Islands of the Gulf

by Shirley Maddock

  Only twelve miles lie between Port FitzRoy where we had been staying and Little Barrier, yet for some time it seemed to draw no nearer. It was ten o’clock when we sailed close to the foot of the cliffs, dwarfed by their size and not their equal as we had been in the amphibian. The beach we had also seen from the air and from the side of a small launch the heavy boulders arranged in a jutting terrace assumed their proper proportion. Close-packed and noisily rubbing shoulders in the water, they lay like giant eggs or meteors. A black sheepdog barked and pranced. Anne Blanshard and her four children were waiting to meet us and Rodger Blanshard, the ranger of Little Barrier, came rowing out to the launch.

  When you arrive here you are spared any formal sort of introductions; there is no time for them. We said goodbye to Reg Cooper who had brought us over, hello to Rodger in the dinghy, loaded our gear, got in and Rodger said, “You have to pick the right moment for the wave when you get out, so when I say jump, you jump.”

  So when he said “jump”, we jumped.

  The stones slither treacherously under your feet and the nearest way I can describe the sensation of walking on them for the first time is trying to go up on an escalator that is going down.

  If I start to write about the outspoken and eloquent Blanshard family, I feel all of them looking over my shoulder. They have a strong, possessive feeling for the island and when they knew we regretted our meagre time at Little Barrier, more than anyone they gave us as detailed and concentrated a view of it as was in their power to provide.

  Rodger Blanshard served in the R.N.Z.A.F. during the war and had worked in films and public relations before he exchanged a business career for island administration.

  Anne Blanshard, quick tongued and outspoken, is a dedicated champion of Hauturu. She and her husband were originally city people and greatly alarmed their respective families when they first forsook the mainland by going off to tend lighthouses on various lonely coastal outposts.

  What had impelled them to make this choice? I asked.

  “Because we wanted to” said Anne. “People did accuse us of escapism — they imagine we sit about on an upturned boat all day Getting Back to Nature, which is nonsense.” And she went on to describe what living on an island entails; planning a larder that must make do with a stores boat coming once a fortnight, or less often if the weather is bad and landing impossible. Then there are the children’s correspondence lessons to supervise and scores of visitors to be entertained. In the main these are parties of scientists and students and they come not only from New Zealand, but from many other parts of the world as well.

  Rodger has his diverse job as ranger and official curator of the sanctuary; he looks after the sheep and cattle, maintains the boats, the fences, the electric generator plant and operates the radio telephone which is their only direct link with the outside world.

  Most days Rodger patrols the coastline, looking out for fire or unauthorised landing parties and we went with him. It was not so calm as it had been earlier in the morning and Rodger skilfully steered for the crest, then sped with the wave as it was breaking. He kept close to the shore and the water was clear as ice. We rounded Titoki Point, where three marvellously twisted old pohutukawa cling precariously at its extremity, skimmed along the edge of Te Maraeroa Flat, on beneath the abrupt heights, first of Haowhenua and then of Parihakoakoa, whose name means cliff of the sea hawk. Most of the human activity on Hauturu has taken place on this corner of the island. The marae of Haowhenua Pa extended over several acres that are covered now with rough grass and wiry clumps of pohuehohue, a native shrub with small round leaves and stems like bedsprings. On the sea side of the marae is a platform of stones where the orators of the tribe would have exhorted the young warriors; near Titoki Point are deep trenches where they dragged up the long canoes from the shore, and on a bank at the edge of the sacred grove of Pua Mataahu is a broad hollow where the chief’s house may have stood.

  We came ashore and walked in the grove. It extends for not much more than a hundred yards, the sheep come in to shelter here from the midday heat and the low branches are tufted with scraps of their wool. According to tradition, about the year 1650, a chief called Maki attempted to invade Hauturu. When bad weather forced him and his party off, his younger brother Mataahu made another try and this time they got ashore. Whose was the victory is not known, only that both sides suffered loss and their dead were buried in the grove. This was the battle brought up as evidence in 1886 when the Ngatiwhatua disputed the Ngatitai title to Hauturu and not long ago a greenstone mere was found among the stones where it must have lain for more than three hundred years. The trees spring fanlike from the ground; their sinuous trunks weave and interlace with one another as if they were growing under the sea. Age has reduced some of them to a rotted carapace of fraying bark and there are others in whose central stem tough tangles of aerial roots have plaited themselves like veins. The light spills through their battered crowns with a greenish, eerie brilliance. The tangible solitude of the island is here, the pull of the past and its vanished people.

  * * *

  While I am fond of birds and enjoy looking at them, I am an unskilled birdwatcher and worse still an unlucky one — as you will see when I tell you of a short expedition led by Rodger and David to look for a stitchbird. We started up the slope behind the homestead. Before it became a sanctuary, this part of the island suffered greatly from fires and felling. In the seventy odd years which have elapsed since then, a flourishing belt of manuka has sprung up and the ground is covered with many varieties of fern. The path, not much more than a foot wide, plunged deeper into the bush and, on either side and growing in the crotches of the trees, were flaxen clumps of epiphytes, some of them dangling spires of creamy blossom. Beneath a dank compost of leaves and fallen branches were signs of old Maori habitation, shallow pits for storing water and kumaras, or deep trenches made to be used in time of trouble when the islanders retreated to the forest.

  The sea and the cries of gulls had given place now to the tui and the mocking song of the bellbird, and fantails, which are the most inquisitive of creatures, hopped along beside us or fluttered about our heads. Rodger had a scarlet bird lurer hanging round his neck which he rubbed between finger and thumb while we waited hopefully for a shy stitchbird to appear. We stopped by two giant kauris and waited for our breath to catch us up. We looked at the knothole in a huge old beech and Rodger rapped on the trunk to see if a morepork were at home but he wasn’t.

  Thanks to Sir Walter Buller and my friend Dr Reischek, I knew what a stitchbird would be like if it burst from the bush without warning. Between the two of them they took away a hundred and fifty specimens of stitchbird from Little Barrier.

  “They are not” wrote Reischek “strong on the wing, but very active in hopping and flying. They feed on small berries and insects and suck honey from the native flowers. The male has head and neck of shining black velvet with a few long silvery white ear feathers. Shoulder golden yellow, a slight splash of white under the wing cover. Wings and tail brownish black edged on the outside with olive green. Yellow band round the breast and abdomen greyish brown, black bill and dark brown eyes. His mate is very homely in comparison, she is smaller and an olive brown colour on the top of the head, back, wings and tail. Their cry varies from a peculiar whistle like their name tiora and the female says tac tac tac on different notes.”

  The most common Maori name is hihi; Resichek preferred tiora which was probably a local Ngatiwai name.

  On page 170 of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research Bulletin on Little Barrier (No. 137) there is a summing up of the different phonic interpretations of the stitchbird’s song. Led by Mr R.B. Sibson and party, a conference of lady and gentlemen bird watchers with serious mien and pursed lips ponder the “tzits” and “tsuis” of its repertoire. As well as recent reports, they recall Sir Walter Buller’s version, Dr Reischek’s and those overheard by the late Mr H. Guthrie Smith.

  There is the “toc toc toc”
already mentioned from Reischek and according to Buller “the sharp clicking produced by the female and male, which has a fanciful resemblance to the word STITCH”. Guthrie Smith in his notes of 1925 heard not so much “STITCH” but a more resonant “YPSTT”, but Mr Sibson (1947) would have none of “YPSTT” — to his acuter ear and to his party’s, it was a “TZIT” and an “Explosive TZIT” at that.

  Then a Mr McKenzie, who watched “a rather secretive and agitated female” (but does not say if he were the cause of her secret agitation), believed that as well as “the typical TZIT” the bird had also said “pek pek pek” and all were agreed that is what Reischek thought he had heard as “toc toc toc”. Mr Sibson’s party, with ears scrupulously pricked, heard the male bird in song only once and “a possible twice with the typical TZIT” which finished with the still more typical “TSIU TSIU TSIU”. They were not so lucky as Guthrie Smith who in October 1925 heard not once, but three times, a similar cry which he called “STIT STIT STIT and, as well as the common TZIT, a softer call like a TZEET and a two-note catch like the exuberant bubble song of the bellbird.” On 19th December he heard the melodious warbling of what he took to be a courtship song rendered by “a solitary male in worn plumage at Tirikakawa.”

  A wandering Stitchbird I

  A thing of TSHREDS & YPATCHES

  Of ballad TZONGS and TZNATCHES . . .

  (anon)

  “Any stitchbirds?” asked Anne when we came down again.

  No stitchbirds.

  We had lunch in the garden under a jacaranda tree and, not long before we sat down, the less retiring honey eaters of Little Barrier had been served their rations in a trough made from half a hollow log. When the flowers in the bush have run their season, the trough is filled several times a day with sugar water. The tuis come, the bellbirds, the parakeets and the kakas. As it was early in autumn, enough flowers remained to keep some of the birds away, so I can only imagine what it must be like when they come down in their hundreds. The bellbirds were first; I had never seen them so close before, away from the shelter of the trees and out in the sunlight. I held out the jug of sugar water and one came and perched on the lip of it. His trim little body was clad in olive green shading to a bluish grey, his bright eyes darted from me to the trough and to his fellows. Then he drank from the jug, his long curved beak dipping and sipping with perfect neatness and despatch. The tuis were bold and quick and the air was loud with the taffeta beat of their wings. The sun struck at the iridescence hid in their jetty feathers and burnished the lace of their shoulder mantles and the full curl of white at the throat. Both sides of the trough were black with birds thick as starlings on a town hall roof.

  Rodger, knowing our time was short, with the help of his children had gathered in a number of temporary boarders round the homestead so that even if the stitchbird remained out of sight, we could see some of the island’s equally notable fauna. Giant wetas for a start, or Deinacrida heteracantha. David and Susan had collected a fine pair from an adjacent gully. They are a little larger than a king prawn, their wasp-waisted bodies sheathed in scalloped armour of a chestnut colour that shades on the under-belly to ivory. The female is not only larger than the male; she is bossier and more aggressive. The distaff of this couple was as high-spirited and mean-tempered a matron as you could wish to see and she straddled a branch of puriri, clashing her long elegant legs and pincered nippers at her husband, who cowered and clung like a craven to his end of the branch. I cannot tell you very much about their habits, but I believe that scientists, who make a detailed study of the weta, find the constituents and composition of their droppings of special ingenuity and charm.

  Geckos, the brown skink and a rare species of earthworm, named S. shakespeari after the first caretaker, also live on Little Barrier and one of the most notable inhabitants of all is the tuatara lizard. Tuataras are rarely found on the mainland; they prefer the undisturbed tempo of islands like Stephens in Cook Strait, the Poor Knights, the Hen and Chickens and here on Little Barrier. A pair of them were sunning themselves in a sheltered clearing and posed with the cold heraldic dignity to which their great age entitled them. Except for a faint pulse at the throat and a watchful quality in their full brown eyes, they seemed barely to be living. I looked for traces of the third vestigial eye on their wrinkled foreheads and put out my hand. One let me touch him for a moment, such cold meat on that obese little body with a double line of quills straggling down the back of it. He made no move to escape, then he bared his fangs, darted a skinny tongue from the side of his mouth and he barked. Or croaked would be a better word, as a tuatara sounds like a bass voiced frog or a creaking door. The Maoris regarded their cry as an evil omen. Anne and I risked ill fortune as we crawled about on the ground a little ahead of them and recorded it. No one knows how old tuataras are and for creatures who have survived from some Stone Age afternoon they are surprisingly nimble. Then they had had enough of us; first one with a pat pat of plump little paws and a petulant swish of his tail was off and his companion followed. The audience was over.

  Before dinner one night, Anne showed us the herbarium she is compiling of the plants that grow on Little Barrier. Through the seasons she gathers leaves, flowers, fruit and seeds. She finds some in the wind-scoured herbiage round the margin of the shore, but most are in the bush, the flowers hidden in the banks and mosses. New Zealand flowers have a delicacy you marvel at with a guide like Anne and which you might overlook when an orchid spans perhaps a sixteenth of an inch and an iris has a flower that is smaller than a fly.

  The sun was going down behind the tall, raking arms of the manuka trees on the flat, the sky burnished gold behind their erect and slender branches. We were having a drink and I asked what they disliked most about town when they came ashore and Rodger, without a second’s hesitation, replied “Noise and hard pavements.”

  When you live in the middle of a big city, the noise increases rather than fades at nightfall and you grow used to its steady, homogeneous roar. I lived in New York once, in midtown Manhattan, and I remember waking up one night because suddenly it was so quiet. The first snow had fallen and blocked the streets. On Little Barrier the night sounds lie in distinct levels one beside the other, not muddled. Furthest off is the sea, retreating and advancing over the stones on the shore; from the bush on the hill behind the house comes the hooting of owls; outside the window is the shivery song of the night crickets and another sound I could not determine, a shrill whistle on the same two long notes that was nearly always answered in a higher key but the same tempo. Next morning Anne told me they were kiwis out for their nightly ramble and the two different keys were the male calling to the female.

  It is difficult to imagine a national emblem, as the kiwi has become, in his own flesh and feather instead of embroidered on a football blazer, hammered into a cap badge or gilded for the national lottery. Kiwis are not native to Little Barrier; the small brown North Island variety and then his larger spotted southern relative were liberated here in the first years of the 20th century and again in 1919. The Blanshards have observed and photographed a pair of albino kiwis, spotlessly white as snowbirds, and have noticed traces of albinoism in other birds in the feathers round beak and eyes. We disturbed a young North Island kiwi at his afternoon nap and before he awoke we came close enough to see how fine were his dappled brown feathers with their delicate tortoiseshell shading. A kiwi feather cloak in Maori society was as much a badge of rank as ermine on the robes of European kings. The kiwi did not stay for long; he looked back, made a curious clicking noise with his scimitar beak and was away, in a funny fast lope, through the trees on one side of the lawn, through a tide of fallen jacaranda blossoms and then on down the gully.

  One night Rodger led another expedition to see if we could surprise a kiwi on his nocturnal hunt for grubs and worms. It was a night of great stillness. All the sounds of bush and shore were magnified in the dark arch of the sky. The stars were lightly veiled in mist, on the flat were woolly mounds of sleeping sheep,
though an occasional muncher diligently cropped among the stones, his long-nosed Cheviot face swimming moonily out of the dark, and the crickets kept up their clatter. “Ruru ruru” went a morepork as he flapped from a branch and the screech of the kiwis was all about us.

  Rodger shone his torch in tangles of roots beside little pools and streams. The moon, with a ring round it, started to rise but no kiwis. Perhaps too many of us were looking and I had caught an unvoiced hint that a female might be jonah-ing the party, so I went home. The Blanshards’ daughters were outside in the garden. They had collected some glow worms and their hands were spattered with pulsing little blue lights.

  “Here you are” said Lisa, giving me a share on a gently extended hand. “You can put them on your jersey.”

  Don and Rodger were rewarded for the five hour vigil which followed. Out of the shadows feet scuttered; a streamlined body cut through the clearing and then off into the bushes again.

  They saw their kiwi and they shot it in barely a flick of the eye or a click of a shutter. And twelve seconds of him were recorded on film. If you dropped a stitch or your handkerchief, you would never have seen it.

  * * *

  On most islands clocks are not essential when you make your own timetable and have no buses to catch or appointments to keep. Life imposes routines for all that and in the morning on Little Barrier they follow a well defined round. Early each morning Rodger checks his rainfall gauge and thermometer and then sends a weather report by radio telephone to the receiving station at Musick Point. The temperature is a little warmer than on the mainland and mild enough for a grove of banana palms to thrive, with scores of bunches lying in their purple calyx. The most tremendous Monstera deliciosa or fruit salad plant covers the wall of the generator shed; the waxen yellow flowers like an arum and the pocked green fruit flourish at the same time. I noticed Anne had a root of the red amaryllis which was the first flower I looked for now in island gardens and the old vines in the arbour were laden with grapes.