by Bruce Ansley
It certainly inspired W.J. (Bill) Phillipps, ornithologist at the Dominion Museum in the first half of last century. His particular interest in extinct birds was the huia, the kokako’s fellow wattlebird. The huia was last seen officially in 1907. He looked at the all-but impenetrable gullies and spurs of the heavy bush between Wellington and East Cape, and the many reports and sightings since, and was quite certain the bird would be rediscovered. He was particularly excited by a 1961 sighting near Lake Waikareiti in the Ureweras by an English tourist, and was certain that she’d seen a huia, although after reading his book I’m not at all sure the sighting would have carried much weight with the Records Appraisal Committee. The huia has been ‘sighted’ spasmodically since — calls in the Ureweras were reported even in 1977 — but the fact of the bird’s existence seems to me less important now than the romance of it, like the search for the Peking Man.
I think Rhys is becoming tired by his search, although not of it. He seems to be on a wave graph, excited one moment, exhausted by it the next. He’s wiry and fit, but he’s still edging his way into thick bush in the kind of awful country most trampers would do their best to avoid. Still sleeping in fly tents, eating the sort of food whose best description is ‘healthy’. For him it’s a way of life and he’s nonchalant about it; only people who’ve been there know how hard it is, how lonely. It seems to me that he is on the edge of his hunt, just as the South Island kokako teeters on the brink of life.
‘No, I don’t think it’s extinct,’ he mutters.
But why, after thirty-eight years of searching, is he telling me suddenly the proper term is ‘functionally extinct’?
‘I could have told you that years ago,’ he says. ‘People sometimes think we’re chasing ghosts, and that is what we’re doing. We’re chasing a bird that is flesh and blood but behaves so like a ghost that you’re best to think of it as that rather than as a reality.’
Well, never have ghost-hunters been so tempted. At the time of writing, the South Island Kokako Charitable Trust has put a $10,000 price on the bird’s head, or rather for information leading to confirmation that it is still alive. Several reports have already been received.
What does the nation’s leading kokako-hunter, a man who lives frugally, whose resources have very largely gone into this search, think of that? If it works, well and good, is the gist of his reply, but I don’t think it makes very much difference to him.
The North Island kokako was saved from extinction. They’re cryptic too, but susceptible to recorded calls. They could be caught in fine nets and managed. The Chatham Islands black robin was down to five birds, the world’s rarest, when Don Merton and his team devised a way of saving it. It now numbers around 300.
Why not the South Island kokako? After all, the Kokako Trust maps eleven ‘most likely’ encounters with the bird from 2015, and far more previously, and they range from Nelson and Golden Bay down the West Coast to Fiordland and even Southland.
Rhys thinks there’s a meagre possibility of finding a way to lure a bird into some kind of captivity or plan for saving it. The problem is the kokako’s incredibly cryptic manner. It will not be reliably attracted by recorded calls, and that, Rhys believes, might be the single reason why it will not be saved from extinction. Kokakos can be managed only in their home forests and only if pairs of both sexes exist: unlikely in South Island forests.
In 1984 Rhys thought he might be able to capture the kokako he heard in that remote branch of the Freshwater. He dubbed the bird ‘Titus Groan’ after the Mervyn Peake character who is tied to both his lineage and a desire to escape his fate. Titus was his best bird, so well-behaved, so lacking in shyness, except for one thing: it revealed itself only once.
I realise that when Rhys talks of ghosts he’s being literal. An element of the supernatural enters the conversation. ‘Why am I up and down, why is this so difficult?’ he wonders aloud. ‘One reason is, the kokako is incredibly rare. The second one, which is really why I’ll never give it up but I’ll say I’ll give it up because it’s psychologically draining, is because it behaves like a ghost and how the hell do you prove a ghost? How do you get anywhere close to a ghost? You cannot save a ghost from extinction.’
There’s not only a spiritual element here for him: it’s a quest in the purest, the most romantic sense. And perhaps it’s also a drama like Romeo and Juliet, in the sense that it is not going to end well for either side?
‘Oh yeah,’ Rhys responds. ‘It’s very, very spiritual. But there’s still the scientific reality that there’s one or two birds hanging on in there, in flesh and blood. I’ll never have any doubt of that. Without the sightings I’d definitely have had that doubt.
‘But there are other things too. I never hear, now, that magnificent, cathedral bell-like call that I once heard. There’s a graph and it’s downwards. It’s very sad to me, but it’s disappearing. You no longer hear that call and we may never hear it again.
‘It is the most beautiful call I’ve ever heard from any bird here or anywhere else, like the Amazon or Himalayan jungles. It is like a violin being tuned through a whole different range of frequencies, in the most divine spiritually wonderful way imaginable to the human ear. The cathedral bongs, loud, resonant, are truly hypnotising. They can toll for minutes at a time with surreal effects on the listener. I realised, I have to save this bird, because there is no bird in the world with such a remarkable call, even the North Island kokako. So the huge obsession for me was to save this bird from extinction.
‘Then I heard the term “functionally extinct”, not being able to save the bird for the next generations. It has dwelled with me, and now I’ve got to give up my obsession because I’m dealing with something that cannot be saved for future generations. It’s really, really sad. Such a grand scale of sadness.’
I’m not sure which is more sad, the disappearance of the South Island kokako or the failure of a lifetime’s quest.
Then: ‘The frustration, the psychological side of it, but you know, it only stops you at a point in time. A few weeks later I’m raring to get back there.’
Where?
‘Well, Lake Fraser possibly.’
I look it up. It is a tiny lake beside West Cape, in the deepest, most remote recesses of Fiordland, wedged between Chalky Inlet and Dusky Sound: untracked, dense, difficult country with deeply incised gullies; all but impenetrable; tight, wet vegetation; so rainy the possums won’t go in there and eat the mistletoe because they don’t like getting their fur wet; no beech mast to attract the rats; out of the reach of earthbound human beings — a fine habitat for kokako.
Rhys seems to put on hold his plan to give up his quest.
A float plane could get in there . . .
9
Going south
South Cape is a mystical place. Even when you’re there, you’re not quite sure where you are. Capes of the imagination have cliffs, rocks, turbulence, storms. Real capes have more. They’re fearful. Capes have a desolate feeling, where something ends and something else begins.
South Cape marks the end of mainland New Zealand, and that, as they say, is as far as it goes. There’s not much else in those southern latitudes, except for the loneliest bits of Argentina and Chile, such as Cape Horn. Oh, South Cape doesn’t lack turbulence and storms. As for the rest, well, we’ll come to that.
South Cape is not much visited. Overland it’s a long and difficult hike down the length of Stewart Island. It’s hardly better by sea, when it’s much, much preferable to stay well away from it. South Cape does not entice you to come ashore. North Cape is a positive tourist trap by comparison.
Murphy Island, hardly more than a rock, lies a little to the west and about a hundred metres further south than South Cape, so just as North Cape is not the most northern part of New Zealand, neither is South Cape the furthest south.
Captain Cook rounded it on 9 March 1770, having mapped Stewart Island as a peninsula, although he believed there was probably a passage making it an island and le
ft his chart incomplete. An American sealer sailed through it in 1804, and Foveaux Strait appeared on European maps. Maori, of course, always knew about it. Their ancestor Kiwa tired of walking the isthmus between Rakiura and the mainland, and asked the whale Kewa to chew a channel so he could cross by waka.
Some, although not Cook himself, believed that the coastline the Endeavour had been following might be part of the great southern continent Cook had been ordered to find.
The hopes of the continentalists, who included the wealthy botanist Joseph Banks, who accompanied Cook, foundered on South Cape. If New Zealand ended there, it could hardly be part of a continent. That theory, Banks conceded, was demolished.
The ship rounded the southernmost tip of New Zealand and found clear water ahead. New Zealand was a chain of islands, and judging from the huge swell coming up from the south, no significant land lay down there either.
The crew celebrated the turning-point with a Tahitian dog stew, although they might have drunk to a narrow escape, one which could have wrecked the Endeavour along with the continental theory.
Cook had his latitude, or his distance to the south right, but his longitude, on those imaginary lines running from Pole to Pole, was more difficult to calculate. In fact, when Cook thought he was a safe distance to the west of that rocky tip, he was just about on it.
So a great deal of mystique cloaked that lonely point. At a certain, restless stage of my writing career I was thinking about parts of New Zealand I’d never been to. I thought of South Cape, and West Cape too. Oh all right, they were hardly places most New Zealanders wanted to tick off their bucket lists. But few people had been to either of them.
The chance to visit South Cape came when photographer Bruce Connew and I decided to charter a boat and steam to the bottom of New Zealand. He was interested in titi, or muttonbirds. I was interested in South Cape.
We contacted Colin Gavan, widely known in the far south as Wobbles, and captain of the steel voyager Argus. Certainly he’d take us.
We went down to Riverton, the ancient southern port where the Argus was moored. The boat wasn’t there.
That was not surprising, because a gale was blowing in Foveaux Strait. I’d fished for crayfish down there in my own boat, the Nina, and it seemed to me that a gale was always blowing in Foveaux Strait. We found a motel in Riverton, with a view of the sea (although most of Riverton has a view of the sea) and moved in.
Several days passed. We got to know Riverton, aka Aparima, quite well. It’s a very old town, whose Maori history goes back centuries and its European one to around 1835, when the whaler captain John Howell set up a whaling station there. The town is Southland’s oldest, and one of New Zealand’s most venerable too.
Howell smartly married the daughter of a Kati Mamoe chief and his toehold on the place became a foothold, now set in stone in a memorial near the estuary. Remnants of past grandeur lie all around in civic buildings and grand houses, but for me its main attractions were its perfect fishing port, and the Aparimu Tavern.
New Zealand’s old fishing ports are dwindling, in size and number. The graceful wooden fishing boats are disappearing, along with some of the ports themselves, as fishing becomes harder and more specialised. The fishing boats were going from Riverton too, one by one. But then, Riverton had that feeling of people who had lived where they worked for all of their lives, and their parents’ and grandparents’ lives too, the feeling of comfortable belonging, of solidity and respect and care for each other in a climate which was not a common enemy but just part of their lives. All nonsense, of course. For stress, anger, conflict and bloody-mindedness the town is probably the same as any other. But I wandered about, enjoying the fiction. The rest of the time I spent in the Aparimu Tavern, which looked over the red river flats to the hills and was warm and friendly and comforting.
And one morning, when we looked out of the window, beyond the river bar where the wind whipped the tops off waves and threw them high into the air, the Argus lay waiting for the tide so it could enter the estuary.
Wobbles didn’t mess around. Fuel, water, food, beer. He wanted to go. What about the weather? ‘I don’t give a damn about it,’ he said, with the nonchalance of a man used to the stormy south. We didn’t share his calm. But we looked at the gale, and the iron-grey of the strait, and the frowning cloud, and followed him with the faith of disciples.
Back over the bar we went, and headed for the top end of Stewart Island, then a black hulk on the horizon looking nothing like its Maori name, Rakiura, ‘isle of the glowing skies’. All that was glowing was the light at the end of the tunnel in our minds. I fondly believed it would lead us out of the darkness and storm and, yea, unto calm and safety.
The Argus ploughed on solidly. Sure enough, the waters calmed into a greasy swell. Near Herekopare Island we stopped and threw cod lines over the side, big hooks with chunks of bait sinking into deep green water mysterious as space. Women’s Island lay behind us, Jacky Lee beside. Ruapuke bulked in the dusk.
Not far from here in 2006 the fishing vessel Kotuku, returning to Bluff with muttonbirders, was hit by two big waves in quick succession. She rolled, trapping three people in her hull. Another three died too, three more surviving after swimming to Women’s Island. Three generations of the Topi whanau were among the dead. I imagined the sense of terror, the panic, the disbelief of betrayal in home waters so familiar.
On that evening all we had on our minds was what to have for dinner. The crew were reluctant to eat fish, because they had a venison stew on the stove, and who wanted plain old blue cod? We did, of course, for the further up the mainland you went, the harder and more expensive it was to get, and blue cod was becoming as much a rare New Zealand delicacy as oysters. Its beautiful white flesh was always the best fish I’d tasted.
The cod didn’t know anything about scarcity. They struck the bait as soon as it was down, while the Argus idled in the swell and its big engine rumbled. In these latitudes fishermen didn’t need patience. If the fish didn’t bite immediately, the boat moved on.
In no time at all, we had all the fish we could eat aboard, lying blue-green on the deck, their mouths looking just like several discontented people I knew.
The crew hooked into their venison stew. Bruce and I tucked into a stack of cod fillets. When I was a crayfisherman, we’d eaten crayfish for the first day or two, then got so sick of it we didn’t touch it for the rest of the trip. Sometimes a helicopter would arrive overhead and lower a leg of venison. We’d fill a bag with crayfish and send it up. We thought we got the better of the deal. So the Argus’s crew stuck to their venison stew, while we ate blue cod every way we could think of: fried, battered, curried, chowdered.
We headed south. The long southern dusk cloaked the islands, and golden beaches were conjured for us through the gloom, and reefs, and little peninsulas topped with bush so dark it seemed part of the sea.
The barometer was still falling, but we knew that down here anything could happen and, as the old saying goes, it usually did. Cape petrels followed the boat, and mollymawks with their fierce eyes and precise markings, Mother Carey’s chickens, and sometimes even a royal albatross. Darkness gradually covered them, until they were strange shapes appearing in the gleam of the navigation lights then vanishing.
We sailed on, in the dark now, the ship rolling, white crests flashing in the black like phantoms, sometimes a seabird arcing through the lights, passing Chew Tobacco Point, Weka Island, the welcoming mouth of a refuge called Port Adventure.
Some time that night, much later, the murk took on a peculiar quality and the phantoms began leaping so earnestly I realised we were heading straight for a cliff. Mark, the crewman, went up to the bow with a torch. It may have been some comfort to the captain, but not to us, for it played over black rock and the waves became frenzied and surely we were all bound for the bottom the hard way.
Magically (for so much down here had the sorcerer’s touch) the cliffs opened. The frenzy slipped behind us, yelling and
booing in the gloom. We sailed in calm water into the peace of Port Pegasus and the captain stared ahead, turning this way then that way, without any purpose apparent to the passengers gazing blindly around, until the boat seemed to be copying one of those strange Victorian dances where people wove and stepped and bowed in a choreography that had no purpose other than grace.
And we went to sleep without so much as a wayward ripple to disturb us.
I was woken next morning by the captain murmuring stories and imitating the kaka’s rough squawk and telling of a tunnel through the rock, once used by Maori to watch early Europeans anchored in exactly the spot we were in now.
We were deep in Port Pegasus, the water like glass. We were surrounded by islets, and rocks, and the passage into them looked dark as a dream, and forever after (for I’ve run into Wobbles several times since) I have wondered about the particular kind of necromancy that got us there.
In the admirable New Zealand Railways Magazine, Rosalind Redwood wrote of Port Pegasus:
It is so remote that few people other than fishermen ever see its glories, and yet its arms of placid waters, shut off from the rougher seas by bushy walls of protection, are capable of holding the whole of the British fleet with ease . . . But alas, so far out of the way!
Which might have been significant given the date of publication, September 1939, the beginning of World War II.
Sealers and whalers worked out of this harbour, gold miners worked the creeks around it, tin miners tunnelled into its rocks, and Port Pegasus once boasted a hotel.
Now, here’s the thing about Stewart Island. The excellent name Rakiura was discarded by the colonists, who preferred to name it after one Captain Stewart. Descriptions of Stewart run from romantic to rat, possibly because several Captain Stewarts were roaming the coast at the time (one of them carrying Te Rauparaha’s war party south to massacre Ngai Tahu in Akaroa harbour). This particular Stewart left a party of men in Port Pegasus building a boat in a bay now named Ship-builders Cove while he sailed to Sydney with a cargo of seal skins and oil. One report said he was arrested in Sydney and thrown into jail.