In the last census taken in 1962, 240 people were counted; sixty years ago nearly 500 people lived here. These people were not wholly dependent on farming then, they were bushmen and miners, working copper mainly but gold and silver as well. In the last part of the 19th century, Great Barrier had a disastrous shipwreck and a swashbuckling murder, both of which are still occasionally resurrected in weekend supplements. The world’s first airmail with stamps and printed forms was established there by pigeonpost in 1898, six years before the Wright Brothers flew at Kittyhawk. The present day economy has been based on agriculture and a small tourist trade in the summer months. The whaling station at Whangaparapara Bay is closed; the last of three companies went into receivership in 1961 for lack of whales and the most hopeful new development is a large scale commercial fishing venture and packing factory based at Okupu.
Maoris of the Ngatitai tribe, the native owners of Great Barrier, sold it in 1838 to William Webster, an American trader, and his partners Jeremiah Nagle and William Abercrombie. The sale was disallowed after the Treaty of Waitangi and the next landowners of any consequence were a syndicate headed by shrewd Sir Frederick Whitaker. A grant of 24,000 acres was made to them. This was in 1844, the year before Whitaker floated the second copper mining company at Kawau. He had ambitious ideas, even plans for town sites, and he named Port FitzRoy in honour of the governor, remembering the capital R, a mark of royal blood on which FitzRoy always insisted.
Whitaker never got into his stride either at Barrier or Kawau and, until copper and gold were discovered, settlement was desultory, mainly military pensioners with forty and sixty acre grants and other sponsored immigration schemes of the 1860s.
Only fifty miles separate Great Barrier from the mainland — four or five hours’ trip by water and thirty minutes in the amphibian. I can never go there and not be moved by the lonely splendour of its landscape. Even the name Barrier has the ring of isolation and it seems more than an island, not because it measures forty miles from east to west but because of the apparent sovereignty of the little communities bound as they are in their own valleys and bays. They are Tryphena or FitzRoy people, Okupu or Whangaparapara people, before they are simply Barrier people. Colonists built pubs and churches in about equal ratio; neither was built here, only a few little halls which serve for dances, meetings or an occasional service on the rare visit of a clergyman.
On the way in, you fly over the green thatched poll of the Watchman, his flanks creamed with the heavy wash sweeping in between Cape Colville and Cape Barrier. A beacon is fixed to his summit. The landward coast is paved with a dense mosaic of small islands, there is a gannetry on a wind-blown hump called Mahuki and then comes a many-armed sound with Port FitzRoy at the head of it. The first time I came was just for the day. Captain Ladd was flying up a doctor on the three-monthly medical call provided by the Auckland Hospital Board; he gave me the front seat beside his own, shouted out the landmarks and told of the first time he landed wherever there looked a likely place and announced he would be a regular visitor. One elderly lady who is now a dear friend had said it would be nice to see the planes coming and going but that she would still take the boat. Another new customer climbed shakily out of the aircraft, piously thanking God she was a Catholic. “I was saying my Hail Marys all the way in and I said some for you too” (to Fred), “even if you are a Protestant.”
A red and cream signboard with an oddly executed seabird on it says “Welcome to Port FitzRoy”. When the tide is high, as it was that morning, you walk ashore by a piratical little plank. Fred, who had to be off, told me to go and talk to Mrs Newman at the store.
“And you’d better ask Nurse Perry if you can go down the island with her and the doctor. I’ll pick you up this afternoon at Tryphena.”
Wick and Monica Newman, who keep the store, have arranged an outdoor museum on the grassy slope with whaling cauldrons and anchors, gigs and traps painted in paintbox colours and planted beds with dahlias and gladioli which were in full bloom. A sign by the shop reads “Welcome to the Port FitzRoy Shopping Centre” and the shop itself is called the Last Resort. The petrol pump, hand cranked and shaped like a soda syphon completes the facilities, and two of the Barrier’s vintage vehicles park here, a venerable truck called Wick’s Wonder, which looks as if the Joads in The Grapes of Wrath might have escaped to California in it, and the island taxi, a vast pre-war Chrysler Imperial which, as everyone knows, once belonged to a resident of Chicago called Al Capone. A New Zealand motor proprietor imported it and for years it was the pride of his fleet of hired limousines. Now it is working out an honourable old age, still with the original upholstery and no detectable bullet holes.
When the doctor had seen some patients in Nurse Perry’s clinic, we climbed aboard her white Landrover and followed a signpost which said “Kaitoki 19 Miles: Tryphena 30 miles.” It seemed a long road to find on an island.
We stopped at farmhouses while nurse and doctor went inside or paused long enough for a word across a garden gate and drove beside the matchless sands which stretch for miles along the seaward coast. At Kaitoki we passed a new house built on cleared land looking out to the ocean and Nurse Perry said that young Mrs Gray was not at home; she was away in Auckland waiting for a baby to be born.
Tryphena bore no relation to the Scottishness of FitzRoy, which is like a loch in a glen. This was quieter country with more trees. We pulled up at the Tom Blackwells’ house where the second surgery of the day was to be held. They have a farm, keep the local store and the first Blackwell homestead sits at the bottom of their garden with the broad-axe marks still plain on the kauri weatherboards. William Blackwell built it when he came out from Tipperary in 1865 and the present generation use it as a store room. Mrs Blackwell, pretty, with short flyaway grey hair, is postmistress here and she asked me back to visit when the surgery was over.
Further down the road a signpost pointed to Mulberry Grove and Shoal Bay and there was a clump of Norfolks by a shuttered, angular schoolhouse. The new one was further down the road, which I followed beside a chain of small coves, past a creek patrolled by a flotilla of small brown ducks, and looked for the mulberry trees at Mulberry Grove. There were some by a magnificent stand of pohutukawa, the sea shining through the interstices of the branches and the sun dappling the fine dry grass. I walked down to the beach by a collapsed red woolshed sinking in the sand and came upon three white bluffs, set side by side like wings on a stage. They were stubbled with round chalky pebbles and the little trees on the top of them and their bared roots reflected in the flat sheet of water the tide had left behind. Hardly a stone or a shell marked the wet sand and at first the sea was biting cold as this is ocean, not the sheltered Gulf. Apart from a pair of black oyster catchers fossicking in the pools and one grave heron resting on a reedy leg, I floated about in solitary possession of the bay.
When you come to a place to make a film of it, you see it in several dimensions. If you are a complete stranger, what you bring back will have the vivid haste of first sight, unhindered by memory, which is a makeweight for a corresponding lack of depth. But if you have begun to know it well, then you try to distill the essential qualities so that you share the picture you have built up in your mind’s eye. Interpret is perhaps too important a word, but it is something like that. With documentaries you are not concerned with actors in a studio; you are hearing and seeing people go about their daily lives. All you can do is to plan what you hope will happen and then be ready to throw away the plan if something unexpected and better turns up. You must also harden your heart to the fact that whatever you do will never please all the people who live there.
It was some time and some visits later, when we came back to start filming. When we landed at Port FitzRoy, the tide was out so far that we had to be rowed ashore and then track through the mud. Fred had brought a birthday bouquet for Mrs Reg Cooper, newspapers for everyone and a letter for Pia Makiha, the new nurse who had arrived a few days before, and he lingered more than he should. Sudde
nly he looked over his shoulder and cried “She’s stuck, Widgeon’s stuck.” When he was aboard he pulled down the stick and the aircraft did not budge. “I’ll have to wait until the tide turns.” He tried once more and this time the aircraft stirred and was off with a roar and a shower of spray such as we had never seen before. The draught blew Reg Cooper’s heavy old dinghy right out of the water and when he had turned it right side up we rowed over to Glenfern.
FitzRoy is very simply described. There is the landing, the Newmans’ house and store, the nurse’s house and the wharf where the scow and the Colville tie up. Glenfern is directly opposite and, while a footpath went round the edge of the bay, it was quicker to row across. The Coopers and their boarding house have been a tradition for so long that families who started coming here as children come back now with children of their own and grownup children at that. When the Coopers sold Glenfern, as they did not long after our visit, and retired to Auckland, no two people could have been farewelled with more love and regret than they were. They belong to families who came to the Barrier in the 1860s. Mrs Cooper, small and brisk, has always treated her guests as an extension of her own family even when they come, as we did, for the first time.
The house was set at the top of an overgrown garden which smelled sweetly at night of white tobacco plant and under a Norfolk was a lean-to addition in which Mrs Cooper presided over the FitzRoy Post Office and the telephone. A simmering kettle sat on the huge coal range and we had tea while the Coopers told us about the Barrier when they were both young. They talked about picnics and tennis parties and how the Shakespear girls used to sail their keeler all the way from Little Barrier in time for Saturday tennis. I imagine them in my mind’s eye, posed in the rigging like Valkyries in starched white pique and little flat boater hats. Mrs Cooper’s mother, who began the boarding house, was also a school teacher who taught at Katherine Bay one week, then at FitzRoy the other and diligent students followed her round, a common situation in isolated districts fifty or sixty years ago.
“Katherine Bay was where most of the Maoris lived. It was a big settlement but now there’s only Uncle Toby Davies.”
Reg Cooper, a tall spare man, never without a tartan tam o’shanter, rolled a cigarette and explained how long it took to sail round to Miner’s Head where the Wairarapa was wrecked in 1894.
“Don’t start wishing for a sou’wester” he said “or we won’t be going.”
“I think just a boiled egg for breakfast would be wise” Mrs Cooper whispered to me. “It gets very nasty out there and bacon might sit greasy.”
Then she showed me the silver tea service presented to her parents by survivors of the wreck whom they cared for in their home.
The Wairarapa was, however, an expedition for a later day. The kauri dams and the Kaiarara Valley were to be tackled first.
* * *
Kauri milling continued later on Great Barrier than it did in most mainland forests and it finally ceased in 1941, when the Kauri Timber Company closed their installations at Whangaparapara Bay and sold their 19,000 acre block of mountainous bush country to the government. They took 55 million feet of logs off the Barrier and altogether 79 million feet were felled. In 1899 you could buy first grade sawn kauri for 11/- a hundred feet and shingles handsplit for £1 a thousand. Today the rare kauri that is felled fetches perhaps £12 a hundred feet. Most of the surviving trees grow in reserves administered by the Forest Service and the stands left on private land are in most cases just as cherished and protected.
Tony Fuller, the chief forest ranger, was our guide to the dams in the Kaiarara Valley. His wasp-yellow Landrover bounced along the narrow road whose surface was fair until we came to the boundary of the reserve. Then it vanished as we bucked over tussock and swamp and across the twin forks of the Kaiarara stream. Presently Ranger Fuller stopped the engine and said we would go the rest of the way on foot.
It was about an hour and a half’s climb to the dam but Tony Fuller never assessed it at more than ten minutes. All the way he encouraged me with the words “Another ten minutes and we’ll be there” and finally of course he was right. The path began on the further side of the stream which ran clear and cold on either side of a stony sandbank and then widened to a little pond deep enough to swim in. The pebbles, dull red and yellow, clashed gently in the current, the air smelled of the bush and the peaty tang of creek water. A mysterious tunnel of fern spanned a tributary of the stream and here the bush was so dense that not much light broke through. Then when we started to climb more steeply we blinked to be out in the sun again. The main stream was left far below in the plunging valley and the path was swampy, marked along the way with outcroppings of stone and icy pools dark as little tarns. Then came a grove of nikau palms strewn about with fallen fronds like huge gourds, and toppled in the undergrowth hard by was the ruin of a bushman’s whare. The path cut round one more corner and there was the dam, its gaunt timbers rearing up between the narrowed banks at the stream’s headwaters, and the scored grey bluffs, at the top of the valley, set sternly above.
Kauri favours steep ridges and inaccessible cliffs and spurs, flourishing in the thin soil of the high country. Dieffenbach called the species “that great phenomenon of Botany” when he first saw them growing in 1840 and Hochstetter, writing nineteen years later, “the Queen of the forest”.
“The crowns of the kauri rise far above the rest of the forest trees. Tree by tree of equal height and thickness rise like pillars in the hall of a cathedral. The trunk runs perfectly straight from the root to the crown, the eye follows the beautiful line to where the powerful branches are twined into a dark green roof through which the light of day peers like golden stars into the dusk of the woods.”
No trees like this survive in the Kaiarara, only an occasional skeleton of one, blanched but still upright, or a huge trunk prostrate on the ground, engulfed in fern and creeper and the young of lesser trees. Bushmen dragged out the logs with bullock teams, with tramways and viaducts balanced over precipices, and they made dams. The first was built at Coromandel about 1837, where later some of the most spectacular in all the kauri lands were made and there are others which survive in the Waitakere ranges almost within sight of Auckland. They were always solid kauri, pitsawn and broad-axed on the spot and the foundations laid in rock to bear the immense weight of flood water needed to impel the logs down stream. A palisade of beams, which might be vertical or horizontal, formed the main wall, planks were caulked with handfuls of pukahu, rotted leaves and root fibre collected from the foot of the kauri and a gate perhaps 12 feet high by 20 feet across was secured with an iron latched log or “trip”. The felled trees were sent tumbling down the slopes to pile up in the creek bed and, when sufficient water was built up behind the dam and the creek jammed with logs, they tripped it. The gate burst open with a terrifying roar and like so many giant corks the logs hurtled down the valley to the sea. The tumult echoed for miles; first the loud report as the pent flood waters escaped and then the grumbling and thunder as the timber jostled on the breast of the tide. Bushmen armed with long poles manipulated the drive from the banks, then down on the beach the logs were lashed into rafts, athwart the scows like outriggers and towed away to the mills.
The silence was profound at Kaiarara, only broken by the water hissing over the green-slimed timber and splashing down into a chain of little pools scoured in the rock like craters on the moon.
When we came back to the foot of the valley, Tony Fuller took us into a grove not far from where he parked the Landrover. It was a planting of new kauri, younglings he called them. They were not sprung wild by their thousands in the leaf mould; they had been raised in nurseries, then brought back to the bush and they were growing in the shelter of kanukas fifty and sixty feet high. The kauri were about ten years old and not much higher than my shoulder nor thicker than my wrist. You must have patience if you plant one and mark its progress in the colour of the bark, last year’s turning brown, this year’s growth turning greenish silver and
at the top the bushy wreath of new leaves.
A dash of scarlet jarred the forest colours — a wooden telephone box. Tony Fuller cranked the handle. I could hear Mrs Cooper on the other end of the line, thin and indistinct, but well enough to catch that Nurse Makiha was not at home now; she had driven off an hour before and meant to meet us at Okiwi school. Lack of communication may be a recurring island problem but, in this case, away up in the bush, our communications were first-rate.
The Okiwi School is the smaller of the two on the island. We got there just as lessons were over and the thirteen pupils, mostly forestry workers’ children, were playing rounders. Nurse Makiha was indoors with Ian McKenzie, the school master, arranging dental appointments for the children when the visiting nurse was to hold her six-monthly clinic. Pia had only been on the island a few weeks at this time and was still exploring as we were. She is a member of the Arawa people of Rotorua and her grandfather is an elder of the tribe and its orator. She is a merry soul with a wonderful ringing laugh and superb white teeth.
“You’d better come down on Thursday to Katherine Bay” she told us, when Ian McKenzie marched his school to their bus, another wasp-coloured Landrover. “Uncle Toby’s sending out a load of cattle and the Rahiri will be beached at low tide. It’s the worst road on the island, so we’d better leave early.”
It was not such a rough ride as our sail to Miner’s Head where the Wairarapa was wrecked seventy-one years ago.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Islands of the Gulf Page 17