Islands of the Gulf

by Shirley Maddock

  In 1857 a Brigantine called the Spray, jointly commanded by Captains Duncan and Angus Matheson, landed here bringing fourteen families from Nova Scotia. The Mathesons established a shipbuilding yard and launched some of the best known schooners and cutters in the Gulf.

  But this time I was not on holiday at Matheson Bay and I stayed on the bus as it pulled out from the stop, left the brief strip of asphalt behind and gulped down its last speck of dust before the journey ended at Leigh.

  The village of Leigh is scattered about the cliff top. Up the road from the post office is an austere little white church looking out to sea and further up the road again is the fish factory and Wyatt’s sawmill. The port is at the bottom of the hill, closely locked in land, with only a narrow passage to the sea. Crayfish and snapper form the main catch here and the tourist trade grows a little more each summer. Leigh is subdividing some of the coastal land, with beach frontages and old pohutukawa strong selling points. Early in the morning, as I walked down to the harbour, a fishing boat was bringing the catch ashore and someone dangled a line from the wharf. If the tide is not too full, you can walk round to the other side and then further round the cliffs to the Maori cemetery. Chief Tenetahi and his wife Rahui are buried here. I had seen a picture of them once when they were old, two tall figures with the kiwi feather mats of their rank about their shoulders. Tenetahi was one of the mainland Maoris who helped the Waikato prisoners escape from Kawau and Rahui was a daughter of Te Kiri the Ngatitai chieftain who had owned all the land round Leigh and Omaha. They and others of their kinsmen had also owned Little Barrier Island before the government made it a sanctuary.

  The sun had burnt the early morning mist off the sea and Little Barrier loomed very close and blue. I went back to the hotel for breakfast.

  At nine o’clock Mrs Sandy Matheson called for me, to come for a drive and then go home to read her grandfather’s diary.

  “It isn’t so difficult to sort out a district if you live in it. You don’t have to work out who are cousins and double cousins and who was twice a Torkington or once a Matheson or whose mother was a Greenwood or a Wyatt, because you know.”

  Mrs Matheson, I discovered, was aunt to the bridegroom we saw married at Kawau.

  “It was my nephew Stanley” she explained, when we set off. “I always like to take people on a particular drive, but it’ll have to be the Abridged Version this morning so you can see the diaries.”

  We ran down to Matheson Bay and read the inscription on the memorial to the people who came on the Spray. “107 tons, that’s all she was. Well” said Mrs Matheson, “if they didn’t all know each other when they left, they certainly would by the time they arrived.”

  We drove down to Ti Point and walked along a narrow, root-ribbed path to a grassy coppice at the end of it. The tide was full in and the air smelled drowned in salt.

  “Smell that,” she commanded. “That’s what I call sea air!”

  Mrs Matheson’s maternal grandfather was called Charles Septimus Clarke. He landed in New Zealand on the day of his 20th birthday, 15th August, 1863. On the Queen of Beauty he made friends with some fellow passengers whose name was Wyatt. They settled at Leigh, too, and later on Charles married their only daughter.

  When we went back to Mrs Matheson’s house she brought out a stack of black covered notebooks.

  “The settler’s worst enemy”, wrote young Charles Septimus, “is mud. Nothing is more calculated to invigorate one’s mind and raise one’s spirits than fine weather, and nothing on the other hand tends to depress them more than a dark and raining day.”

  He wrote how funds had been raised to buy a harmonium for the church services they held in one another’s houses and recorded the launching of the first vessel built at Leigh.

  “The vessel on the flat was launched today. Mrs McKenzie of the Waipu christened her the Banshee.”

  Then when the Flying Cloud was finished, a free passage was offered on the schooner to all who liked to go on the maiden trip to Auckland.

  Charles stayed behind and reflected on the silence now the boat-builders had gone. “The beauty of the morning struck to my heart. Even the cattle seemed to feed with quietness and tincle their bells less violently.”

  “Tincle” has a gentler sound than “tinkle”, I felt.

  He was a great one for resolutions and solemn reflections, for which I suppose he had plenty of time while he hoed the turnips.

  January 1, 1865. “I have been in Omaha for little more than a year, I hope I may be more diligent this year and show more sign of cultivation. Substituting flourishing crops for the primaeval forest is my intention and with the blessing of God I propose to accomplish it.”

  On his birthday in August of the same year. “I am now 22 years old, the thought of which does not give me great pleasure. I think a person should feel remorse on one’s birthday, another year is gone by and one is a year nearer the grave. I trust that God will assist me to pass the next year more profitably and that as I grow in years I may grow in grace.”

  Then he cheers up a bit and remarks that he went to the Wyatts for supper and had a jolly evening.

  He records very little news from the outside world, probably because they had so little and what you did each day seemed more important — that the old chief, Te Kiri, had invoked the Treaty of Waitangi and chased you off his fishing grounds, what you planted, how many pigeons you shot. Then, one day, he described how he went over to see Mrs Anderson who had brought him two pounds of tea from Auckland.

  “I went over to fetch it in the morning and to hear the news. The principal news was the assassination of President Lincoln while at the Opera. The chief English news is that England and France are to enter an alliance to defend Canada and Mexico.

  “I went home and began to make a little house for the ducks.”

  * * *

  Charles Septimus and the Wyatts had a brush with the American Civil War on the way to New Zealand when they were challenged by the Confederate gunboat Alabama. Captain Eddie Wyatt told me the story.

  “They were playing cards in the saloon and the Alabama pµt three shots across their bows. The Queen of Beauty hove to and the second lieutenant of the Alabama came aboard. When he was satisfied she was a British ship, the captain ordered out the grog and there were no hard feelings. The Alabama had been at sea for months and the Confederate officer asked what was the news, so they gave him what papers they had on board, wished each other the best of luck and the Queen of Beauty continued her journey.”

  The Wyatts live not far up the road from their sawmill. Mrs Wyatt was born here too and they have both lived all their lives in Leigh except when Captain Wyatt went to the 1914 war.

  “Part of this house was the one that Charles Clarke built when he married Mary Anne Wyatt. It was further up the hill and they moved it down here.”

  “They were always moving buildings” said Mrs Wyatt. “Churches, halls, houses — if a site didn’t suit them, they hitched up to a bullock team and away it went.”

  “We used to have great picnics over at Whangateau on Boxing Day and New Year.

  “We’d join all the tablecloths together and make a great long spread, and you never ate out of your own basket. It had to be other people’s food and it always seemed to be fine.”

  “I don’t know” said Captain Wyatt. “You live in a place, the days go by, and you don’t seem to notice they’re slipping into years.”

  * * *

  Beyond Leigh the road starts a slow climb until it reaches the top of Pakiri Hill. The gate to Dovedale is just over the brow and it is hard attending to the drive down to the farm when the ocean draws before you an immense and infinite half circle adorned with the lonely peaks of the Barriers, the Hen and Chickens and the Poor Knights. The farmhouse sits in a hollow not far from the cliff, with a landing strip in front of it for the aerial top-dressing planes. A Lancashire man called William Greenwood built Dovedale. He came out in the Blue-jacket at much the same time as the Wyatts and Ch
arles Clarke and the Mathesons. The house was timbered from kauri felled and pitsawn on the place and the planks were dressed by lamplight so that nothing of the day was wasted. Another William Greenwood, grandson to the first, lives here now and his wife is a granddaughter of Captain Angus Matheson.

  We sat down round a big table. Some relatives were visiting, their baby crawling companionably about our feet, clutching an arrowroot biscuit, and while Mrs Greenwood poured the tea she and her husband tried to decide what were the main differences between the present time and when they were young.

  “We didn’t top-dress with aeroplanes — Grandpa Greenwood would get a shock to see an airstrip in front of Dovedale and flying machines spilling super all over the paddocks.”

  “And the shipping’s gone from the coast. You always went to town by boat. Wednesday was boat day, eight pairs of waggons went over from Pakiri sending wool down to Auckland, or dressed pigs, whatever had to go.”

  “Then at a quarter past three every Sunday you could set your watch by the Manaia on her way to Whangarei.”

  People on the coast and in the Gulf talk about the shipping and recall the names, like the Kawau and the Clansmen and the Kapanui, as if they were old friends. You went everywhere by ship; to weddings, to the dentist, to dances in woolsheds and halls with fiddles and accordions providing the music.

  “My trousseau came round by water” Mrs Greenwood remarked. “Then they brought it up from the beach in a bullock waggon. It wasn’t the dark ages either, it was just after the First War.”

  “One thing that’s different is wages” and Mr Greenwood showed me the cashbook his father had kept, noting what money he had received or paid.

  (shillings)

  Taking turkeys to Omaha 4.00

  2 days dipping 10.00

  killing pigs 4.00

  tailing lambs 5.00

  2 days shearing 12.00

  He paid his nephew Henry six shillings a week, with board, and after six months he raised it to eight shillings. On the back page he gave a drastic sounding recipe:

  A DRENCH FOR COWS

  Boil hops and box leaves in 2 separate bags in 6 gallons of water for two hours. Strain from bags then add cream of tartar, then saltpetre and salt. Then ground ginger, sulphur and blasting powder [the italics are mine]. Stir in slowly to avoid lumps. Then camphor dissolved in turpentine. Then sulphate of iron. And last gentian root, and while boiling hot put in drums and cork. Will keep for any length of time.

  I hope they stored it well away from the whisky still, or someone might have made a dreadful mistake.

  The Greenwoods have no children. A nephew, Peter Greenwood, works for his uncle and he and his fiancée, Alison, walked with me to the airstrip on the top of the cliff. They were to be married soon and would live at Dovedale.

  “If I’m not around” Alison remarked, “the family always know to look for me here. Uncle Willy says I won’t like it so much in the winter storms, but I shall.”

  And the next mistress of Dovedale looked at the house resting serenely in the hollow and the plumb line of beach set against the ocean.

  * * *

  It was hot down in the valley, the plunging hillsides shimmered with heat and sheep drowsed in the scanty shade of cabbage trees.

  I stopped at the store to ask the way to Sam Brown’s house. There was a handsome old silver cup in the window engraved “Pakiri Cricket Club”, a handwritten notice about a flower show and the letter box had V.R. on it.

  “The post office has been in the valley for a hundred years” the storekeeper told me, “but the first we knew about it was when someone wrote up from the South Island and asked could we postmark a letter for them on the day. People here didn’t bother too much about a centenary; there isn’t enough of us really. We’ll just wait for the next time round.”

  “We heard you were coming up this way” said the storekeeper’s wife. “We get the news on the television all right, but we never need anything like that for what’s going on in the district.”

  They directed me to Mr Brown’s house and suggested I should call on Mrs Gravatt.

  “She’s lived at Pakiri all her life, and she was born over on Little Barrier. There’s not many who can claim that one.”

  If you do not know the islands, this might not sound very remarkable because then you would not know that Little Barrier has been a sanctuary since 1894 and that the only human inhabitants are the ranger and his family.

  “My family weren’t exactly living there” Mrs Gravatt explained. “They had a place here in the valley. It was before the government bought the island and Dad was working in the bush with Tenetahi (that’s Sam’s grandfather) and Mum went over to see him. I must have come a bit before she expected so that’s why I was born on Little Barrier.”

  Mrs Gravatt was short and a little stout and from her features I thought she was partly Maori. “We were a bit of a mixture” she went on. “My father was a Swede called Biorklund, and my grandmother was part Fijian. They used to call her Black Kitty. Red Kenneth McKenzie brought her down from the Islands. People said he used to do a bit of blackbirding up there. He was the first man in Leigh to have a horse and like a lot of them he had his whisky still up in the hills.

  “I don’t have many people asking me about the valley in the old days.” And she paused comfortably. “I have never lived anywhere else. I went to the school you must have passed coming down the road, and there were a lot more children at it in my day. I suppose we had bigger families and some of the gumdiggers down on the flat had children. A lot of them were Austrians.

  “I was just thinking about it the other day. There was a sawmill down by the creek and further down still the gumstore. My dad used to take me there when I was a little thing. I remember seeing bedroom jugs with roses on and hats for a shilling. The Maoris plaited them, and they had wide brims and a shallow crown like a curate’s. ‘Gee-gee Hats’ they called them. I used to buy a ha’penny bag of pink conversation lollies. I remember the smell of the place, the floor all sandy, the lollies in my hand and the dust and all the heaps of gum.”

  * * *

  The families I had met up to now could look back not much more than a century in their own and their grandparents’ recollections. Sam Brown, or, in Maori, Te Kiri Paraone, and his people have been here much longer. His great grandfather, Te Kiri, was chief of the Ngatitai and owned all the land round Leigh and Omaha and Whangateau. His grandparents, Rahui and Tenetahi, and their kinsfolk were the last owners of Little Barrier and the last Maori people to live there.

  Sam was a tall, sparely-built man, with a thin high-bridged nose. He must have seen our dust cloud from the other side of the valley as he was waiting at the gate.

  “Tea” said Mrs Brown and as we sat down I tried to count how many tables I had put my feet under this summer. Mrs Brown was calm and plump and restfully sliced bread, buttered scones and opened a pot of jam.

  Sam Brown was a sort of stepping stone back to the Gulf. His people were as much of the islands as they were of the mainland and, though he has almost as much pakeha blood as he does Maori, his feelings of race go very deep.

  He talked about Tenetahi and his racing cutter, the Rangatira, many times champion of the Auckland Regatta, and about Rahui, who was a powerful swimmer and once saved her husband’s life in a terrible storm when the cutter was nearly wrecked.

  “There used to be charcoal burners on the flat” he told me. “A little boat used to come up the river at high tide to gather up the charcoal. Pakiri must have been a huge settlement once, before Hongi’s wars, two hundred years ago perhaps. They had their kumara gardens here. I’ve been ploughing and found axes and flints and meres all round here.

  “There’s an old Pakiri story that the first Maoris to come here arrived when the pohutukawa was in blossom and they had never seen the flowers before. They had the red-tipped wing feather of the amokura in their hair and, when they saw the pohutukawa, they threw their feathers away. Then the flowers faded and thei
r feathers were lost.

  “Most of these stories are so old that most of us have forgotten them, just like the young ones can’t speak Maori.”

  I asked if anyone had ever lived on the Poor Knights and the Hen and Chicks.

  “People lived there once; the old terraces and walls are there and fishing parties would stop to rest. Sometimes a man of the tribe on whom the mana had fallen — you understand, the power, the dignity — he would go off to the islands and stay in one of the caves, perhaps on Tawhiti Rahi, that’s the largest of them. Then when he came out of the dark into the daylight again, the mana filled his mind and he knew everything about his tribe right back to the beginning of things.”

  And he shook his head at the folly of trying to explain what cannot be explained.

  “We’re getting too deep” said his wife and filled the cups. “We saw those island programmes on the television” and I noticed a set in the corner, a cloth over the blank eye of the screen.

  “You met my Uncle Toby down at Great Barrier” Sam continued.

  Uncle Toby is “uncle” to most of the Gulf. We meet him later on at Katherine Bay on the Barrier and at Flat Island.

  “He’s a pretty old man now, but he looked all right on the television. You want to ask him about the old days. He lived in them!”

  They came down to say goodbye at the gate.

  “Come and see us again and go down and look at the beach before you go home to start the book!”

  The road to the beach is on the other side of the river. You go through a gate, rattle over a cattle stop and drive for a mile or so through paddocks, past mooning cows, up to their chins in cocksfoot, and a pair of grey donkeys in a corner on their own, rubbing their flanks on the fence. The entrance to the beach is guarded with sandhills, laced with marram grass and with a bent file of pohutukawa on top of them, the life almost beaten out of their twisted trunks by the winds of centuries. A speckled rooster and his cackling wives foraged in the buffalo grass and lupins at the foot of the dunes.