Off the Radar

by Te Radar

  In some ways it’s remarkably similar to filming Off the Radar.

  In the late 1700s, Europe ran on the fat of the sea. Whale blubber, sliced off and melted in vast vats, provided the oil for lamps and candles, street lighting, and the lubrication of machinery. Whales produced a very fine oil that could be used to lubricate the mechanisms of the new-fangled pocket watches and clocks. In many ways we could say that the whale was the innocent victim of the tyranny of the timepiece.

  Whales were also used in the manufacture of other vitally important things, such as the ‘boning’ or framework in women’s corsetry. Juice extracted from their heads was used in perfume, which in Europe at that stage was an essential, as the concept of taking a bath was considered a bit queer. As for the meat, that was allowed to rot.

  Unsurprisingly, the populations of seals and whales declined rapidly.

  Such was the shortage that a diarist on an Australian whaling ship visiting our shores wrote that he witnessed one whale being pursued by 70 whaleboats. It wasn’t only the whale that was endangered in situations such as this. As the whale was claimed by the crew that first harpooned it, those in the leading boats had to be careful they weren’t themselves impaled by harpoons thrown in desperation over their heads by trailing crews. That’d make for a rough day at the office.

  It wasn’t until 21 December 1964, the same year that Coronation Street was first shown on New Zealand television, that the last whale was killed in New Zealand waters. Over the previous years, fewer and fewer whales had been sighted, which was not surprising, because at the same time in the waters of the Antarctic, Japanese, Russian and Norwegian vessels were engaged in wholesale decimation of the remaining stocks, killing tens of thousands.

  Ernst Dieffenbach, the first trained scientist to live and work in New Zealand, summed it up best when he wrote: ‘The shore whalers, in hunting the animal in the season when it visits the shallow waters of the coast to bring forth the young, and suckle it in security, have felled the tree to obtain the fruit.’

  He could have been describing the history of our fishing industry in general.

  Nowadays it’s not the whale that is harvested, but the money from tourists’ wallets as they queue for whale-watching boats to view these mighty leviathans.

  The one time I went whale watching it was one of the most underwhelming experiences of my life to date. We did see a whale, but there was none of the breaching, or slapping of tails, or any other frolicking that you generally see on television. Instead we watched a whale sleeping. It slept on the surface of the ocean for a quarter of an hour, then disappeared again for another 45 minutes, before it reappeared for another nap.

  I mention sealing and whaling for the simple reason that these industries set a precedent for the harvesting of the sea’s resources, where almost every successive venture has featured the exploiting to near-extinction of virtually every species deemed useful. From seals and whales to crayfish, oysters, snapper, toheroa, and any number of other species, supposedly unlimited resources have quickly became very limited ones.

  It wasn’t always obvious this would be the case. Given our current propensity to consume fish, it is hard to believe that when the Europeans first arrived they chose not to eat it.

  Aside from the obvious problems of storing and transporting fish in the days prior to decent roads and refrigeration, in England only those who could not afford meat would eat fish. Eating fish here was considered to be a reminder of the poverty they had escaped, and generally they eschewed it for red meat, which was cheap and plentiful. When they did eat fish, it was in forms they recognised: imported salted herrings and canned fish from the UK. It seems that food miles were not an issue then.

  It’s ironic that given the high prices of seafood today, a diet high in fish will make you poor.

  As stocks of one species become depleted, other species are targeted. At one stage attention turned to a fish that had been so loathed by fishermen that they referred to it as the ‘slimehead’. The Japanese were even more disparaging, christening it the ‘diarrhoea fish’ and refusing to eat it. However, when some bright spark realised that the fish could be made edible by removing a waxy layer from underneath the skin, it transformed itself from an annoying by-catch to the most expensive fish on offer.

  Rebranded by marketing folk as the ‘orange roughy’, it was hauled from great depths in vast quantities, until it was realised that the fish was a slow breeder, taking up to 20 years to reach maturity, and that breeding stocks had been decimated. It is now considered by some to be in the worst state of any of the fish stocks we harvest.

  I am glad Swampy and I are not on the hunt for diarrhoea fish.

  I watch as he guts the flounder in the blink of an eye. I try to follow, but it’s all a bit too fast. A quick slice with his knife, a deft flick of his wrist to extricate the guts, and it’s done.

  ‘Don’t just stand there gawking, get rid of those snotties,’ he says.

  The snotties are the jellyfish that are caught in the net. As their colloquial name suggests, they look as if someone with a rather bad cold has sneezed into the net. There are dozens of them. Cold and mucusy, they slosh around underfoot until I grab a bucket and bail them out over the side.

  Turning to roll another cigarette, Swampy looks at me and says, ‘Well, you’re not a complete disaster.’

  High praise indeed.

  18

  The goats are wild

  It’s not often that you stop what you’re doing and think to yourself, ‘You know, I hadn’t really anticipated when I got up this morning that I’d end up with my hand stuck in a goat.’

  I am not a fan of hunting goats. Don’t get me wrong—it’s not that I don’t think they should be hunted. It’s just that I have always found them incredibly frustrating to hunt.

  Goats love hills. I do not like hills. Goats have no problem scaling them at great speed and with remarkable nimbleness. I can barely drag myself up them, sweating and huffing and crawling on all fours.

  Matt the butcher, who I last saw when we went pig hunting, has offered to take me to one of his mate’s farms to hunt goats.

  John’s place turns out to be one of the nicest farms I have ever seen, a large beef-raising block that wraps itself around a tributary of the northern Kaipara.

  The block has a small mob of feral goats that were present when John moved there, but he’s since brought some larger goats from up north and introduced them to the herd in the hope that romance will blossom between the mobs. The resulting kids will be bigger and meatier. He continues to allow the goats to range freely, shooting a few whenever they need dog tucker.

  Along with the goats, there are roaming mobs of feral pigs, and John ensures that a healthy breeding population remains by having safe havens where hunting is banned, so that the sows can raise their litters in peace. Outside these areas, he and his buddies can hunt them whenever they need more pork.

  Sustainability theorists will say that the game is fed on solar energy because the farmer adds no other ingredients; the sun and rain provide the foliage for the goats and pigs, the dogs eat the goats, and the pigs feed the families all over the district.

  And now some of it is going to feed me.

  I have only ever killed one goat before, and that was a year earlier. To be honest, I didn’t personally kill it; a Dogon medicine man in a village in Mali did the actual slaughtering. All I had to do was tell him what purpose I wanted the goat sacrificed for, and pay for his shamanic services and the goat (although I suspect the New Zealand taxpayer actually paid this, as the cash came out of the Intrepid Journeys budget).

  As we stood in his small courtyard, surrounded by various shrines and totems, he held the goat down and asked me what it was I wanted from the sacrifice.

  I said I wished not to be killed by a hippopotamus and for good ratings for the programme.

  These may seem trivial to you, but I was about to head up the Niger River for several days, and the hippopotamus is the most
dangerous animal in Africa (if you don’t count the mosquito, which kills more people than anything else).

  The priest murmured an incantation, then slit the goat’s throat.

  There sure is a lot of blood in a goat.

  Afterwards the medicine man got to keep the carcass of the goat, as its flesh is considered sacred and could only be consumed by him and his medicine-men chums.

  Those of you without any belief in the protection afforded by this ritual may scoff and say that all I did was pay for their dinner, but I wasn’t killed by a hippopotamus, and the programme rated very well, so maybe the goat didn’t die in vain.

  Who can tell? You can’t be too careful, I say.

  There is very little in the way of ritual while we are hunting goats at John’s farm, other than my application of sunscreen. Sunscreen always worries me. I have no idea what it contains, but I slather it on by the litre, as my fear of sun-inflicted cancer is greater than the possibility that I may contract something from all the chemicals in the sunscreen. It simply seems the lesser of two evils, especially as the sun only needs to rise above the horizon and I become a lighter shade of puce.

  It is certainly a day that requires sunscreen—a glorious midsummer day that envelops us in a hot, dry heat, the kind of heat that screams GO INSIDE AND LIE DOWN AT ONCE! It is most certainly not the kind of heat in which I wish to scale hills.

  In order to minimise the hill climbing, I am equipped with something that will hopefully negate the need to be too close to the goats, namely a large-calibre rifle containing steel-jacketed shells that pack a mighty wallop over a fair old distance.

  John thinks the goats will be near the back of the farm, grazing in the shade of the mangroves. Sure enough, from the brow of the hill we can see a small herd meandering through the trees at the water’s edge, grazing as they go.

  John, Matt, Matt’s two boys, Philippa the camerawoman, Frank the soundman, Jane the director, and I all sneak down the side of the hill. We are hardly the most surreptitious bunch, and by the time we get to where the goats have been, the goats have gone.

  John selflessly climbs the steep hill again to see if they are over the other side, signals that they are, and then the ordeal I suspected would happen does happen. What follows is an infernal hour of climbing up and down precipitous hills in an attempt to head off the goats.

  Leaving the crew, I clamber up the slope as John gestures from a wearingly distant ridge that they are just over the next hill. This comes as no surprise to me, because in my experience goats are always just over the next hill.

  Popping my head up above the ridge, I catch a fleeting glimpse of the gently swishing tail of a goat vanishing around the next bend. Up and down I drag myself, but the goats prove elusive. It is made worse by the fact that they aren’t even climbing the hills, but sauntering along the bottom.

  On the positive side, the scenery is magnificent. From the ridge-lines I can see the Kaipara stretching away south like a great silver smear. The river that borders the farm is like a mirror. Birds sing their songs of summer. Cicadas chirp. Cattle stare at me as I pass them. Blowflies drone lazily around the cattle’s dung and my feet, which seem to have an inability to avoid said dung. The only thing that tarnishes the tranquillity is the thumping of my racing heart and the ragged, gasping breathing of my lungs.

  I suspect one of the reasons this country revered Sir Edmund Hillary so much was that none of us can be bothered climbing hills, and we were happy to bask in his reflected mountaineering glory.

  Finally I am in position. At least I hope I am. I honestly believe that if I have to climb another hill, I will pass out. This will be bothersome, as I will probably roll back down the hill in my unconscious state, and then I will have to climb all the way back up again.

  Sitting in a hollow near the brow of the hill, I wait, basking in the sun, as the goats clamber up the slope towards me.

  After a short while, the faint sound of goat snickering drifts up the hill, and within moments the first head appears over the rise, about 70 metres from where I am lying. Within seconds there is another, then another. They are no doubt enjoying the summer day as much as I am, unaware they are in mortal peril.

  There is always a delicate balance in situations like this. You have to decide how long to wait, and how close you can let them come towards you, in order to make the shot easier and increase the chance of bagging more than one, before they catch wind of you and flee.

  There is also the question of which of them I want to shoot. I abhor this part of the process.

  I’d hate for you to think that this is an entirely enjoyable experience. After all, the goat, like the other animals I am required to hunt, is a beautiful creature. They are so cute and funny looking with their big floppy ears and their swooshy little tails and the quizzical looks in their big yellow eyes.

  I certainly don’t want to bag an old buck, as they are tough to eat, and their manliness pervades their flesh, rendering it pungent and foul tasting. There are several large, tender-looking kids, and a few small females in the group. Sadly for them, I need to eat, and they have the misfortune of being the best eating.

  Spread-eagled under the sun, the dry grass aromatic but prickly beneath me, I scan the group through the telescopic sight of the rifle, trying to figure out which goats I want. Normally I would be satisfied with just one, but I have plans to secure a couple for a special project.

  In the end I simply decide to go for a good-sized nanny, and also for a large white kid with a ginger splodge on its side, because it looks as if it will make the best rug.

  Taking careful aim at the female, I squeeze the trigger, and watch as she bolts forward several paces, stops, looks about quizzically with her big yellow eyes, and falls over.

  As the sound of the shot reverberates across the hill and the mob erupts, I shoot the little ginger goat as it turns to run. The rest of the goats disappear over the hill in a cloud of dust and flicking tails to live another day.

  All that remains is to dress the goats. Or undress them as the case may be. In the cool of a grove of trees, we throw a rope over a branch and haul them up.

  Skinning them is a rather physical task. At one stage, as I insert my fist between the goat and its skin in order to punch it free, my hand gets jammed. Struggling to free it, I nearly fall over and end up hugging the swinging carcass of the goat. Matt finds this hilarious. He’s already mocked me for shooting the smaller goat in the butt. I didn’t. I shot it through the rump as it turned to run away. The rump. Not the butt.

  With the carcasses skinned and gutted it’s back to Matt’s butchery to render them into their constituent parts. I want boned roasts, shanks, chops, and a large pile of the rest of the meat for my special project.

  With the goats broken down, I leave with them in boxes. They are certainly much easier to handle this way. And the total bill for the entire procedure? Two goats shot and butchered for the princely sum of a lunch at the farm for Matt and his family.

  A few days later, armed with a pile of goat meat and a large pork haunch in a bucket, I’m knocking on the door of Salumeria Fontana in Hoteo North, southwest of Wellsford, where master butcher Greg Scopas lovingly creates gourmet sausages.

  Greg has volunteered to help me turn my goat into something a little more exotic—salami.

  ‘Have you ever made goat salami before?’ I ask him.

  ‘No,’ says Greg, ‘and depending on how this works out, I might not make it again.’

  I can understand his sentiments. There is an unmistakable, almost overpowering aroma of goat in the air. It has a musky feralness to it, although after a day’s exertions the same could be said of me.

  When I moved to Henderson a few years ago, a chum and I were comparing butchers, and he’d remarked that he’d heard of a fantastic sausage-maker whose premises were located somewhere near my house. I never managed to track down this Shangri-la of sausages, and it had been a source of much annoyance.

  As I get chatting to Gre
g, I discover that he is that elusive sausage-maker.

  How serendipitous.

  It is little wonder I couldn’t find him as he had relocated to his olive orchard in Hoteo North, where he now runs an olive press and his sausage-making empire. The sausages are made by hand and are robust and meaty, based on the French, Italian, and Spanish style of sausage.

  Greg’s is yet another of the many businesses I have encountered whilst filming Homegrown and Off the Radar that began as a passion and progressed to successful enterprises. He’d begun making sausages as a hobby, and had heard that someone in Henderson was selling a commercial sausage-making machine. It turned out to be located at a disused sausage factory, so he bought the machine and the factory.

  ‘Do you ever eat a sausage-sizzle sausage?’ I ask him.

  ‘Sometimes I give them a try,’ he says with a laugh.

  ‘Ever thought of doing a gourmet cheese sizzler?’

  ‘No.’

  Over the course of the next hour we mince the goat and pig together, which unbelievably serves only to increase the heady aroma of the goat meat. This mince is then combined with garlic from Invercargill, French chilli powder, Sicilian sea salt, South Australian wine, and a few other spices, and crammed into a metre-long piece of pig intestine. As great as the salamis look and smell, all I can see is my carefully reduced food miles going out the window.

  Hanging the multitude of salamis that we have fashioned in the curing room, Greg explains the ethos behind his gourmet sausage and olive oil business. ‘It’s pretty simple, Radar. If you want a quality product, you use quality ingredients.’

  ‘Exactly,’ I say, ‘and what could be better than free-range wild goat?’

  ‘Well…pretty much anything, I imagine,’ he replies. Good one, Greg.

  19

  Birds of a feather