Islands of the Gulf

by Shirley Maddock

  The mob was nearer now, crossing the paddocks jiggety jog and then on to the sand, with the sun behind them. The men, pakeha and Maori, equally swarthy by weather or nature, sat easy in their saddles, their faded pants hung low on their hips, their strong arms shining in the brilliant light as they applied their sticks to the flinching rumps of the young heifers. The sharp hooves slithered and clashed on the muddy stones. You heard their panting breath and the thud of ti-tree across their backs as the shouting men drove them up the race and aboard the scow.

  Looking over the side was Captain Jock McKinnon. Now and then he spoke in his deep grave voice, a word to a crewman or another to quiet a bewildered calf. He was born at Leigh and he went to sea sixty years ago on the schooner Huia, which made the fastest Tasman crossing ever for a sailing vessel. His face is seamed and gnarled like old wood, his voice like groundswell over shingle.

  Was it a hard life?

  “Well, it’s not an easy one.”

  He started in the Gulf in 1919 and in 1923 he and a partner salvaged what was left of the Wairarapa.

  “She wasn’t recognisable as a ship then; she was pretty deep down and her sides had burst wide open.”

  He took command of Rahiri, a Mahurangi-built scow, shortly after the salvage operation and since then they have measured thousands of miles round the Hauraki islands and the coast. This was almost his last trip because he was going ashore and I asked him if the thought of retirement saddened him.

  “No” he said with resolution and he thumped the rail. “I reckon, after sixty years at sea, I’ve earned my rest.”

  Then he noticed the cattle seemed uneasy so he went down to see to them and I clambered over the side on to the wet beach.

  Rahiri looked like the ark on Ararat. Toby was walking slowly down the beach, the dogs were quiet and the cattle had calmed down. They must wait now for the tide to turn.

  Under some old, old puriri, with rotted branches and mandrake nests of roots and creeper, were two lines of the red amaryllis lilies and the buds were just bursting into bloom.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Great Barrier

  After you have driven down the main Barrier road six or seven times, you know the principal landmarks by heart and begin to learn the detail. You count the kingfishers swinging on the telegraph wires, watch for the ditch where the torch ginger grows, notice the morning glory and pink passionflowers tangled in a hedge and the soft green globes of a wild melon vine hanging from a cabbage tree.

  At Awana, Pia pulled up at a crooked gate with a mailbox beside it made from a fruit case. We followed her across a planked bridge and over fields until we stopped at the small brown house where Mr and Mrs Menzies live. This was the morning of their 53rd wedding anniversary. They are Scots and have been living here almost as long as they have been married. I hope they will forgive me for saying that they live a life extraordinary for its avoidance of the world. When authority took some of their land to make a road, the Menzies viewed the act as unlawful and they decided they would use the road neither for pleasure, necessity, nor to transport their stock. A ruin of a shed, blown down in the winter storms, stands in front of their verandah and inside is a mouldering buggy. It has been there for nearly forty years, since Mr Menzies drove home one day, turned out the horse and flipped the traces over the buckboard.

  Mrs Menzies is tiny, quick-witted and looks like a goodwife in a fairy tale. She is bent with arthritis and most fine days sits on the porch looking along the road with her binoculars. Both she and her husband are very fond of music and poetry. Mr Menzies plays the fiddle and she reads to him, the Victorian poets mostly. They talk as broad a lowland Scots as if it were last year they came away, not fifty.

  “Do ye play?” Mrs Menzies asked me after a little conversation. “Nurse Perry used to and we’d hae a bit of a sing-song.”

  “I play a bit.”

  “Well don’t blether. Go and play a bit. The piano’s inside.” I went into the airless parlour and played my sparse choice of “off by heart” pieces.

  “Do ye niver wear a dress?” she asked when I came back. “Trousers seem odd on a young woman, or are they all wearing them now?”

  “What next, auld man?” and she fetched her husband a sly dig in the ribs.

  Pia, like the earlier nurses, is their main contact with the world outside the farm. She brings their mail, buys their meat and never lets much more than a day go by without keeping in touch. The Menzies have never bothered with electricity (they have a wood stove and oil lamps) nor have they installed a telephone or running water in the house. Their only concession to the 20th century is a battery radio with a case made from a Highlander condensed milk box.

  I had hoped they might let us film an interview but they preferred not.

  Mrs Menzies came hobbling to the step to see us off and her husband walked down to the Landrover.

  “Television” he chuckled. “Us on television, och, that would never do.”

  The road lay all the way along the coast now, by the glistening bone-white beaches that stretch mile upon untrodden mile, banded with dense thickets of pohutukawa and the long crisp surges of the Pacific rolling in. Awana beach is at the foot of steep banks. We saw some people on the sands here, a rare sight; three manikins with surf boards slung on their shoulders, dwarfed by its empty size.

  At Kaitoki, Pia had to call on the Barrier’s youngest inhabitant, at the house I had passed with Nurse Perry and the doctor and she had told him Mrs Gray was away to Auckland to wait for her baby. It was a girl called Raewyn and she was four weeks old. The young Grays, who are breaking in new country, have built their house looking across the limitless sands of Kaitoki beach and away up the valley to Mount Hobson, the highest peak on the island.

  Pia and Mrs Gray settled down to discuss weights and sleeping times and how Mrs Gray was getting on with breast-feeding. Baby lay stark naked between them on a towel and bawled herself crimson.

  Past the airfield at Claris where charter planes from Auckland land, a river meanders through a marsh down to the shore. The small brown New Zealand duck were here in great strength. They have become very rare on the mainland now. A dozen of them, ranged in formation behind a leader, swam precisely up to one point in the river, then wheeled and swam as precisely back. The country here is barren with scrubby pines growing on the sandhills. Further off is the stern outline of White Cliffs where gold quartz was discovered in 1892 and then silver. Seven different companies worked claims at White Cliffs; by 1908 they had brought out £23,000 worth of gold. Operations had petered out by 1910 and Oreville, the mining settlement which once had a population of 400, was abandoned.

  We made no more stops until we got to Tryphena, where the dental nurse was holding an open air class at Mulberry Grove school. Pamela Tait, the dental nurse (whose mother I met a year later at the Warkworth Flower Show), was holding a pre-school clinic too and Carol Moffat, the schoolmaster’s wife, had brought along her son and daughter.

  The Moffats own a splendid juggernaut of a car, a Dodge, c.1920, with a capacious body, a tattered canvas hood and what look like the original tyres, their holeyness plumped out with handfuls of grass. It goes very well and once conveyed the Anglican Bishop of Auckland from the amphibian to a church service in the hall. It is never called on to travel very far, being more a fetcher of wood or parcels come down in the scow and is a tremendous drawer of oil and of water. At that time the Moffats’ house was equally old and shabby but they were expecting a prefabricated one to arrive by barge from town. The school from Mulberry Grove was brought down in the same way. When we got there, all twenty-five pupils and a few extras were lined up in the playground. The extras were correspondence pupils who live too remotely to come every day and had made a special trip to see Nurse Tait.

  She gathered the children about her in a semi-circle and conducted toothbrush drill with a brush in one hand and a snapping set of false teeth in the other, while her audience chanted and mimed, “Flick, circle and stroke” (th
e key to brushing your teeth the right way round). Those who had forgotten their brushes used a finger instead, all except for three big girls who thought no one had noticed when they twisted their little brothers’ arms, took their toothbrushes and planted themselves squarely in the front row and circled, flicked and stroked with their filched brushes right into the lens.

  No other part of the Barrier looks as gentle and serene as Tryphena, which, in 1886, enjoyed the notoriety of a celebrated murder case and, like the wreck of the Wairarapa, no one has forgotten it.

  John Caffrey, the principal actor, a strapping sailor whose good looks were not much impaired by his having to wear a glass eye, was the captain of the Sovereign of the Seas, one of the fastest cutters in the Gulf. His favourite reading, it was reported at the trial, was the American Police Gazette and his hero was Ned Kelly. The Sovereign of the Seas often called at Tryphena and Caffrey fell in love with a girl there called Elizabeth Taylor. He and her father, whom he nick-named Old Tuskey, got on less well. Mr Taylor persuaded his daughter to break with Caffrey and marry instead a young neighbour called Seymour. Elizabeth obeyed and within a year had borne a son. Caffrey, playing the discarded lover to the hilt, renewed a threat to kill her each time the Sovereign called at Tryphena.

  In June 1886 he bought a chart of the Peruvian coast and signed on a man called Henry Penn as his mate. With Penn and what the court described as “a fifteen-year-old street girl called Grace Cleary” as company, they set off for the Barrier to abduct Elizabeth. Once they were well away, Caffrey indulged his sense of theatre by running up the skull and crossbones and, when he sailed into the bay at Tryphena, fired a pirate salute of six shots with a revolver in each hand. Since only five families, much scattered, lived here, he did not expect any opposition, but old Mr Taylor put up a tremendous fight and, while Caffrey and Penn grappled with him, their guns went off and one or both of them shot him dead. The abductors were frightened now. They rowed back to the Sovereign and made off, the skull and crossbones still at the masthead.

  When the news reached Auckland, they had a good start which they spoiled by getting themselves wrecked on the coast of Australia. Some time later they were captured, first Penn and his girl friend and then Caffrey, whose wild ideas of joining the Kelly gang must have fallen through.

  Auckland hung on every sensational detail of the trial. Grace Cleary, who, as a minor, was not expecting much punishment, wore a more exotic bonnet every day. She was acquitted but both men were sentenced to hang. They went off to the scaffold, the Southern Cross reported, “in good spirits piously singing ‘Jesu Lover of my Soul’ and with their last free breath forgiving those that would hang them”.

  Before you get to the wharf at Shoal Bay, another road branches off away from the beach. Charlie Osborne lives in a little house up here on the other side of a footbridge. Like the Blackwells, the Osbornes have been a long time at Tryphena. Charles is a spry little man with a round white head and only one arm; he lost the other in an accident with a rifle. His surviving thumb must be exceptionally green, as his house is set down in the middle of a closely cultivated garden of two acres or more. He is mainly a vegetable man, but he scatters a few flower seeds at the end of a row of onions or carrots, cottage flowers like sea-holly or pincushions and tall clumps of granny bonnets. His fruit trees bear so well that the branches touch the ground. He has rare varieties like red Astrakhans, sweet rough-skinned russets and a good firm apple called Bledisloe. One corner of the vegetable garden had a grape vine for a windbreak; as well there were figs and feijoas, Chinese gooseberries, black and yellow passion-fruits and mountain pawpaw.

  His stock price for everything is sixpence a pound and in the summer he sells his produce mainly to boat people, who know about his garden and his collection of shells. He has built a museum beside his house, set on very high foundations, and here he keeps the shells and the flower paintings done by his mother, his aunt and his sisters. He makes no charge to come in but he likes you to notice a collection box for missions on the shelf.

  Mrs Osborne made exquisite pen and wash studies of New Zealand flora; there are albums of them, each page devoted to a single species. His aunt, Miss Hartwell, was well known before the First World War for her flower pieces which used to be printed in Christmas supplements. They were nearly always nosegays of native flowers and berries arranged in beautiful free-flowing arrangements like the Dutch domestic school of the 17th century. Mr Osborne has collected most of his shells on the island and the rest by exchange with collectors in other countries. The nautilus are his great pride, some no bigger than a shrimp, a little double whorl of shell infinitely fragile. They ascend in size and perfection until the finest of all, which he found at Shoal Bay wharf. It measures about nine inches across, the light shining through a skin like parchment, clean as coral, with no trace left behind of the creature who inhabited the chamber at the end of its small labyrinth. I was taught a poem by Oliver Wendell Holmes once about the nautilus and all I can remember is the beginning:

  This is the ship of pearl, which, poets feign,

  Sails the unshadowed main —

  The venturous bark that flings

  On the sweet summer wind its purpled wings

  In gulfs enchanted.

  “Hold it to your ear” and Mr Osborne gave it to me cupped in his one hand. I took it in both mine, worried that it might break, and held it up and listened. I could hear the sea.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Great Barrier

  Almost twelve months had gone by when we flew up to FitzRoy on the third day of the New Year. Our fellow passengers were a pair of trampers who planned to explore the shaft of the old copper mine. We approached from the northern coast and even Miner’s Head was stripped of its menace by the summer day. Fred looked thoughtfully from his window and said, “I think I might take you boys right into Miners’ Cove instead of Katherine Bay and it’ll save you that trek over the hill.”

  I should have thought, with such splendid boots and haversacks, they would have insisted on tramping every inch but they jumped at the chance. Fred made a contemplative run towards the cove, the water so limpid we could see every rock on the bottom. None was near the shore. So we came in, trundled up the small beach and the trampers waved goodbye as they set off, a-clank with frying pans and billies.

  We flew over Toby’s house, a big stand of bush further inland still with a few columns of kauri on the ridges and then over the Kaiarara Valley, with the dam shrunken to matchsticks at the bottom, before we whistled down a narrow gorge towards Port FitzRoy.

  “Ladd’s Canyon” Captain Ladd explained as tree tops and stone walls plummeted by, close enough to touch.

  The Newmans had added another gig to their collection on the landing and Capone’s Chrysler seemed much as before, even to the piece of wire securing the exhaust pipe. Only the bay was not so quiet, with a fleet of yachts and launches at anchor. The Last Resort was besieged with summer visitors, the bread had just arrived and I waved at Wick and Monica Newman who were backed against the wall of their shop, rosy with heat as they dealt with a clamorous mob of customers. This was the high water mark of the summer season. Later in March there is another spurt for a deep-sea fishing contest which makes its headquarters at FitzRoy. But they are only small dents in the spacious armour of the island’s quiet.

  Pia was there to meet the amphibian and the new forest ranger and his wife, Mike and Barbara Hetherington, were with her. The Fullers had been transferred to a mainland forest further south. Mike, as Tony had the year before, ferried us round by Landrover.

  There were other changes. A red clay road had been cut round the bay to Glenfern and our friends the Coopers had retired to Auckland. When Mrs Cooper relinquished her keys to the post office and telephone she had operated for forty years, the Department made the rare gesture of a retiring gift and a citation commemorating her devoted service. We drove instead of rowed to Glenfern this time and admired a dog’s-leg bend the roadmakers had contrived to save a
fine stand of young kauri.

  The grove of youngling kauri in the Kaiarara Valley may have sprouted an inch or two but not more; a gang of Maori children were bathing in the creek and we even passed some people on the track to the dam. They were three yachties off to climb Mount Hobson with transistors for company and toi-toi plumes in their hats. You knew it was the holiday season at the dam, too, as three or four beer cans floated in the pools at the front of it.

  At Okiwi they were haymaking and Mrs Fred Cooper, sister-in-law to Mrs Reg at FitzRoy, showed me an orange tree in her garden sprung from one of the fruit that had been washed up after the wreck of the Wairarapa. It stood about forty feet high. As Mrs Cooper shook one of the laden branches, some ripe fruit came down. Although the skins were coarse, the flesh inside was sweet and juicy.

  I was determined that this time I would get on to one of the ocean beaches on which I had gazed and driven past but never set foot. So, that afternoon, Mike turned into a narrow road set across paddocks to Fred Mabey’s farm. Mrs Mabey and her daughter Lesley took us to Whangapoua Beach, which is one of the boundaries of their land and the first link in Barrier’s glorious chain of beaches thirty miles long.

  We waded across a little stream that slipped in and out of the green stalks of the bulrushes; gates and a taut wire fence cast their shadows in geometric counterpoint to the curve of the hill and to the creek bed as it meandered out to join the sea. It had been a poor year for the pohutukawa. Most of the buds had miscarried in a wet chill spring but they were blooming here, dribbling their crimson threads of petals on to the white ground. Whangapoua Beach seemed infinite. Even at high tide its breadth must be a half mile and it stretches five miles or more before it halts briefly at the Okiwi marshes, there to yield its place in the glittering procession of Awana, Harataunga, Kaitoki, Oruawharo and the rest.