Islands of the Gulf

by Shirley Maddock

  The schoolbell hangs there and Anne gave it a hearty peal at nine o’clock when the children begin their lessons. The ring round the moon had brought no rain, so Lisa did her spelling exercises on a little blackboard in the garden while Gina was sketching the old trees on the beach. David was at work indoors on a physics paper, Susan had spread her assignment on the kitchen table and Anne was making the daily batch of two loaves of bread. Making bread in itself is a simple enough business, but for most people it has become an archaism. The only bread they know is limp, emasculated, the soggy wrapping round their lunchtime sandwich, and they may never have smelled the incomparable fragrance of bread freshly taken from the oven.

  At noon, by the time the bread was cooling, Susan and Lisa were packing the morning’s work in the same green canvas covers I had seen Rosemary fasten down at Rakino. As the tide was high, it was time to swim. At low tide you run the risk of meeting a stingray lurking in the kelp. The Blanshard children sprinted over the boulders while others, less nimble, limped along behind, but it was splendid once you arrived in the water. Even on a calm day the surge of the ocean is powerful; you feel completely at its mercy to be set down and caught up, then squashed on the boulders in a high-handed bruising way.

  On the last afternoon we all set off to walk round the shore, not too far because the sun was hot and there was time just to sit and look. We tramped across the flat, sixty acres fenced off in a deep L shape, where the small flock of sheep share the grazing with a few head of cattle. The sheep are all Cheviots with the slender legs and aquiline faces of the breed, not like the square-jowled Romney-Southdown you find on most of the islands. The Blanshards keep enough cows to furnish their milk and butter and Little Barrier cream is of a singular richness and flavour. They have a brindle bull called Beast and inevitably his sister is named Beauty.

  Where the land starts to rise a little there is a straggle of tall manuka trees. When the summer is over, the wood pigeons come down here to fossick for their favourite white clover. About seven or eight pigeons were gathered in a corner, each one pecking diligently and stretching a leg from time to time in its elegant fall of feather pantaloon. The Maori name for the wood pigeon is kereru, after the sound the muffled stroke of its wings makes in flight. These birds were much prized as game by the Maoris and the European settlers and at one time they were threatened with extinction, but they are protected now with heavy penalties of the law. They perched in the manuka, along the fence and preened their fine round breasts which with their charming shoulder-strapped design look as if they had all just put on clean cream pinafores.

  A tall poplar, its light green dipped in autumn, looked foreign and out of place against the unchanging sage of the manuka. It was planted in memory of a curator who died at Little Barrier and was buried not far away on top of a little hillock. He and his wife came to the island in 1910 and not many months after he fell ill and died. His wife, who was left quite alone, made a grave and then waited until help should come in answer to the fires she lit along the shore.

  The wooden cross, painted white, records his name, Robert Hunter-Blair, that he was fifty-seven and a native of Ayrshire in Scotland. His grave is a long way from the Lowlands but you could not wish for a more peaceful one.

  All the wild vegetables, which Cook prized so much as an insurance against scurvy, grow on Little Barrier and the children and I went hunting them along the boulder beach. They have the biggest grains of sand in the world, they told me, as I imagine they tell all their visitors, and they leapt like antelopes from grain to grain while I scrambled on behind. We found the spinach first, creeping over the stones like ivy, thick dark leaves covered with fine down. It tasted bitter, as cultivated spinach does if you leave it to come up to seed. The celery grew close by; its stalks were greenish and thin and, like the spinach, it smelled of its garden-raised cousin, only harsher and more rank.

  Cook was a tyrant when it came to his crew eating what he knew to be good for them. He flogged a man once for refusing his meat ration. His diary records how bountiful the east coast of New Zealand was as a kitchen garden. On 28th October, 1769, he wrote “Some hands were employed in the picking of wild sellery (sic) and other green stuff which is here in great plenty. I have caused it to be boiled with portable soup and oatmeal every morning for the people’s breakfast and I look upon it as very wholesome and a great antiscorbutic.”

  His people’s comments on their wholesome breakfast have not been preserved.

  The cliffs of Little Barrier are slashed with deep enclaves and gullies. You find no proper streams on the island. They are a jumbled mass of mossy rocks and boulders, damp all year round, but only in winter during the heavy rain do they flood into a brief existence and then ooze back into the earth again. One such is Parihakoakoa. Its echoing length invokes the legend come down from Toi that Hauturu belonged to the Patu-Pai-Arehe and that, on misty days and at night, the fairies crept down through the forest and leaf-strewn gullies like this to cast their nets along the shore. You could not smell the sea even though it was only a few yards off, only the seeping earth of the banks studded with boulders and festooned with dense tangles of roots and creeper.

  That night we had to go back to Auckland. D’Arcy O’Brien, the kind and resourceful officer at the Lands and Survey Department who had arranged our visit, had managed as well to introduce me to the Auckland commander of the Royal New Zealand Volunteer Naval Reserve and they were to come up for us in their chaser launch Ngapona. Again the night was still and the moon late in rising and away in the distance we heard the throbbing of HMNZS Ngapona. Again we trekked across the flat, disturbing the sheep and hearing the kiwis cry. The launch came in as close as it could and anchored and, just as in one of those films when the navy comes in the nick of time to rescue the gallant resistance workers from the Nazis, they spilled a powerful light from the ship to the beach. Rodger rowed us out in the dinghy laden with our usual impedimenta and also a plant Anne had raised of the native New Zealand hibiscus (it has a dear, small, butter-coloured flower), a jar of Little Barrier cream apiece and the box with 3,000 feet of exposed film, which we handed aboard as if the Crown Jewels were in it.

  Wearily we sat on deck, waving at the figures on the shore who waved to us, until they and the island had retreated, then vanished in the dark.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Little Barrier Revisited

  When I went to Hauturu again we came, as we had before, from Great Barrier, but this time we flew over from Mulberry Grove, which is at the other end of the island. Just as you cannot land by boat at Little Barrier in a south-west wind, neither can you by amphibian. We had a calm flight, came down at a gently running glide, then bounced a graceful triple bounce along the deep water until we were idling in the little waves. Rodger came rowing out in the dinghy just as he had before, Mac was barking merrily on the beach and the children were waving. Because it was mid-summer and the bush full of flowers, there was no need to fill the trough with honey water and we did not see the jostling crew of tuis and bellbirds dipping into the hollowed log. The tuis were working in the pohutukawa in flower along the shore; we would catch sight of them for a moment or see them speed across the garden on their way to the bush. We had seen patches of red and white rata in the higher reaches of the island when we flew over.

  We made a brief trip to a colony of pied shag and this time we climbed up to the island’s summit. The shags nest on a cliff top not very far from the homestead. Susan drew us a little map and with the tripod and the largest lens Don and I set off. The D.S.I.R. handbook describes the track as a short walk and it is short enough, although perpendicular Up one way and perpendicular Down the other and I am not very good at sitting on slippery banks at the top of cliffs.

  Before we saw the shags we heard them, as we inched down a leafy slope to find there was virtually no flat on the cliff edge and that the colony was a little further still round the point. The nests, untidy twiggy bundles, were thrust into the crooks of dead pohutukawa
branches and inside imperious young shags, necks stretched and wings flapping, were waiting for their mothers to come with lunch.

  Don crept closer and closer and I, a coward, stationed myself behind a sturdy looking tree and waited — not so much for Don to come back, but for the loud cry and awful splash when he fell, as I was sure he must, from the top to the bottom of the cliff. He was gone, as he said he would be, for some time.

  The only shag I could see from where I had anchored myself was not visited by his mother or anyone else and his attitude grew more pathetic. He cried but no one answered; he flapped his little sickle-shaped wings and he slumped down in his nest, his chin, if birds have them, resting sadly on the edge of it. A kaka screeched and landed lumpishly on a branch above me, then a parakeet flashed past, his green and scarlet plumage flaring for an instant in a stray beam of light. At last I heard Don come round the point, we could leave and follow the shag track which on the way back did seem, as it said in the book, only “a short walk from the homestead”.

  We were not the only visitors to the island. A serious and scientific family were also there and I knew that on a second visit to Little Barrier we could not with honour hang back in the Tenderfoot class.

  Anne made this point very clearly.

  “Anyone” she said with great firmness “can take pictures of tuis and fantails practically anywhere and this is no more symbolic of Little Barrier than a clump of pohutukawa. You have not seen the island unless you have climbed to the top.”

  So one morning we set about it. We were seen off with many words of encouragement, directions about the track and a warning about a fork halfway up which could be confusing. Also we were told we would come back coated with rich black mud and that my blue shorts would not be blue much longer. Very unmalloryhillary we set off and I am sure no one would have been surprised if I had come down again shortly after and admitted defeat, even though the climb was only 2,374 feet.

  The first four hundred were the steepest. After that the track levelled out to a pleasant slope. The sound of birds was all about us; now and then we saw a bellbird, or a blithe rose-in-the-ring wreath of whiteheads coquetting in a branch. Occasionally, when the path followed a ridge, the bush broke sufficiently so we could look down a valley to the shore, but most of the time all you could see behind, ahead and all about, was the forest. The solandrii, one of the larger varieties of Astelia, was in bloom, trailing long velvety tassels of ivory coloured flowers and in the moss and on the banks were a delicate profusion of flowers. Some I knew from Anne’s herbarium and those I did not I brought down to show her later. Dianella was one I recognised. On a hair thread stalk depended tiny spheres of deep hyacinth and nearby I found the fragile white mountain iris, its exquisite little head swaying above the moss. I did not recognize the tawari, with its clusters of sticky white flowers in cruciform shape like American dogwood and at the heart of each one a long, libidinous-looking pistil, light green and slick with nectar.

  Another unfamiliar flower shook from its stem tiny bell-like clusters which were green at the calyx and shading at the tips of the petals to deep rose, each floret not much more than an eighth of an inch. It was Archeria racemosa, a favourite source of nectar with the stitchbirds.

  We noticed dank little holes dug along the banks, the nesting burrows of Cook’s petrels who breed nowhere else but on Little Barrier and an island in the Foveaux Straits, and intermittently beside the path we passed their small corpses, ragged bundles of white and grey feathers. Some of them may have died from injuries sustained when they collided in the dark with overhanging branches, others might have been killed by the only predators on the island, wild cats descended from domestic animals who lived here before the island was a sanctuary.

  One part of the track is called the Rock Staircase, a euphemism, as the staircase is no more than a few chunks of stone sticking out of a glorious wallow. The mud has a particularly sticky and fixative quality as though someone had stirred in barrels of creosote (I believe petrel droppings help in this respect). I took some on my knees and then some more on my seat when I unexpectedly took a step down. Every 200 feet or so we passed a marker and when we reached 2,000 feet the path, which was hugging the ridge, dipped down a little through clumps of astelia and mountain flax taller than me and then dipped again into a small dell. This was the start of the Moss Forest which adorns the highest land on Little Barrier. Anne had told us that the first was not the best, so we paused briefly and then climbed a little stretch on the other side, following the path, which had shrunk to nine inches, and pushed through more flax and a sharp-edged cutty grass that rasped on ankle and leg.

  We came to the further dell. It was round, perhaps twenty feet across, and our feet sank into the drenched green floor. A stake driven into the ground penetrated many inches before it struck on rock. Spreading epiphytes massed at the outlimits of the glade and the walls were tawari and rata, some branches sprawled almost prostrate and others thrust violently askew by the strong winds which blow here for many months of the year. The dense canopy of leaves, light green rata and the strong hard-coloured tawari, holds back the light; the moisture settles on it and nourishes the springing tide of moss and lichen, ferns, worts and curtains of lianes and vines. Seedling trees, most of which will die before their height has touched a handspan, spawn in thousands on mounds and hummocks velvet deep in moss; some close-cropped emerald and viridian, some jade and one with little curling tendrils tinged yellower than green.

  Toi must have found his way here, been overtaken in cloud as we were and seen the mossy trunks and mossy branches, the long straggles of hanging moss and lichen, blurred in the mist which swirled and shimmered in the lucent air, and known this for the Patu-Pai-Arehe’s home. How still it was.

  We followed the path and came to a third glade. Beside the track was a dark, deep hole. I crept to the edge and looked down. It seemed to plummet all the way to the shore, or into the very centre of the island. Then abruptly the forest ended. The last few feet to the top were walled in rock, flanked with a few scrubby bushes, and the peak of Mount Hauturu is scraped bare. The rain shower chased itself up and down the valleys, blotting us out for a few minutes, then withdrawing to let the sun shine again.

  We could see Great Barrier and more faintly the Coromandel Peninsula; away on the mainland was the white length of Pakiri Beach and, lying off it, the mysterious humps of the northern islands. Auckland was hidden in the haze. It was not such a clear day that you could see the buildings of the city as you sometimes can. We knew a tin was buried on the summit with a book inside to put your names in (and prove you came here). If you want, you can record your feelings in a Remarks column. Some had, some had not and one had simply written AGHHHHHHH as if all his breath had left him. Some were flippant, some had a pop at the poetic and some names appeared more than once. We wrote our name with the date but no remark, put the lid on the tin, the tin in the hole and set off on the return journey.

  “Any stitchbirds?” someone asked when we were down.

  I said no.

  “Was it worth going up?” asked Anne and I stretched my stiffening muscles and agreed most gratefully that it was.

  The day for going home was one of such perfection that I hoped the amphibian would be delayed and it was. We sat on the shore, slapping at the sandflies and having very foolish but enjoyable conversation. Little mauve and copper-coloured moths fluttered about. We watched a gannet dive, a young shag practise landing and tumble on his backside and a pair of pigeons move from a pohutukawa to try the berries on a puriri. They flew across the bleached face of Haowhenua cliff, the sun kindling the opalescent amethyst and green on their wings and back.

  I looked at the colours in the boulders, some slate, some a dark coppery green, others terracotta and dove grey and a fine faded lavender, some pale as old bones and the driftwood lying among them.

  Away to the south were noise and hard pavements, but they could stay where they were for a while. We still had time enough to watch
the last of the day slipping down on the horizon, the trees on the point bending to the wind; to listen to the water slapping on the shore and drowse like lizards on the warm stones as if all the world were no more than this one small island.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Aotea

  To Lord Onslow,

  Governor of New Zealand.

  Greetings to your Lordship,

  We on behalf of the inhabitants of this locality would express our pleasure at your presence among us and hope that the Countess and yourself may take away pleasant memories of your visit to the Great Barrier, which is perhaps the healthiest place in the Colony. We would ask that on your return to the seat of government you would consider our isolated position and want of regular mail communication. Hoping your Lordship will consider our wants, and would ask you to convey to her Most Gracious Majesty our Sovereign Lady Queen Victoria our loyal duty and we your petitioners will ever pray for your health and well being and would subscribe ourselves your humble servants.

  George Blackwell

  James Smyth

  Great Barrier Island

  The Earl of Onslow was governor of New Zealand from 1889 to 1892 so the petition, which is undated, must have been presented during those years. In 1964 a deputation from Great Barrier flew to Wellington with a similar request, that the government consider the island’s lack of communications and the difficulties brought about by poor roads, starved lands and the uncertain future of the ageing coastal vessels on which the islanders rely to transport their goods and produce. Two cabinet ministers headed the party who came down to see for themselves. They toured part of the island, attended an acrimonious public meeting and when they went off could leave only the cold comfort of a promise to try to solve at least some of the island’s problems.