Islands of the Gulf

by Shirley Maddock

  Arid Island, raw-boned and granity, lies off the coast here. It would be big if it were in any other company but Great Barrier and, in spite of its name, its six hundred acres are rich and well watered.

  Some boys came round the point dangling strings of snapper, but no one but us was here on this immense white stage watching the combers roll sonorously in, their frosty manes tossed behind them.

  * * *

  The Menzies were just as they had been the year before, apart from a few little troubles like the bridge at the gate collapsing in heavy rain. We had to walk in from the road and Mr Menzies came down to meet us looking like Father Time with a long manuka stave in his hand.

  A dozen or so big calves were grazing by the house. “All bulls this year” Mr Menzies told us sadly, “eating their heads off.”

  The foundering shed was still there with the gig inside and Mrs Menzies was sitting on the verandah with her sewing on her lap and her binoculars beside her.

  “Ye’re late” said she.

  They had made up their minds to have their photographs taken. This time we had no music and, instead, Pia was sent inside to fetch some photographs Mrs Menzies said she would find on the mantle.

  “Ye ken we’re Scots, Walter and me?” Mrs Menzies asked me. “This was my home in Scotland” and she showed me a Georgian house with an elegant fanlight over the door.

  “These were my brothers.” Her brothers were a handsome quintet of young Edwardians with moustaches and high choking collars up to their firm chins. Her sisters, another quintet, posed in front of columns and velvet drapes, were such pretty girls with burdens of hair piled high and wistful, unpainted little mouths. Their lawn dresses were tucked and inserted with lace and Mrs Menzies had good sport as we tried to guess which one was she.

  “I was the baby” she admitted at last.

  Her father was a prosperous man and provost of the town not far from Glasgow where they lived.

  “Have you ever gone back?” I asked.

  “Never. We went to Australia, then we came to New Zealand and tried the Waikato. But we moved to the Barrier fifty years ago nearly and have been nowhere else to this day.”

  The preparations for the photographs took a little while. Mrs Menzies tweaked her braids and told her Walter to take off his hat and smooth his hair.

  Don took one with Pia in the picture, Mr Menzies gallantly putting an arm about each lady and being told off merrily by his wife for being a flirt. “I’ll kiss ye in front of them all and make a shame of ye” she threatened.

  At last we found the right place when we moved their little bench to the landing at the top of the steps and they sat down and looked at the camera like two good old children.

  * * *

  Oruawharo Bay, with its sugarloaf headland, lies at the foot of a valley which was settled by Thomas Medland and his wife Elizabeth a hundred years ago. For the first fourteen years of their life on the Barrier they lived in a raupo whare where seven of the children were born. Three Medland families live in the valley now.

  The Sam Medlands’ boarding-house, like the Coopers’, was a holiday home for several generations. It is big and rambling, with the original homestead that succeeded the raupo structure embedded somewhere in all the alterations and additions. Mrs Medland showed us photographs of Thomas and Elizabeth, his wife, who lived to be a hundred, and then an ornate Chinese vase nearly three feet high which had been washed up after the wreck of the Wairarapa.

  “It landed right in front of the house” she told us, “and not a chip out of it.”

  The Medlands have set a memorial to the first generation on a steep sided little hillock on the beach. It was like being on top of a haystack and you looked back to the pleasant farms which are tangible expression of the plain words on the inscription.

  “The pioneer Medland family loved this district

  Where they, finding waste, produced worth.”

  Thomas James Medland First East Coast settler 1865.

  Died 1920 aged 78. Elizabeth his wife died 1952 aged 100.

  We arrived at Tryphena just as the light was fading. A handful of yachts were moored at Mulberry Grove, a pair of oyster catchers stumped about at the water’s edge and some children were playing French cricket.

  “Here you are” cried Mrs Blackwell. “We’ll have a cup of tea and hope the ’phones keep quiet for a minute.”

  The Tryphena exchange, with its archaic plugs and cords, lives in a little room off the kitchen. There are six exchanges like this on Great Barrier and making a call is much more agreeable and personal than with an automatic exchange.

  Little seemed to have altered at Tryphena. Someone had drilled for oil and struck water, the schoolteacher’s new house had arrived, but not the original one, which was wrecked in a storm on the way down and sunk off Waiheke Island. This had been front page news in Auckland, too, because of the novelty of a house being shipwrecked. The Blackwells, who had kindly invited us to stay, were celebrating that week the centenary of their family’s coming to Tryphena. George Blackwell was a regular soldier who lost a leg in service and, like many military pensioners, was given a block of land in New Zealand. He married a girl from his home country of Tipperary and they took passage on a ship called the Victory. The bride’s parents were worried at the thought of their daughter going into the wilderness, so they sent her brother along too to look after her. He devoted his life to his promise, never married, lived close by his sister and her husband and was buried beside her at Mulberry Grove.

  “They had a store too, as well as a little farm” Tom Blackwell told me while we had tea. “When the miners were still thick up at Oreville, grandmother made a 200lb bag of flour into bread every week.”

  Tom has lived most of his life at Tryphena. He was born in the old house across the garden and he went to the little school at the bottom of the road.

  There has never been a doctor on the Barrier and only since the end of the War has there been a nurse. Mrs Blackwell remembers times when fifty miles stretched impossibly between them and hope of medical aid. Once, before the amphibian service began, her daughter was desperately ill with pneumonia and, for long hours, they kept watch on the beach waiting for an air force flying boat to come and then had to listen to it circling in the fog trying to find a break to come through.

  In the early days, women coped with babies as they did with everything else; Mrs Cooper had told me about this too. “One woman died” she said of an appendix victim, as if she had rather let the side down, “but if a woman was having a baby, she went up in the steamer to Auckland well beforehand, and if she couldn’t do that, well, she just had to manage. People helped one another.”

  Grandmother Blackwell, who died in 1911, had borne twelve children, seven daughters and five sons, and all of them survived, an uncommon achievement in those days.

  Mrs Blackwell told me about a young woman going up to Auckland to wait for her first baby’s birth. By chance the schoolmaster’s wife was going up too. As they were about to go aboard the little steamer at Shoal Bay, the young woman exclaimed she must have started, her pains were coming.

  She was frightened at the thought of the journey, but not nearly so alarmed as the schoolmaster’s wife who was newly married and very young. The pains receded, so the girl decided she would still go and Mrs Blackwell, who had been a nurse, and another woman to whom birth was no mystery briefed the schoolmaster’s wife.

  “I made up a sterile pack of rags and clean towels” said Mrs Blackwell “and told someone else to boil some string for tying the cord. Boil some string! She boiled a whole ball and stuffed Mrs . . .’s handbag with it. It would have lasted St Helen’s ten years!”

  The novice mother and the novice midwife set off but fortunately the trip was calm, the pains held off and the baby was not delivered until three weeks after the ship got to Auckland.

  Mr Blackwell had been looking through the leaves of the family Bible. He found the petition to Lord Onslow and his grandmother’s obituar
y notice but there was one piece of paper which was not there.

  “It was an old fellow lived back in the bush from Awana. William Perry. He’d been a bushman, he might have worked in the mines at one time and he had a little shanty. He used to sit all day on the step writing poems. He had his pension and he lived on raw onions, fern roots, rice and cheese. He used to chaw on charcoal for his digestion. You never saw him without an old sacking apron on and a short-handled slasher near to hand.”

  At last Mr Blackwell turned up a sheet of lined foolscap closely written on both sides. If the verse scans a little oddly the writer’s emotion is plain in the words of an old man mourning the forests of Aotea.

  Long centuries you reigned supreme upon your seagirt throne

  Undisturbed, unchallenged, unrivalled and unknown

  Till restless roving men appeared and marked you for their prey

  And soon, destroyed by axe and fire, your beauties pass away.

  I often gaze with wonder on that picture of the past

  When nature crowned you charming queen of islands unsurpassed.

  I’d feel I’d die contented if my death could but restore

  To you your vanished beauties that have gone for evermore.

  You have bound me to you strongly and I do not wonder why

  For I loved you since I’ve known you, and will love you till I die

  For your beauty of the present and your beauty of the past,

  You lonely, lovely, charming queen of beauty unsurpassed.

  William Perry

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Rangihou or Flat Island

  Flat Island, or Rangihou, is flat, a grassy, whale-shaped island of no particular beauty. We had flown over it often and once Captain Ladd had landed us here so that we could meet the Walkers, but no one was home, which you don’t expect on an island, where there are not so many places to go. There are the Chris Walkers and the Harry Walkers, who are crayfishermen. Between them, the two families have enough children of school age for the Education Department to maintain a primary school here. We went to Flat Island one night for a party, when so many people were expected that the Walkers had sent over a small fleet of boats to pick up their guests. The cruise launch Sayandra was coming and several other private boats anchored at FitzRoy.

  It is a strange feeling being in a small boat in the dark. You lose any sense of direction you may have had. Our route was narrow in places and thickly strewn with rocks and reefs and other smaller islets. Once we were safely in Man o’ War Passage we could see away at the head of the sound what looked like a huge golden pumpkin; then, as we drew nearer, it broke and separated and, when we came nearer still, we could see strings of Christmas lights, lights from the windows of several houses, bobbing lights reflected across the water as people with torches walked along the jetty and lights on the boats already in the bay. There was little assistance from above; the moon was not up and the stars shone only fitfully through ragged banks of cloud.

  The island’s population had been greatly increased by the holidays and, as well, there was an important family reunion between both the Maori and pakeha sides of the family.

  Chris Walker is the senior of the two brothers and the party was held on his lawn, a big semi-circle bounded with peach trees, lights threaded through their branches. A small stage backing had been contrived from ferns and willow and the gates into the garden were decorated with nikau palm fronds. A miscellany of chairs and benches which went right round the lawn were all full.

  The entertainment began with a haka, a fierce little ten-year-old warrior giving the challenge, then an action song, two lines of children in the front and older brothers and sisters and cousins providing the musical accompaniment with guitars and ukeleles and an upright piano. Marina, who was about eighteen, did a solo poi dance and then all the little girls joined in. Although the youngest, Rosina, who was six, was a little confused by the lights, being up so late and so many people looking at her, she shivered her little arms, stamped her bare foot and clapped hands just half a beat behind the rest, her eyes fixed unblinkingly on her grownup cousin, Marina. If anyone had been sailing on the ocean side of the island and heard the concert carried out into a dark and empty night, he might have suspected a mass but cheerful haunting.

  Chris Walker took me round to the kitchen to meet his wife and Mrs Harry who were preparing supper with a team of friends and relations. Mrs Chris is a woman of immense dignity, very quiet and composed, Mrs Harry is younger and more vivacious. Between them they were covering the huge table with sandwiches and pastries, chunks of crayfish in lettuce leaves, and sponges the size of kettledrums, drowning in cream. The Walkers are a Katherine Bay family originally, who, after the War, thought they would try commercial fishing somewhere round the Barrier. The crayfishing season lasts most of the year; the small red sort from July to October and then from October to March come the big packhorse crayfish which weigh up to twenty or thirty pounds. Flat Island is still Maori land and Toby Davies as the senior member of the family gave them permission to settle here. They lived in tents while they built their houses. Chris and Harry felled timber on the Barrier, rigged up their own sawmill and cut and dressed it themselves. They have made a good life here. Chris has twelve children and Harry seven; some of them are married now with families of their own, so I never worked out whose were all the forty or more beautiful children there that night.

  As far as I know, the Walkers are the only permanent settlers of Flat Island in modern times. The only others were a gamey old pair of squatters known in the Gulf as Scotty and Maud. There is a romantic legend about them which relates that Maud, like the heroine of many a story, was an abducted “society girl”. One version has it that Scotty was a deserting seaman and that Maud was not only a clergyman’s daughter but a clergyman’s daughter from Christchurch!

  Maud must have lost her rectory ways fairly soon, because they lived in a whare and eked out a living from fish. Maud’s smoked fish was famous and she was reputed to sleep in the smokehouse along with the strings of snapper. She was also particularly strong and, when circumstance demanded, had been known to row to Auckland to replenish their stocks of gin.

  When the concert was over, the M.C. called for dancing and asked the guests to take their partners. About fifty couples tried the almost impossible task of a foxtrot on a sloping lawn. Twisting was easier. You could manage in bare feet and were less likely to be trodden on, but the M.C. seemed to disapprove of the Twist’s isolation and set about mixing up the party in a Paul Jones.

  Dancing bridged the gap between the concert and supper, which could not begin until the performers had set up an endless train of laden plates which they passed with pretty courtesy and poise.

  “Would you excuse us, gents” enquired a young gent of about eleven “if we serve the ladies with orange drinks first or else the cups won’t go round?”

  I asked Chris how Uncle Toby was getting on.

  “He’s here for the party; been staying since New Year.”

  Uncle Toby was in the living-room, watching television, festooned with grand-nephews and nieces.

  He remembered me from last year, making a little joke about seeing himself on that “thing” and pointed at a Western which pursued a slithery progress on the screen (all island television has a slipshod look because of generator power).

  He was wearing the familiar cable-stitched jersey, with a clean pink vest underneath. He told me about the wreck of the Wairarapa again in the same words he had before. “They didden know what had happen, they didden know where they were” and his old eyes, filmed and gentle, went back to the picture.

  “Bang bang!” said a sleepy baby.

  “Bang bang yourself” said Uncle Toby.

  * * *

  In the morning we retraced the route taken so perilously the night before. The fragments of island were cast in dark basaltic rock cut by wind and ocean into strange likenesses — a crouching eagle, two Assyrian warriors with halberds and spiked
helmets, another like an uplifted scallop shell worn almost transparent. They are barren, the grass singed with salt, no trees, only thorn bushes and flax thrusting up dark chevrons of dead flowers.

  Not so many boats were in the bay now; all signs of the party except for a nikau arch over the gate had been taken down. A few relaxed figures, hats sliding down over noses, were dozing under the fruit trees and some of the children, heavy-eyed after the late night, were splashing in the tide. Two naked little boys struggled with heavy oars as they manfully punted a beached dinghy. A pretty cousin from town sunbathed in a bikini on top of a crayfish cage and some big boys went out to the holding pots in deep water and brought back handfuls of irritable crustaceans, which snapped their bony tails and waved their angular feelers in dumb fury.

  The party had marked the end of the holiday for most of the visitors and the women were packing. At last all those who were going ashore were ready. The jetty creaked under the procession of mothers and fathers and bulging suitcases and pushchairs, some with passengers and some without; one of the naked boys was snatched from the beach and thrust weeping into his travelling clothes, aghast at the suddenness of departure. Uncle Toby, who had been sitting at the end of the wharf, came slowly down to see the boats away, then found to his surprise that he was going too. Some young female relatives were taking him back to Katherine Bay to stay with them there a while. Apparently he needed no luggage and uncomplainingly went aboard with the rest. Only one false start delayed the party when a missing child was spotted on the shore. Then, with no more than six inches freeboard between them, the two launches set off with shouts of farewell and instructions and jokes and remembrances and we followed them down the bay in the wake of their laughter.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  To the Lighthouses

  Every second Tuesday the Colville sets off from King’s Wharf to take stores and mail to Little Barrier and to the three lighthouse islands. An agreeable mixture of coastal tramp, commercial fishing launch and ocean-going yacht ties up at Kings; there were two Mahurangi-built scows, the Owhiti and the Jane Gifford, and an American ketch with washing hung out in the rigging. The Colville is a steady old Fairmile built for the Navy during the War and then converted into a chaser for the unlucky whaling station at Great Barrier; the harpoon gun is still fixed to her bows. She is under charter now to the Marine Department.