Islands of the Gulf

by Shirley Maddock

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Rakino Island

  FINAL 10 ACRE BLOCK RELEASE YOUR LAST CHANCE ETC.

  This advertisement in an Auckland newspaper of March 1965 offered not an island but chunks of one, with no rates to pay, no “local body problems”, riparian rights as far as mean high water mark and prices which ranged from £2,500 to £6,000; a long way from the days when entire and much larger islands sold for empty casks, a few pairs of trousers and a brace of muskets.

  Rakino has been fitfully in the news ever since 1963 when a small paragraph announced that the United Peoples’ Organisation (World-wide) Incorporated had bought it and proposed setting up a philanthropic community there. Subsequent articles raised free-wheeling conjectures such as: was it true Rakino meant to seek United Nations protection and independent statehood; or, if twelve miles were insufficiently distant to fly your own flag, might it still be far enough to dispense with New Zealand’s inelastic liquor laws, open a duty free store, or indulge in the picking of oysters, a privilege vested solely in the Department of the Marine? Dr Maxwell Rickard, owner of the island and president of the U.P.O., made no comment on the more fantastic rumours and the nucleus of a community settled there to develop a tourist resort which eventually would finance their philanthropic aims.

  I had missed seeing these first intimations of an island Utopia. All I had read was an advertisement for a boarding-house and I took a quiet holiday there in January 1964. I had had to look on a map to see where Rakino was and I found it in the central waters of the Hauraki Gulf, not far from an uninhabited group called the Noises and close enough to its nearest neighbour, Motutapu, to have shared the clouds of volcanic ash from Rangitoto in eruption. When the week was over I went back to the mainland determined to explore further in the Gulf.

  Rakino holds within its small compass the classical form of the Hauraki islands, whose promontories and headlands and little offshore islets repeat themselves again and again, worn by a prevailing pattern of wind and tide. Since I first knew Rakino, more than half of it has been sold in sections and blocks, a network of roads has been formed, the first of the summer cottages been ferried down by barge and in Home Bay some elderly farm buildings have been smartened up and converted to a coffee shop, a post office and a well stocked general store.

  The plans for Rakino have been somewhat altered by circumstance. The humanitarian work Dr Rickard and his organisation intend was to be put into practice much sooner. The plans include a clinic for disturbed and nervous patients, an international orphanage, a refuge for unmarried mothers and homes for the elderly, all to be based on Rakino. Now it is to have a much larger hotel, the role of which will be to earn money. The good works will be undertaken later and in an as yet undisclosed location.

  Rakino’s size, an acre for each day in the year, meant that you could comfortably pace it out within an afternoon. I would set out across the paddocks for the highest point, about 200 feet or so above the sea, follow a valley down again and crunch along the stony bays until I found another hill to climb. Rakino has some fine pohutukawa but the shore, as everywhere else does now, suffers from the indestructibility of plastic. The old beaver dams of flotsam — driftwood and glass the sea has pounded into gem-like fragments — are littered now with the gaudy colours and impervious skins of plastic containers.

  I met no one on my walks that first week. The other people staying at the boarding house were out fishing or bathing in the nearer bay. One day I scrambled round a point and thought I saw a white magnolia in blossom on the steep bank, but it was a pohutukawa drowned in bird droppings. The flowers were hundreds of perching shags, whose white breasts had looked from the distance like huge folded buds.

  And I lay for hours in the warm grass, looking along a toppled line of fence posts to the boulders, caught fast in rings of bright water; at the rough carpets of lichen, the eyebrow tufts of sedge and sea grass and the dense fields and thickets and forests of oysters, leeched on to every inch of rock and, when that was used, leeched on to one another.

  Rakino has only one real beach, a nice little rough white bowstring, christened with all our Anglo-Saxon dullness, Sandy Bay. I had it almost to myself that long hot week in January, except for a pair of sandpipers, little brownish creatures on scurrying threadlike legs. They had fecklessly laid their single egg, not in a nest, but in a shallow dip of shingle, and if I went too close they shrilled, whistled and limped away with frantically dragging wing. One late afternoon I heard a cheep no louder than a grain of sand rubbing on another. The chick had hatched. It swayed between the broken halves of egg and attempted the nearer ridge which loomed before it like a mountain. It climbed up, rested and then staggered on to try another, the parents proudly urging and leading, but never helping. As its strength grew, the chick explored further. When he was three days old his parents trusted me enough to forego the pantomime of the broken wing and let me watch him. Then on the fourth day they were gone. I searched for them and called, but they never came back and I worried that a hawk had taken them. Yet would it have seized all the family? I comforted myself with the thought that the sandpipers had simply moved because one more person on the beach had made it common.

  Sandy Bay is almost a lagoon, with a scrap of an island lying athwart it. I used to paddle out on my airbed. I made slow progress as I let the current take me while I looked down to the bottom, through wavering beams of light, at hedgehog clumps of sea eggs, strings of weed like yellow poppit beads and startling patches of greenish-white sand. It was so calm that, if I dragged my hand along, the little wake was barely broken all the way to shore. All the Hauraki islands have smaller replicas of themselves anchored alongside. A few of these have names, dismal things like Rabbit or Rat or Flat — the Maori name has been forgotten — but this little island was named Tuatara after a tuatara lizard supposed to have been set free here fifty or sixty years ago. No one has seen him since, or found a burrow or caught him basking on the warm stones of his preserve.

  This first look at Rakino was deliberately on the solitary side. When I had had my holiday it was time to do more than watch the sandpipers and wonder about a tuatara lizard. There were questions to be answered. Who, for instance, had built the homestead which now served as a tourist lodge? Who had planted the orchard and built the stock pens on the shore and marooned a rusty boiler in the bay?

  Sir George Grey, who twice ruled New Zealand as governor and once as premier, bought Rakino in 1862. He ordered trees, had the framework of a house started and then lost interest when Kawau became available and he made that his island home instead. The 1860s were hard times in New Zealand and especially so in the Auckland province which was more deeply affected by the Waikato Wars than the rest of the colony. The government brought prisoners of war to Auckland and then was at a loss to decide where to put them. Some were locked up in hulks at anchor in the harbour and a small party were settled at Rakino. They were provided with all the necessities (except a boat) to make a frugal living, a house was built, they were given a few head of stock, a plough and a pair of horses. But the experiment failed — banishment was an unbearable hurt for the Waikatos. There is an entry in the Appendices to the House of Representatives Journal which says, “Ihaka did not thrive much on the island, and died there, it is presumed, of homesickness and a broken heart.”

  In 1874 a man called Albert Sanford leased the island and later bought it from Sir George Grey. He and his family lived there for nearly eighty years. He was a fisherman and one of the founders of Auckland’s commercial fishing fleet. Gilbert Sanford, a younger son, farmed the island until 1958 and he lives now in retirement on the mainland.

  “Dad started on his own,” he told me. “There were no powered boats, they were out in all weather, working with handlines, and then they rowed their catch up to Auckland. Twelve miles with a dinghy full of wet fish. Then they sold them on the steps of the Queen Street wharf, three good fish for a shilling. The Maoris used to be squatting on the wharf too, selling flax kits of p
eaches and kumara.”

  Albert had his sons to help him and he employed other men as well who lived with their families. They were clearing the land too and starting to farm.

  “Spread drayloads of fish manure on those hills — we were never short of offal” and Gilbert Sanford screwed up his nose at the memory of it. On hot days you could smell Rakino’s richly manured fields all over the Gulf. They built ti-tree racks along the beach, slung the schnapper on them to dry in the sun and then exported them all the way to China.

  The homestead was built of kauri logs rafted up from Mercury Bay on the Coromandel Peninsula and was added to as the family of eleven children were born.

  “At one time there was enough of us on the island — with the family, the fishermen and a few odd visitors — to raise both sides for a football game.”

  The morning we sailed down to Rakino to start filming, our prospects looked glum. We were to meet Dr Rickard at the Queen Street steps (where they used to sell schnapper) and it was raining in torrents. Glumly we went aboard and as glumly watched the docks recede and miraculously the rain receded too. As the sun rose higher so did our spirits.

  Dr Rickard waved his hand towards Motutapu and prophesied it would be a suburb in another thirty years.

  Dr Rickard is tall, thin, his face dark and sardonic, and with a manner ranging from deliberate intensity to a puckish “I’ll show them” sort of good humour. He is New Zealand born, served in the air force during the war and his doctorates in psychology and philosophy are from American universities. He has practised in Wellington as a clinical psychologist and a hypno-therapist; he has owned a nightclub, toured as a professional hypnotist billed as the Great Ricardo and as well he has recorded several educational records which enjoyed a brisk sale, especially one with the surefire title of “Love, Sex and Marriage”.

  “I hope the fish will be running,” remarked a middle-aged fisherwoman as she ran a loving finger down her line.

  We hoped the sun would stay shining.

  Once you have made a film, you see the location ever afterwards in the manner it was photographed. That morning the rain stayed well to the west, the sun climbed the washed sky and we tied up at the long wharf to greetings from guests at the lodge and full-time islanders. There was Adrienne Hargreaves, a slim, pretty Australian who is secretary of the United Peoples’ Organisation, her thirteen-year-old sister Rosemary and Jack Jeffs, a builder by trade, who came to live at Rakino. On our last visit a year later, some new faces had been added, several young men and women who helped in the running of the lodge, the store and the coffee shop.

  The orchard beside the old house grows right down to the beach. There is a windmill, nice old-fashioned sorts of apples and plums, which still grow in the Gulf but hardly anywhere else, and a remarkable apricot tree. I have heard a theory that apricots only thrive in gold-bearing soil and in New Zealand the best apricots do grow in the gold-bearing soil of Central Otago and at Thames down on the Coromandel. The reefs on the Coromandel Peninsula have been traced under the sea and gold has been found at Ponui, at Great Barrier and at Kawau which is not so many miles from here. The Rakino apricot bears well despite its great age and a trunk shored up with concrete thirty years ago to choke an attack of borer.

  At Rakino I first saw a brilliant coral coloured amaryllis which, I discovered, grows on almost every island in the Gulf, even at Cuvier, the remotest of all. I have never found it on the mainland until I brought a root home for our garden.

  The cowbails are in the orchard and twice a day Rosemary drove the cows through to be milked. She is the only child living there and, like thousands of others too far from a school, she does her lessons by correspondence, with school broadcasts for company and her teachers’ letters for encouragement. Milking the cows was her morning chore before she began her lessons. A Siamese cat called Minty pranced along behind the two flighty young Jerseys and the girl, the cat and the heifers made an antic procession. Rosemary dealt out gentle little spanks until she had coaxed them down a long, dim tacoma-hedged tunnel to the bails and then, like a milkmaid in a storybook, she brought her bucket, a three-legged stool and sat down to begin her work.

  Was she lonely? Did she miss the company of other children? She said not. I have never known an island child admit to loneliness; their lives are too active. The only time the island felt lonely, Rosemary said when she had thought a minute, was when the south-west gales blew on winter nights. “They howl round the house” she said, “and the boards creak and it sounds horrible.”

  Rosemary was doing a project on birds. She had started off with a gannet’s wing and she showed us a book full of drawings and notes and glued-in feathers and bits of shell. “The wharf’s the best place for watching.”

  The best time was a full tide at noon when the men put out the nets for piper, little silver things like tiny swordfish. The terns were her favourite birds, she said, and she called them Kahawai Gulls as most Gulf people do, because terns track the schools of kahawai and share their feeding grounds. They waited on the rusted boiler someone had dumped in the bay, hovered, retreated, then lightly perched with exquisite flutters of their sickle-shaped wings. Rosemary’s pet brown gull, who had a mended but useless wing, waited on the shore, limping down to the water’s edge, screeching and mewling with all the polish of a professional beggar.

  Rakino’s permanent inhabitants, of whom there were not quite a dozen in February 1965, have not kept remote from the world outside. There is the comfortable lodge filled with comfortable guests — Dorothy, who does the cooking, serves wonderful fish and spicy buns for tea and delectable fruit-salad jam — the shop and the coffee lounge whose customers come and go by boat, a radio telephone, a television set and a ferry on Saturday and Sunday. In another year the island will be dotted with little houses and look perhaps like the suburb Dr Rickard predicted for Motutapu. For the future work of the United Peoples’ Organisation we must, as Mr Asquith said, wait and see.

  * * *

  We sailed one afternoon round the coast of Rakino on a day when sun and sky were especially brilliant. A dozen little boats were at anchor in Woody Bay and there was such a crowd of skin divers that I wondered if it were their annual picnic. They slithered in and out of the water, flippers churning and wielding their spears, then in gelid black suits, with strange back-to-front codpieces, they sprawled on the rocks like sleek, wet seals. How odd it looked to see a seal smoking.

  We left the seals behind and rounded the Three Sisters, Rakino’s attendant islets, their miniature peaks tufted with ti-tree and pine, and bearing down across the horizon were a scattering of sails no bigger than feathers. They belonged to thirty or forty keelers on a Saturday race round the Gulf with the islands for markers.

  They came skimming down the wave tops in a high sou’ wester, so fast they might have been summoned out of air. Their great spinnakers filled and nearly burst their lungs, ice white or Viking striped in orange and scarlet, black and blue and green.

  They were upon us, around us and then, in a splendid, full-bellied cavalcade, sped on down the channel, until their sails had shrunk again to feathers and only their streaming wakes remained to prove that they were real.

  * * *

  If you truly wished to exchange the world for a Crusoe’s life, then the Noises would be the place. I look out towards them from home. I can see two; Motuhoropapa, which is in fact a rocky little trio of islands, and Maria, like a fat, lonely tortoise with an unmanned light on her hump. As well there are the David Rocks, others with the jolly name of Ahahaha and Otata, the largest island. A retired harbour pilot called Captain Wainhouse and his wife used to live on Otata. Their weatherboard cottage still stands at the head of the only beach. Captain Wainhouse cut tracks through the scrub and marked them with signposts, he planted the bananas and phoenix palms which give it a tropic look and he had pet crabs in the rock pools round the island who came when he whistled them. As the Wainhouses had no radio telephone, the only means by which they could reach
the world was to light a bonfire on the beach. The keepers at Tiri Tiri used to keep an eye out for them.

  I had always thought the Noises’ collective name was onomatopoeic and derived from the booming of the waves and the wind roaring through the caves which fret the islands’ rugged coasts. But there is another explanation which an Auckland journalist and bookseller, Mr Robert Goodman, gave me. From a distance the islands look like a handful of pebbles, but to an early French navigator they were more like a handful of nuts, so he wrote “Noisettes” on the chart. Time has rubbed off the Frenchness and the name has become the Noises.

  No one has lived here since Captain Wainhouse died, only the watchful colonies of shags who fly shrieking from the caves or perch on the skeletal branches of a killed pohutukawa, where they nest and sit like sentinels watching for fish, preening their plumage on the topmost branch and spreading their broad black wings against the sun.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Kawau

  “We entered the Shouraki Gulf in the middle of the day, the wind from the south west. We landed in a cove about two o’clock, where we dined and proceeded to the next island on the west side of the river and went ashore for the night. I felt a grateful mind to the God of the Seas and the Dry Land who had conducted us in safety thus far while on the bosom of the great deep and before we retired to rest we united in offering up our evening sacrifice of prayer and thanksgiving to him who holdest the waters in the hollow of his hand and whose presence fills the Heavens and the Earth.”

  The “next island” was Kawau. The Reverend Samuel Marsden made this entry in his journal on 2nd November, 1820, and the next day he took his reckless bearing on the eastern tip of Rangitoto which so greatly alarmed his friend Mr Butler. Marsden never suggests in his account of their journey that they were looking for converts, so they may have welcomed the absolute stillness which greeted them in the morning. Not a soul did they find on Kawau to whom they could proclaim the Word.