One morning we set off by launch to a communion service the Reverend Bob Hansen was to hold in a farmhouse garden at the eastern end of the island. The road through was not completed then and when the vicar could not complete his journey on foot he went by water. He had brought two young sea scouts with him as servers, his vestments and communion vessels were in a rucksack on his back and the Processional cross had been contrived from fitted lengths of iron piping.
Settlement became much sparser as we went on. In many of the bays there was no house at all and in the cleft of a valley a stand of bush remained. We passed one house whose garden ran right to the water and with a boatshed and jetty in place of a garage and drive. An arrow on a cliff pointed to the store in Connell’s Bay, the very first store the island ever had; most of its customers still come to it by water. A sheepdog was chasing some screeching gulls along the sand. The bays were divided with bony fingers of light golden rock, pines snatching a precarious foothold on their narrow spurs. They repeated the trinity of little peaks with infinite variation and the longest of the promontories stretched languorously into the blue water like the fossilised tail of some gilded dinosaur. We were going to the Days’ farm at Omaru Bay on the other side of the tail, Little Muddy Bay, the yachties call it, as the tide goes out so far. It was out this morning and the sea scouts had a long pull in when they rowed us all ashore. Four other little boats were coming in too, their passengers in good suits and Sunday hats. When we grounded there was still a walk over the mudflats and the congregation with rolled trousers and kilted skirts gingerly waded in. The Days (Mr Ted, whom most of the district calls Uncle Ted, his son Edsel and daughter-in-law Dixie) were waiting on the shore to welcome us in. Their house was built on a gently sloping platform on a little bluff, kowhai trees spilled down the bank to the beach and along the shadowy path. On four or five rows of chairs arranged in the garden, with rugs and cushions for the children, the congregation sat down and talked in the muted buzz people keep for church while the vicar went indoors to put on his vestments.
The hymn for the Processional was “When I survey the Wondrous Cross”. The scout bore the iron cross bravely and set it down by the improvised altar. The singing wavered in tempo and was insecure of pitch but the spirit was right. We heard the familiar words, made the familiar responses and received communion and the priest’s blessing while a tui sang in a branch above and a baby slept on his father’s shoulder.
We came back to Matiatia late in the afternoon, just as the Baroona churned alongside the wharf. Somewhere in the afternoon the autumn had stolen a march on the remnants of summer. It was chilly as the homegoing weekenders with sandy feet and tired children and sticky bunches of belladonnas scrambled up the gangway. At Oneroa, the sands were deserted except for a trio of nuns who strolled down the far end looking like three black dolls. At Palm Beach a man had the tide to himself. He pursued the line of little waves, head bent, deep in thought, and he had a quill in his hand, a big, strong-looking wing feather from a black-backed gull.
He was a beachcomber he said, by choice, not necessity. He came by a little money and augmented it on the beach. He had picked up the feather to make another pen for a book he was writing between his prowls along the shore, but the book had not gone very far because “when you don’t have to do it, there doesn’t seem much point.” He walked along further, kicking up tattered swags of kelp and what should he find but a ten shilling note, drenched but still negotiable. “See, you do all right at this time of the year” and he mooched off, his eyes firmly fixed upon the ground.
You could call Tom Dawn a beachcomber, I suppose, because he lives in a little hut backed up against the end of Surfdale beach. He is a gruff, proud, handsome old man, ninety-five or ninety-six years old, he thought. His house is a couple of army huts banged together, with a stream and a sandy strip of garden running down the side of it. In one of the beds was a cross made from two ti-tree sticks.
“Dug a skeleton up here” he told us. “Big fella, must have been seven feet tall. Had a broken skull. Plenty of fights round here in the old days, back in Hongi’s time. Good fighter old Hongi was, a hard man. Anyway I made a grave for this bloke, whoever he was, and planted a few flowers on top of him.”
He invited Don and me inside. The kitchen had a heavy smell of wood smoke and old clothes and damp; laggard blowflies circled our heads and landed on the tins of condensed milk and spaghetti open on the table. A spindly tabby kitten was sitting on top of a meatsafe and inside it were three mutton chops congealing on a tin plate. The kitten’s name was Shirley.
Tom Dawn did not belong to Waiheke. He lived, he said, wherever he happened to be.
“I was born at a place called the Hutt Valley not far from where the mission station was at Petone.” He talked about the great Otaki chief, Te Rauparaha, as if they had only just missed being contemporaries and he had known Te Rauparaha’s son. “I speak Maori fluently and grammatically” he said and gave us snatches of his long, long life, working in the bush felling totara, gold mining in Coromandel and then moving on to Kalgoorlie in Australia.
“I was the first man in to Alice Springs when they opened up the country there.” He told us about the strings of camels and the Afghan drivers who used to comb the tailings the white men left behind. “The Chinks worked the tailings too and they were the best workers of all, and the best transporters — better than camels, elephants, bullock teams, motor cars, flying machines even. He took his little basket of charcoal to cook his ‘lice’ and make his tea and all he needed was a bamboo pole and a bucket. Jog trot, jog trot, off he went with his pigtail bouncing on his back and his little squinty eyes looking into the sun.”
“Went to South Africa eight or nine times trading horses. Could have gone on to the nitrate mines in California. No thanks, I said. The stuff rots you, your hair drops out, your flesh shrivels. Dug gum. Up north. Plenty of gum round here one time — I was talking to a chap on the beach and he said the hills round Surfdale were full of little pits where the gumdiggers were working. Sacks of the stuff piled up on the beach waiting for the scow. I’ve got some gum here” and he went and fetched a box full of rough lumps of unscraped gum and gave us each a bit. We had only met Mr Dawn by chance and Don kept bobbing out to see if the amphibian we had to catch was in sight.
“That chap patient enough to shine up his bit of gum?” the old man asked when Don had gone for the third time. “That’s the trouble with you people, can’t stop and chew the rag.”
I asked if he had ever married and he said he had once, long ago but they hadn’t suited. “I don’t bother with relations. They think I should have kept my money and not wandered about like this. You get used to the life and your own company, and I’ve got my cats. Bought young Shirley for two bob off a kid on the beach to be company for Willy and they get along all right.”
Willy was a sleek black and white tomcat and he had one green eye and the other was brown.
“Wicked cat down the road scratched out one of Willy’s eyes. I was going up to town to buy him a glass one and then blow me down, he grew another. Only it was brown, wasn’t it, Willy?”
The Widgeon hummed in the distance and, clutching my second piece of gum, I wished Mr Dawn goodbye.
“Always rushing about, you people,” said he with a wink. “No time to stop and chew the rag. Not like us, eh Will?”
And old Tom Dawn scraped steadily on with his rusty knife. Will purred a gruff, pleased purr and stared sleepily out from his one green eye and its mate of miraculous brown.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Waiheke Again
The road linking the west of Waiheke to the east was the biggest change on the island in the year between filming the television programme and the summer of 1965. We drove down the first weekend it was open, one scorching day in the New Year holidays. Senator Burns was repeating his good offices of the year before and, when his big blue van suffered a puncture, we transferred to an angular truck with tall thin wheels and surprised lo
oking mudguards and, hipbone to hipbone, rattled off down the yellow clay road. When the radiator began to boil, we stopped to eat the cold chicken Mrs Burns had packed for lunch and waited by a waterhole until someone should come by with a tin or a bucket. Presently someone did and we poured a gulp of swamp-water down stout Lizzy’s parched throat. We continued on our way until we were back at the coast, with Ponui and Pakatoa and Rotoroa floating on a larkspur-coloured sea and the blue ridge of Moehau in the far distance.
Waiheke East was the first settled part of the island and it was a resort much favoured by the gold mining towns of Coromandel as well as by Auckland. Until it assumed its present-day character, Waiheke West was mainly Maori land and the few Europeans were nearly all gentlemen farmers of means.
In the 1840s Judge Laughlin O’Brien had a farm at Wharetana Bay and married a Belgian wife called Helene Leopoldine Francoise Isabella de Witte. The present Mrs O’Brien has her portrait, which shows an elegant young woman in a crinoline of taffeta and velvet, cut very low, and her hair dressed in a profusion of black ringlets like a Bronte heroine.
Captain Kennedy of the Royal Scots Fusiliers bought four and a half thousand acres on Waiheke in 1883. His wife, a city-bred girl, was terrified of the sea and never really accepted antipodean island life, which she began by coming down from Auckland on a cutter and sitting miserably on the beach watching a bullock team haul her furniture through the surf to the shore. The Kennedys built a white two-storeyed house called Esslin, then in 1900 they sold it and their land and went back to Scotland. But in 1907 they returned, bought back their land and started again.
John and Mary Kennedy live in the same lovely bay as the first generation of the family, but in a smaller modern house. Esslin was pulled down and we paced out the faint marks its foundations had left in the grass. In the old days the Coromandel steamers were the Kennedys’ link with the mainland and we walked round to Steamer Bay where the family used to run up a flag when they wanted a ship to halt. They left their mailbag under a pohutukawa tree and sometimes the steamer stopped and sometimes it did not. The Kennedy wool went direct to England from here. The only craft at anchor that morning was a trim looking launch called the Dixie, more than fifty years old and still as seaworthy as on a week in 1917 when John Kennedy’s father took her out to join in the search for Count von Luckner.
If Waiheke West had a squire it would be Mr Fred Alison. He and his wife live quietly at Matiatia. While we sat in their long, shadowy drawing room, they talked about a much wider world than the Gulf, although we came back to it from time to time. Mr Alison bought Oneroa and Matiatia in 1901 when they were covered with scrub. He grassed hundreds of acres, had many miles of fencing built and not all wire; a beautiful woven brush fence marks one of the boundaries of his gardens. When he sold Oneroa in 1922, the urban development of Waiheke began and he retired from active farming in 1963 when he sold all but the homestead block at Matiatia.
His father, Alex Alison, founded the North Shore Ferry Company and owned a fleet of steamers that served the coastal ports and the islands. He began the business, when, as a boy of fourteen, he ferried passengers from Devonport to Auckland, his vessel a twenty-two foot dinghy with a single sail. The year was 1868.
“He carried an old man called Davies as supercargo and to help lump the 100 lb bags of flour, charged 6d. a trip and when there was no wind the passengers pulled. Dad used to land them on a shingly beach at the corner of Queen Street and Shortland Street — it was long before they reclaimed all the waterfront land from the harbour.
“The Takapuna was his first real ferry, then there was the Tainui, the Britannic and the Condor. A man called Quick set up a rival firm with the Osprey and the Eagle and the two companies fought a price war with the fares down to a penny and touts drumming up trade in Queen Street.”
A son of Steamboat Alison had slight chance of avoiding a waterfront career and, although Fred Alison always wanted to be a farmer, his father apprenticed him to a boatbuilder and eventually he had a small fleet of scows trading in the Gulf. The family were all keen yachtsmen and their beautiful, gaff-rigged keeler Volunteer was a star at regattas seventy and eighty years ago.
The land at Matiatia was all Maori property divided into thirty-eight blocks and governed by two chiefs. The biggest settlement was at Church Bay. Not a building stands on it now; the schoolhouse is gone and the little church. Mr Alison remembers going to a service in it when he was a little boy and he also remembers the raupo whares and the old grandmothers squatting at the doorsteps smoking their pipes, their chins blue with moko.
The day he remembers best of all was a great race meeting, the first ever to be held at Waiheke, on the big grassy flat at Church Bay, when he was eight years old.
“The Maoris and my father were good friends and they asked him to bring some visitors down from Auckland. They had some fine horses, a cross country type with a good Arab strain. Dad packed up a small steamer called the Beatrice and so many people wanted to come the overflow went in one of the tugs and everyone was landed in dinghies through the surf. If they hadn’t brought their lunch, the village kids were selling slices of melon and baked kumara and mussels.
“My father was to start the races — with a flag on a ti-tree stick — and all the events were hurdles; the jumps were kauri rickers with the leaves still on them. The jockeys wore dungaree pants gathered at the ankle with a bit of flax and there was great rivalry between the bays with barrackers from Owhanaki and Matiatia and Huruhi. (People call Huruhi Blackpool now but it was all Maori kumara gardens then.)
“There was no betting and they raced until the horses could race no more.”
* * *
I knew the land to the east a great deal better after Henry Day took me on a concentrated tour by Landrover.
“Seven-thirty too early to start in the morning?” he asked on the phone the night before and at 7.30 he was outside the Burns’s home at Oneroa ready to go. Henry is a cheerful breezy bear of a man who looks as if his major interests in life might be fishing and rugby and so they are, but Waiheke, where his family have been for nearly a century, is another and he reads the landscape as some people do a book.
“That’s Hangman’s Gully — Grandpa Trace hanged a dog in it once because he worried sheep.
“Over there” and he pointed to a ti-tree thicket with a few kauri rickers springing, “an old woman had a bit of a farm on that land and she was always singing out to her daughter — ‘Elsie Nora Hilda Victoria, can’t yer hear yer mother calling yer!’”
We stopped off first at Onetangi and he, his wife Billie and I sat on the floor looking at photographs and faded letters and hearing stories:
A race meeting on Onetangi Beach, a little later than Church Bay, with sailor-suited children and ladies riding side-saddle.
A school prize — a stirring work called English Sea Victories, Sea Stories and Tales of Enterprise by S.O. Beeton, “For Good Work, Conduct and Cleanliness”.
A letter dated 1879 from an Irish cousin emigrated to America who wrote, “Times since the War have been getting worse all the time, you must be getting rich fast if you can make £8 a month steady.”
A farm wife who smoked a pipe, wore hobnailed boots, had fifteen children and remarked when the last was born, “The only time I get me boots off is when I lay down to have another.”
“Well, daylight’s wasting” said Henry and swept the great litter of papers into a sack. “We’ll take this lot with us and read them at lunch.”
Lunchtime lay beyond many miles of fields and hills and beaches and on the other side of many gates. Waiheke offers gate connoisseurs an endless variety of fastenings. There are some wrapped round with chains, others with a little dagger you drop through a ring, wooden cross-bars, stiffnecked bolts; some gates are double, some swing across ruts at great speed and others have to be dragged and lumped and heaved.
Our first objective was a disused manganese mine at Awaroa, a valley that cuts almost dead centre through the i
sland.
“This was Grandpa Trace’s farm . . . He’s buried up there on the knob. He had muttonchop whiskers and he was famous for miles around for his swearing. The Hooks kids used to hide outside the kitchen window listening.”
The entrance to the mine was a black bolthole on the hillside. Henry dived in. There was a main tunnel and other subsidiary seams branching off like spiders’ legs. It smelled of damp and cold and rotting earth and, when my eyes were accustomed to the dark, I could pick out the strata of brown, greasy rock and high galleries on the weeping walls.
“Watch out” warned Henry “and keep close behind me. There’s a forty foot drop down there.”
I looked over a heap of boulders and dropped a pebble and the splash echoed dully round that dank tomb. We came blinking back to the kindly warmth, my hands and knees and probably my face satisfactorily streaked with mud.
“We’re getting on now” cried Henry. “We’ll pop over to Owhiti and see if we can find the open-cast working they had down there.”
The sun rose higher and higher, hawks hung over the valleys, larks soared and cicadas shrilled. We passed an oozy-looking swamp where grave pukekos with heads bent and wings crossed like monks’ hands beneath their habits stalked about from turf to turf, or lazily took off with their legs dangling and square white patches revealed beneath their surprisingly perky tails.
The manganese mines on Waiheke were sporadic affairs. The Awaroa seam was discovered in 1839 by Henry Taylor, who floated the first copper company at Kawau. The open-cast working at Owhiti was a later development. The hill where Henry thought the mine had been was densely mantled in ti-tree killed by fireblight and we crawled froggily through whippy trunks festooned with cobwebs, buzzing with flies and moths and a myriad gauzy creatures.
“Must be some other hill,” Henry decided when we emerged more grimed than ever on the other side.
Islands of the Gulf Page 26
