We landed at Motunau late in the afternoon. This is the third of the farms, where there are three houses and three generations. Mr and Mrs Fred Chamberlin live down on the flat land near the beach and their son Peter has built a house on the higher ground where he lives with his wife Patricia and their three small children. The third house in the bay is very big and old; the second Charles Chamberlin built it on the other side of a tidal creek with mangroves on its banks and laden peach trees hanging their branches over the water.
A broad grassy platform stretches beside the beach and every January Mr and Mrs Fred Chamberlin are hosts to the Crusaders, a Christian youth movement, which holds a boys’ camp here. Over the last thirty years, hundreds of boys have learned at Motunau the special delights of exploring and living on an island.
We walked along the beach, turned up a little defile with one beautifully twisted cyprus growing in the middle of it and saw away on a hilltop Peter Chamberlin riding his tractor in a cloud of buff coloured dust. His sons, Bruce and David, came bounding through the grass with their small sister Gwenyth at their heels and we walked through a gap between the high thorn hedges and into the home paddock. In one corner was a huge golden haystack with a magenta cover strapped over it and in another corner a small herd of donkeys was grazing, all descendants of the first pair who landed in Galatea Bay more than a century ago. They had two foals and when we came near their mothers bared their long yellow teeth, braying in alarm. Some were a jetty charcoal, lightest on the belly and darkest on their great twitching ears, and some were pale grey with the cross on their backs, their reward for the ancestor who carried Jesus to Jerusalem on Palm Sunday.
When Mrs Chamberlin took us over to see the old house, the children skipped along in front hunting for a family of kittens whose mother was raising them on the verandah. When they were tired of that, they shinnied like squirrels up the trunk of a huge old oak reputed to have the broadest trunk of any in New Zealand.
The house is occupied only at holiday time now, when mainland relatives come to stay, and the massive brass beds and huge chairs and tables would be large for most modern houses. In the hall was an engraving of Narborough Hall, twin to the one at Poroaki, and a faded photograph of a trim little cutter. Mrs Chamberlin told us the cutter’s name was Midnight; during the Waikato Wars Charles Chamberlin put her at the disposal of the government. Armed with a four pound cannon, she did courier and patrol duty in the Gulf and once is supposed to have hastened up to Kawau to bring back Charles Chamberlin’s friend, Sir George Grey, when it seemed dangerous to stay there. Mrs Charles and her children went up to Auckland and lived in the barracks at Albert Park until the troubles were over.
Mr Chamberlin brought out another few pages of a diary which told a story of work and quiet pleasures and occasional trips to town, once to go to the opera. “Got oysters, cutting firewood, salted pig.” One entry records how he shot two wild sows with one pistol shot and every few pages you read “Pulled to P. in Cygnet.” Cygnet was their first boat and P. was Poroaki; sometimes it is “Pulled to P. by moonlight”.
At the entrance to Motunau Bay is a white lighthouse set on tall iron stilts. Fred Chamberlin said he could remember when a solitary keeper lived there all alone like a gull on a rock. A little further out is Pakihi where Captain Herd and his party landed so briefly. Next day we sailed close by the little island; one side of it has been almost eaten away by a quarry and there is no way of knowing which was the beach where the terrified settlers watched the Ngapuhi canoe come close in shore to wave its fearful trophies. We completed the circuit of Ponui’s beautiful coast we had begun the day before and joined the Sunday cavalcade of yachts and launches.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
The Long Sheltering Island
“For about two hours we sailed rapidly through unknown channels and among lofty islands covered with magnificent forest, whose shores were adorned with smiling vegetation . . . I particularly noticed on Wai-Heke sites that would be admirably fitted for settlement.”
Dumont d’Urville, 1827
Dumont d’Urville, who was probably the first European to recommend the fishing at Waiheke, thought it looked a much better bargain than the scrub-covered land on which Auckland was ultimately founded. Most present day Waihekians would applaud his good sense. I have left it to the last because it contains within its limits a neatly carved dichotomy of the present and the past. Waiheke West is turning itself into a marine suburb as quickly as circumstance allows; Waiheke East is remote and pastoral and both ends of the island were linked by road only a few weeks before I started to write this book.
Waiheke’s old name was Te Motu-Arai-Roa, the Long Sheltering Island, and its Maori history follows the classical pattern of one tribe conquering and ousting another. The earliest people came from the Western Pacific about 950 A.D. They were the Maru-Iwi who were overrun several centuries later by the ubiquitous Children of Toi whose effect upon Hauraki was much the same as the Normans on England. Hongi Hika’s war parties of the 1820s paid it frequent and bloody attention and there cannot have been many inhabitants when d’Urville was admiring the coastline. At that time a European settler called Thomas Maxwell was squatting here but we know very little more than his name, that he had a Maori wife and that he built a ship of Waiheke kauri in which he eventually drowned.
A local legend has it that Samuel Marsden preached a sermon on the island with a congregation as numerous as at Rangihoua in 1814. This visit took place in 1837, the year before Marsden died, and his companion, the Reverend William Brown, mentions a service held on their ship, HMS Rattlesnake. “3rd June 1837. Anchored at sunset under Wyheke — a large island in the Firth of Thames. We could not discover any natives. On the 4th June myself, the officers and men assembled for divine service and Mr Marsden preached from Matthew XXV, v.31−33.” (On dividing the sheep from the goats.) Mr Marsden’s diary entry, written as a farmer rather than a clergyman, gives his view that hogs would fatten well on Waiheke. “They get very fat on fern root and require no grass to feed them up.”
“The island of Wyheke where we lay this morning seems very beautiful the shores bold and craggy and thickly timbered to the water’s edge” wrote Mrs Sarah Mathew on her way to Coromandel and the same Mr Jameson who enjoyed Wepiha Webster’s hospitality just after Sarah had not, described his stay with an English couple on Waiheke whom he calls Mr and Mrs H. “They had a good kitchen garden, and in rich soil, seeds of peach, almond and experimental wheat. The house had been built by natives and divided into four compartments, no fireplace, wooden gratings for windows, embers in an iron pot for heating and Mrs H. displayed the cheerfulness and fortitude of which British ladies of education possess a greater share than many who have not been reared in refinement and tenderness. The Delhi and Lady Lilford here taking aboard timber for Sydney and firewood for Valparaiso.”
Logan Campbell was on Waiheke this same week and watched the Delhi’s load of kauri hauled out from the bush.
“It was a wild and exciting scene. The huge log the natives were dragging out was some eighty feet in length, the largest spar of the Delhi’s cargo. Every available man had been mustered to drag it out and the head was decorated with branches of flowering trees and waving tufts of feathers. At this decorated end stood the oldest chief of the tribe. Round his waist he wore a short mat of unscraped flax leaves dyed black. In his right hand he brandished a taiaha, a six foot Maori broadsword of hardwood with a pendulous plume of feathers hanging from the hilt. High overhead he brandished his weapon like unto a soldier leading on his men to battle and repeated a long string of words, lifting up one foot and stamping it down again, the body thrown back on the other leg. Every moment his voice became louder and louder until almost reaching a scream, then he grasped his weapon with both hands, sprang into the air and came down again as if smiting an enemy to earth. At this instant some eighty or more men minus a flax mat or even a fig leaf yelled forth one word as an ending chorus. As one man they simultaneously stamped on
the ground and then gave one fearful pull on the rope doubled round the edge of the spar. The chief springing into the air again, flung his arms on high, yelled out a word, the gang repeated it with a louder yell and the earth almost vibrated. At last after one tremendous pull the gang ended their shout by prolonging it until it died away and the chief accepted this as an intimation they must have breathing time. So they rested and a tribe of children brought kits of wet mud to besmear the sleepers in front of the spar. Then the chief began his long recitation to work the men up to the proper pitch and after some vigorous strains on the rope we saw branches, flowers and tufts of feathers suspended, then the other end of the spar tilt up and away rushed the stupendous mass, snapping young trees like carrots, and by the time the prolonged shout which had sent it on its last swift journey had died away, the spar, its garlanded head sadly despoiled, sent a shower of spray into the air, showing it had reached the water’s edge, and then another long, loud and joyous shout rang through the forest.”
* * *
When you measure Waiheke’s twenty-mile length from the air, the land rolls away with the beautiful symmetry of range enfolding range, not clothed in forest now but in grass that burns gold in summer. The best of her timber had been felled by 1850 for the wooden towns springing up on both sides of the Tasman. Wool, dairying and holidaymakers are Waiheke’s staples today. You fly over so many exquisite little coves empty of a sign of life that it is hard to believe that nearly two thousand people live here. About a hundred come to work in Auckland daily and, while I have been writing, a complicated dispute about ferry timetables has been waged between the two transport companies and the Marine Department; Waiheke’s point of view was put forward by a specially convened Commuters’ Association — the island’s talent for creating associations is as effortless as breathing. It is doubtful if a landlocked community of much greater size would have achieved the press coverage Waiheke did in the two largest dailies in the Dominion. Only one of the lawyers concerned was bold enough to suggest that if people choose to live on islands they must expect transport troubles, but his was a lonely voice and I should not have been surprised if an R.N.Z.A.F. Sunderland had been called in to provide an airlift.
Captain Ladd’s amphibians take five passengers to Waiheke in eleven minutes. Manuwai, New Zealand’s first and only hydrofoil, which went into service in May 1964, takes 73 passengers in twenty-five minutes and the sixty-year-old Baroona made it in an hour and a half, her back bowed under a load of up to four hundred passengers. Early in 1965, her infirmities forced her replacement by harbour ferries of much the same vintage and speed, so the eleven miles between island and Auckland have not been sufficiently shrunk to fulfil any immediate dreams of marine suburbia. Neither the amphibians nor the hydrofoil can travel after dark.
At the western end, the foreshore and the hills behind Surfdale, Oneroa, Onetangi and Ostend show a mushrooming growth of new houses and roads. Oneroa and Onetangi both have superb ocean beaches. Authority and the levying of rates for all Waiheke is vested in an elected Road Board and the law is upheld by a police constable who lives at Oneroa. The three primary schools and a district high school have a combined register of about three hundred and thirty pupils, there is a Lions’ Club, a guild of spinning and weaving, a ballet school whose directrice, Madame Francesca Mayall, also teaches elocution and the pianoforte, a Cultural Centre (where once in the line of professional duty I attended a school of Greek Drama, with earnest students clad in calico chitons declaiming Euripides), there are bowling clubs, a golf club and a muster of societies and groups a conservative resident tallies around forty. There are Roman Catholic, Presbyterian and Anglican churches and the latter parish embraces not only Waiheke but the rest of the Hauraki Gulf as well.
The island has a ‘stop’ sign which went up about two years ago and Oneroa, the main business centre, sports a hopefully metropolitan array of noticeboards mainly of a cautionary nature. Here there is a cinema in a stuccoed building like a Neapolitan ice, a mobile fish and chicken bar, a chemist, an electrical and general store, where you can buy a television set, a crinoline petticoat, a new hat or a pair of gum boots and not move from the same counter, and a barber shop whose chair has a lovely prospect of the beach and the Pacific uninterrupted by any other island until it halts at Chile. Oneroa also has a once-weekly bank and a branch of New Zealand’s national play centre, the T.A.B.4 The bus timetable is arranged to dovetail with the working hours of the T.A.B. and the island’s only licensed hotel at Onetangi. Physical welfare is in the hands of a district nurse and a general practitioner and, as there is no hospital, babies are not encouraged to be born locally. Early starters are sometimes airlifted to hospital by amphibian. You can be buried here should you die, though your coffin must be ordered from town. Beside the cemetery is another notice which boldly states “Tip No Rubbish Here”.
Waiheke is the only island in the Gulf with a newspaper, The Resident, edited, written and cyclostyled by the owner, Gordon Ingham, not a resident himself, who keeps his view impartial by living in Auckland. Some of his critics say this is cowardice, not caution, but he is a constant visitor and enters all island affairs with editorial zeal and an impartial trampling on corns, untrammelled by any fear of the laws of libel and slander.
One edition contains a spirited row with the high school committee, an advertisement to hire a Father Christmas suit for the Fire Brigade and a Public Notice in which one Caroline Dobson challenged “the man who lives at Ostend to meet me and the building inspector to prove or disprove . . . that the concrete foundations of my house in Belgium Street were likely to crumble at any time.” The columns are a chummy miscellany which mixes birthday greetings with obituaries, social notes from all over with a sharp dig at the Road Board, or a hint for the Businessmen’s Association, “Why don’t they scrap the sorry segments and begin again with a brand new set of officers?” When there was to be a reception for the Governor General, readers were cautioned “It will do social climbers no good to buttonhole Road Board Members for an invitation.” Sometimes he reports in verse. A Road Board Member rode a perennial hobbyhorse about the cleaning of the Surfdale Public W.C. The topic was debated at meeting after meeting and came to a head when the member in question threatened to lock them up.
“But hark the cry is Odlum
And lo the ranks divide
And the great Lord of Surfdale
Comes with his stately stride.
Upon his ample shoulders, his banners floating free,
To the barricades now, comrades, at the Surfdale W.C.”
The amphibians most commonly land at Surfdale and on the highest ridge of a hill covered with houses is the spectacularly situated outdoor W.C., whose owner has forsaken modesty and shelter for a splendid view of ocean and island. Perhaps it belongs to the hero of the poem.
Coming by sea, on hydrofoil or ferry, you land at Matiatia, whose sheltered bay is one of the best anchorages in the Gulf. At weekends and holidays, when the boats come in, the wharf is packed with bach-owners arriving, as well as picnic parties and youth groups. There are babies in prams, budgies in cages, cats in carryalls, boxes of provisions, cases of beer — all to be crammed into the buses waiting where the road begins. At peak times, the overflow is left to straggle up the hill to Oneroa and the beach. Our guide to the west of Waiheke was eloquent on many subjects and most of all on the future of the island. He is “Senator” Bob Burns (an honorary title bestowed on past and present Road Board Members). He would drive us about the eighty odd miles of winding thoroughfare and at every bend and turn he had a fresh glimpse of promontory and ocean to fortify his Panglossian view of the best of all possible worlds. “Best of two worlds” he would say. “Peace, tranquillity, the country life — and all within spitting distance of the biggest city in New Zealand.”
The way took us to Little Oneroa, with a balloon cluster of red, yellow and blue sailing skiffs heaped on its small crescent and fishermen cleaning their catch in a rockpool; to its neighbo
ur, Big Oneroa, with the pony club cantering along the broad expanse of wet sand at the water’s edge; to drive beside the other great ocean beach at Onetangi and then climb the steep zigzags to the hills above. We scrambled through the fields to loll in armchair tufts of couch grass looking over to Carey’s Point and Coromandel. Here the road goes further inland, you have windy, sheep-dappled ranges and stern outcroppings of granite until you descend into quiet little valleys, cows grazing, a vineyard or two and a neat patchwork of hedge and garden punctuated with arrowheads of Norfolk pines.
We went to bowls, to the sports at Blackpool primary school with three-legged and sack races and a special race for the Mums, with much drinking of tea on the sidelines and the fathers talking politics on the backlines. We danced at a 21st birthday party in a hall decorated with streamers and arches of fern where everyone had been invited from the oldest grandmother to the youngest cousin, we went to a Roman Catholic wedding, where the march from Lohengrin was played on the Presbyterian church’s harmonium, and I rode on the Volunteer Fire Brigade’s shining red engine. They staged a mock alarm for us to film, but, in the summer droughts, the brigade has more than enough genuine calls to keep in practice. They excavated the land, built their own headquarters and the fire chief assembled the chassis which, polished to a blaze, lay waiting behind the heavy doors. The siren blew, volunteers skimmed over hedges, screamed up on motor bikes and in cars, grabbed helmets and hatchets, and some even slid down the pole to land in agreeable Keystone heaps on the floor. When we had finished filming, the fire chief invited me for the ride on the engine. We took off at speed; I clung so hard I thought my legs would fly straight behind me and all I could see was the roadside flashing past in a dense white slipstream of dust and all I could hear above the engine was the fire chief’s genial roar of “Don’t stiffen up whatever you do, love. Bend your knees, dear. That’s right, bend your knees.”
Islands of the Gulf Page 25