Harry Head the hermit of Hickory Bay

Press, 29 March 1980, Page 15

Harry Head the hermit of Hickory Bay

By

GORDON OGILVIE

Harry Head and Hickory Bay were made for each other. Head. as outrageously eccentric as any person who has trod these shores, needed a remote spot like this Banks Peninsula bay to sustain his Robinson Crusoe life style. Hickory* Bay has had pleasure from the memory, ever since.

Hickory has always been regarded as one of the Peninsula’s most inaccessible bays. The Maoris, who knew it as Waikerikirari, did ‘hot settle here; and it was the last Peninsula bay to attract Europeans.

It is not difficult to see why. Facing due east, the bay is isolated by' two great bluffs between which the seas roll in fiercely. The Bay of Angry Waters, the Maoris dubbed it. There is little possibility of landing a boat safely’, even in good weather. The only’ access is by land — a steep haul over the hills from Le Bons Bay northwards, or Goughs Bay to the south, or from Takamatua and Akaroa beyond the craggy western skyline. Dense native forest', probably’ the most luxuriant on the Peninsula, clothed the swampy flats and steep surrounding hill slopes, right to the cliff edges. Giant totara, kahikat e a , and - matai abounded; plus thousands of nikau palms, up to 70ft in height and 400 years old. Some of the latter still survive.

.The .only evidence of Maori interest was a midden or two above the high water mark, signs of feasting in a cave on the south side of the bay (later excavated by Louis Vangioni), and a large, half-built totara canoe high up in Crown Island Gully, midway across the southern promentory leading. to Goughs Bay. Work on this may well have been interrupted by Te Rauparaha’s joyless visitat;,' r| s of 1821-?,?..

Only a pioneer as spirited and resolutely unorthodox as Harry Head could have tackled Hickory Bay. alone, in its virgin state. Harry, bom at Chippenham in Wiltshire, had originally’ left England for the United States and Canada where he acquired a lasting taste for the way of life of the North American Indians. Voyaging on to Australia he spent some time in the late 1850 s at the diggings there and applied unsuccessfully to join the Burke and Wills expedition of 1860.

Thinking he would now like to see something of New Zealand, Harry crossed the Tasman, walked the length of the North Island, sailed to Nelson, and carried on walking to Christchurch. He tried to buy land at Le Boris Bay but was told there was none left, so he

returned to England. After a short stay, he was back here again. This time he journeyed to the Otago diggings where he was one of the originals at Gabriel’s Gully in 1861. But the Peninsula had so delighted him that Harry Head made another attempt to buy land there. After short periods at Fishermans Bay and Paua Bay, he returned to England and then voyaged back to New Zealand in December. 1863, as a passenger aboard the Zealandia. After helping to build the road from Barry’s Bay to Little River, he decided he had seen enough of society for a while and set himself up at Hickory Bay, the remotest spot he had seen in his wanderings. On October 10, 1864, he obtained the rental of 1400 acres of Crown land at the rate of £lO ner annum and erected a

tiny punga-roofed weath-er-board whare in a small bush clearing bordering the Waikerikirari stream, about 100 yards from the beach. He obtained his first freehold section, the 20 acres of R.S. 9629 where his whare was sited, in February’ 1866. Harry is referred to in the land" deeds as “Henry Alexander Head. bushman.” He paid 40 pounds for this section which had a frontage along the line of the projected Hickory’ Bay road. With considerable difficulty Harry’ Head drove some calves across the thickly timbered hills from Akaroa, established a flourishing fruit and vegetable garden, and proceeded to support himself singlehandedly’. Occasional visitors would be startled by his appearance. He clothed himself, while at the bay anyway, in a sack with holes cut' out of it for his

head and arms. He grew his hair long, also, and wore an Indian-style head band.

If expecting polite company he would dress himself up a little, wearing homemade trousers and a blanket. For grand occasions he wore round his waist a brightly coloured cord with tassels, plus a home-made jacket and a hand-woven Indian shoulder bag. Harry Head’s feats of endurance became' legendary. He once Walked to the West Coast and back, able to travel 50 miles a day in all types of rough country. He would walk to Christchurch with only a handful or two of sugar in his pocket to sustain him. If he rode a horse, it was without a bridle. He preferred to control the animal with a string turned around its lower jaw, Redskin fashion.

Yet, though Harry's her-

mit habits attracted interest enough, his talents were even more remarkable.

The son of a bookseller, he was well educated and very’ widely* read. He was a first-class mathematician and a reasonable Greek scholar. He could play several musical instruments, including the piano, banjo, and drum. He was a handy* enough landscape artist and paintings of the first two Dalglish cottages at ’ Le Bons Bay are still in that family’s possession, as well as Harry’s excellent oil painting of the first bridge at Le Bons. He knew enough about botany* to be able to correspond knowledgeably’ with Baron von Muller and Sir Julius von Haast on the subject. The principles of surveying were familiar to him and he helped lay* the road into Le Bons Bay*, as well as the road out to Nor’West Bay. He also had a good knowledge of native birds and in June, 1866, wrote a letter to “The Press” about the feeding preferences of kakas and wild pigeons.

Harry Head seems to have had an unerring sense of direction, and could make a beeline through dense bush forany* place he wished to visit. On one such occasion, when carrying a bath tub on his head, from Barrys Bay’ to Hickory Bay, a branch flicked back and struck him so hard, he was knocked out. It is also believed he broke an arm another time while trying to test a primitive flying machine — possibly a homemade glider.

He was a visionary and mystic as well. In his youth he experienced strange fancies. He once spent a night at Stonehenge on top of one of the ancient stones hoping that mysterious dreams would come to him from the forgotten past. All he got for his trouble was a cold.

In the finish Harry Head, still incurably restless, sold most of his Hickory Bay property to Valentine and William Masefield of Goughs Bay. Another settler, named Wason, had benight 50 acres up at the. top end of Hickory; and Head told the Masefields the bay was getting overcrowded so he had better take off again. Before departing he presented to the Canterbury Museum, in October, 1871, a Prayer Book of the Armenian Patriarchs written in 24 languages. Leaving the Peninsula with at least 500 pounds in profit to show for his spell there, Harry returned to England where he augmented his savings by giving public lectures under the name of Alexander Head. He later paid another visit to the United States where one of his lectures was reported in 1878 by the “Daluth Tribune”, Minnesota. This report was reprinted later that year in the “Akaroa Ma’ 1 ” which referred to

Harry as “this original though somewhat eccentric gentleman.” Presumably Head himself had posted a copy back to the Peninsula to keep his friends in touch with developments. Next to the Masefield brothers' recollections of Harry Head as recorded in Jacobson’s “Tales of Banks Peninsula”, this American account is the most au-i thentic discription of the Hickory* Bay hermit avail, able.

The reporter was fascine ated by Head’s unconventional attire, for a public lecturer anyway: “. . . An everyday wood chopping suit consisting of loose gray pants and a woollen over-skirt, his waist encircled with a rather gay looking- belt and his feet in a pair of Indian moccasins. This outfit, together with his full black beard and his long black hair hanging down on his shoulders, gave him a unique appearance. He has an utter contempt for what he regards as fashionable follies.” Head’s lecture was delivered from a manu-

script and read in a rapid but very distinct manner with "a pleasant voice, a cheerful face, and a merry twinkle of the eyes which at once gained him the goodwill of the audience.” His extensive reading and an estimated five voyages round the world gave him “an immense reservoir of the information such as not one man in five hundred possesses.”

As for the lecture itself, probably only Christchurch’s Wizard could have delivered its equal. The reporter did “nett know what its subject was, or indeed if a subject could be given to it. It was a medley of metaphysics, philsophy, science, and theology'; political economy, hygiene, history, travel, sense, and nonsense.” Head was evidently opposed to cities, railroads, commerce, payment of interest, and milk as part of the human diet. The only surviving example of his prose style is in “The Press” letter

mentioned earlier, and it reveals a curiously quaint and involved manner of expression, hopefully not typical of his lecturing style: “Sir, — So that some who wish that the birds of this land may not all be killed, and who may have some chance to set right what I deem wrong, please to let them know by’ means of type and ink that in this last week or two I have seen three young, kakas and one young pigeon. .« Harry* Head’s subsequent career is not well documented. Records show that he still owned land at Hickory Bay in the 1880 s. He returned to Akaroa in about 1905, where he was the guest of Valentine Masefield. He also visited the Wares and the Wrights, two other families with whom he had been friendlv.

In 1913, he was known to be on the move in Aus- ’ tralia again. The rest is silence. Bob Masefield of Children’s Bay (Akaroa), 1 a grandson of Valen- I tine, heard from his | father that Harry died in England. His father also told him that Harry* Head ' had helped to level the ■' site for the Masefield fam- ’ ily home at Children’s • Bay; and that Harry had ) been able to travel such a ! lot because he knew sev- 1 eral ship’s captains w’ho ■' would give him a free | passage in return for a ' little work on board. ! Harry’s favourite job was cleaning the propeller 1 shaft. Ail he had to do was sit down and hold a I rag to the shaft; and as it turned it cleaned itself.

Head’s original section at Hickory Bay was later , bought from the Masefields by John Smith J of Le Bons, and became part of a large block ' which Smith milled extensively on behalf of James Goss, the Christchurch timber merchant. “Darky” Smith actually set up his mill on the clearing next J to Head’s deserted whare. More than 90 timber cutters and millers were liv* ing at Hickory' Bay at the height of the timber boom in the 1890 s. Alexander Roberts bought the 3000 acre property in 1886 and completed the bush clearance during his 12 years there. Cocksfoot, cattle, and sheep have continued to keep the bay in business. Head’s original section and the surrounding farm have been owned at various times since by the Wares, Knights, Leonardos, and Griggs. Christopher Grigg’s wool shed, up-valley a small distance from his home, is on the location of John Smith’s pioneer timber mill. Close by, somewhere, must be the site of Harry Head’s primeval whare, though no trace of it has been evident since the turn of the century. The bay’s population has shrunk again to a mere two or three families. But to Harry Head, still the local folk hero, that would have been an intolerable crowd . . .