than to lie half awake swaying like a bird on a bough, listening to the sea and knowing even with your eyes closed that the sun is shining. Fine mornings in the summer of 1965 were too rare to be missed and on this one we were sailing in a ketch called Starita, having spent the night in Bon Accord harbour. Not far from where we lay was Kawau’s other ruin, the remains of the smelting house. It extends fifty feet or more and the architect, who must have been of an ecclesiastical turn, designed the windows in vaulted Gothic so that in decay the roofless smelting house looks like the ruins of a monastery, waist-high with dock and sorrel and white and yellow clumps of dog daisy.

  The miners called it Swansea Bay, but now it is better known as Lidgard’s because of the noted boat-building family who live there. Their pretty two-storeyed house and their huge boatshed are only a hundred yards from the gaping archways of the smelter. Their lawns and gardens run down to the water and we tied up at their jetty. It was plain that this was no ordinary morning. Women were coming and going with covered dishes and plates; they had hats on and gloves, which is not the usual custom for Saturday, and there were several knots of lounge-suited men standing in that rather lost way men have when they can’t mow the lawn or take out the boat or clean the car, because they’ve just Got Dressed. Mrs Lidgard looked out to say good morning and, before I had a chance to explain who I was and ask if we could take a photograph of the ruin, she exclaimed “I was hoping you’d come.” A mixed advantage of working in television is that for good or ill your face has gone before you, so I said “That’s nice.”

  “We’re having a wedding here this morning and there’s no one to take any pictures.”

  Don volunteered to put that right. Mrs Lidgard said we could help ourselves to the smelter and she hurried off to complete her preparations for the wedding. When we had explored the ruin we sat in the sun to wait for the bride.

 
Her name was Pamela Diment and she lived on the other side of the harbour; her fiance, Stanley Torkington, came of a pioneer family from Ti Point on the mainland opposite and the bridesmaid was his sister Marie. We could see the bride in an upper room and the flutter of her veil as someone lifted it up and rearranged it. Her bouquet was on the windowsill.

  Two little dachshunds larked about on the grass, more guests arrived in a sturdy old launch with a red and black funnel, a kingfisher sat on the grape arbour then streaked off in a gleam of blue and I noticed the coral amaryllis grew in the Lidgards’ garden too. The wedding was to be held in the Warkworth Yacht Club, as Kawau has no church, and it is built so close to the water it might almost be a ship itself. The walls were hung with huge old photographs of famous yachts and sailing ships and the ladies had arranged late summer riots of dahlia and michaelmas daisy and fern fronds from the bush. I wondered where the bridegroom had been hidden until it was time for Lohengrin on the cottage piano.

  The bride was very young and fair, in a short, stiffened bell of lace and satin, her bridesmaid in tearose. They posed beneath the grape arbour, by the sea wall, and then in modest procession walked slowly round the point, flanked by old gnarled trees and tall dark lances of flax in bloom.

  The guests chattered comfortably on the grass when the service and reception were over, waiting for the bride and groom to leave, not by boat but by amphibian. The bride had changed into her travelling dress and she and her husband sat a little apart from the others, with their brand new luggage piled at their feet and not much conversation. Then the throb of an engine came closer and closer as an aircraft sliced across the bay and clambered up on the beach. The pilot was Bruce Packer, second in command to Captain Ladd.

  “Mr and Mrs Torkington about?” he enquired. “I hope we’re not late.”

  “Your carriage, Ma’am,” he said and gallantly handed the bride aboard. The guests bobbed about, the air bubbled with laughter, advice and good wishes, and confetti was mixed with the sand.

  * * *

  At low tide, Bon Accord shrinks down to a broad, sandy-shouldered river. The shoreline threads a string of little bays with a house or two and a wharf at the bottom of the garden. There was one large old house with odd stamp-shaped skylights on the roof like little hatches lifted up. This was a school once when enough children were living on the island to need one.

  The morning after the wedding, the sky was a shadowless canopy of pale, unrelenting grey. The gunmetal sea slithered round the boat and had no more ripples on it than a jug of milk. The morning had a very solitary feeling to it. We hauled up anchor and crept round the point, no one moving but us and one small yacht at the mouth of the harbour, its sail slumped in the windless calm.

  We began to feel as if no one would ever raise his voice again. Then a harsh chattering cry ripped the quiet to pieces. A kookaburra had woken up. Then a child hung out of a window and called to someone, a man pulled a dinghy down to the beach yawning as he went, a girl pegged washing on the line and a voice announced that breakfast was ready even if nobody else was. It was like the curtain going up on a play.

  At the wedding we had been invited to call at the Comettis’ bay. Mr Cometti is the president of the Kawau Residents’ Association and the commodore of the Yacht Club. Their house, oiled timber with much glass and a big patio, has a colonial simplicity that goes well with the bushy hill behind and the sea that at high tide almost reaches their lawn. At one side of the garden they have dammed a stream and made a lake, with a dappled yellow iris growing at the verge and in the centre a pohutukawa, quite dead, its whitened spread of naked branches reflected like antlers in the bronze water of the lake.

  The Comettis raise Monstera deliciosa for house plants and make hanging baskets for ferns and flowers from woven ti-tree. Mr Cometti showed me a little magazine that was printed on the island before the last war. It was called the Kookaburra, “being most about Hauraki’s Gem”; it cost fourpence and this edition was dated July 2nd, 1934. Its news had gone a little stale after thirty years (the lead story reported 50 per cent of Auckland’s firewood was cut on Kawau). It had a “Kiddies’ Corner”, the Social Notes described a card and dancing party held to raise funds to build a schoolhouse and it mentioned a production of Macbeth an amateur company was to give in the Cathedral Grove at Bon Accord Harbour. The Reverend Jasper Calder, the City Missioner, was to play Macbeth and the actor who took Banquo was a man six and a half feet tall. The grove is halfway up a not very high hill behind the Comettis’ garden. It must be a hundred feet long and almost as wide; the walls are tight drawn ranks of puriri and karaka, their trunks bent a little in age and so close the branches spread and densely tangle at the crown, leaving only chinks for the sky. It may have been tapu ground in the old Maori time. The leaf-strewn ground was quite bare of undergrowth, and the acoustic was clear and ringing with not a trace of echo. I should like to have seen Macbeth played in that “rooky wood” and heard him cry out “Never shake thy gory locks at me,” to the towering ghost of Banquo.

  We heard no other bird but the kookaburra that quiet morning. It started to rain and the drops seethed down the leaves of the karakas and on to the mulch below.

  We were to sail round to Mansion House Bay and, before we left, Mr Cometti showed us an engraving taken from a painting of the bay made in 1845. The beginnings of the Mansion were there in the plain-faced, two-storeyed house built for the copper mine manager and there was a paragraph with it from a London newspaper.

  THE ISLAND OF KAWAN

  HOURAKA GULF (sic)

  “There is very little doubt that in a few years’ time this beautiful island will form a most favourable resort. In consequence of the recent establishment of steam communication between Australia and New Zealand, there are already flocking to this country the merchant, the government official and even the Valetudinarian from India.”

  I do not know if the island were besieged with valetudinarians from India but you knew them, I expect, by their yellow complexions and an unreasonable fondness for chutneys. Kawau’s most illustrious resident was called Grey.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Kawau Continued

  Sir George Grey has a statue in Albert Park, his books and manuscripts are the most important single collection in the Auckland Public Library and he has been long enough dead for the political conflicts of his day to be forgotten. In his house, an hotel now, and in the remnants of his gardens, his quality and presence have not been much diminished by time, or even by writers of tourist pamphlets who try to make him into a ghostly master of the revels at Mansion House Bay. He bought the island in 1862 for £3,500, greatly enlarged the copper mine manager’s house built twenty years before and planted the seventeen acres surrounding it with a prodigal catalogue of exotic trees and plants. He started a menagerie, stocked the bush with deer and wallaby, set peacocks strutting on the lawns, monkeys chattering in the branches of the trees and his only failure was a pair of zebras he brought from Africa to draw a little carriage and which did not long survive the change of climate.

  Grey was governor from 1845 to 1853, again from 1861 to 1867 and in 1877 began two not very successful years as a Liberal premier. He was both idealist and imperialist who saw the colonies as the best cure for the poverty and injustices of the old world. He loved the Common People in a paternal and aristocratic way, though he would never have invited one of Them to dinner, and his concern for their welfare alienated him from many of his own class. When Grey began his second term as governor in 1861, the colony’s fortunes were very mixed. Otago was the most prosperous province with the splendours of the gold rush beginning, Canterbury had sheep and wheat, but Auckland, as well as having lost its status as the capital to Wellington, had no immediate prospects but the bitter wars in the Waikato.

  To the Maori the wars expressed his deep attachment to his lands and the agony of losing them; the colonists saw them in simpler terms, as a job for professional soldiers whose duty it was to protect them and their farms fro
m savages. The British Government very soon came around to the view that the whole business in New Zealand was a bore and a terrible waste of their money, but for Grey the wars were political disaster.

  He was a high-handed governor who quarrelled so bitterly with General Cameron, commander of the British forces, that they did not speak and communicated only in the most official memoranda. Nor was he inclined to wait for Colonial Office instructions before he acted, which was not unreasonable since their instructions were usually three months old before they arrived.

  In 1863 the British defeated the Waikatos at Rangiriri and the prisoners from the battle were brought to Auckland, among them the little group who were settled at Rakino. A much larger number were confined in hulks in the Auckland harbour and in August 1864 the Marion was towed up to Sir George’s island and anchored in Bon Accord harbour. A minister called Mr Ashwell looked after the prisoners’ spiritual welfare and an unnamed doctor saw to their physical needs. His daily records are part of the lengthy reports on the Waikato Wars in the Appendices to the House of Representatives’ Journal. The commonest complaints in his patients were diarrhoea, sore eyes and sore throats and Haki Haki or the Itch. He also reported cases of worms, debility and scrofula.

  “The decks leak very bad and make the prisoners uncomfortable. The carpenter promised to stop it and has not done so.”

  “Hami Te Kome Kome is given wine and beef tea continually and rallies a little.” Then, a few days later, “Prisoners taken ashore and allowed to run about and enjoy themselves.”