going to the Chats

Te Ao Hou, 1973, Page 14

going to the Chats by Shila Natusch That was what somebody's kind Maori grandmother, said, when we were waiting at the Wellington Airport for our call to board the Bristol Freighter: ‘Going to the Chats?’ She was, too, but just for the weekend. ‘I wouldn't like to live there!—couple of good seas, it would wash away!’ But plenty of kai moana: and the weather, though inclined to be misty and blowy, nothing like as rough as we'd been having over the first weeks of spring about Cook Strait. As a Stewart Islander now living in Wellington, I didn't expect to feel out of place in the Chathams. My husband, like most of his generation, had been overseas, but for me this was the first time—well, I was at least going to get a foot half-out of New Zealand! What to take? We were allowed 44Ibs luggage. My brother had been over the year before, so I wrote to him. He couldn't think of anything to add to my suggestions—‘but I'm not commodity minded,’ he wrote. ‘If for instance ice cream was banned and I didn't hear the news I wouldn't notice its absence perhaps for several years’—nowadays such things are obtainable at the Chathams anyway. For our own use, he recommended short gumboots: ‘handy in bad weather as they can be kicked off at doorsteps as is custom to stop dragging mud in. Each house has a little row of little gumboots at back door. All the same brand—red tops—obviously sold at Chatham Store. No doubt sometimes the wrong boots go on the right feet. Gumboots without red tops and got in New Zealand would be easily identified.’ We also took tramping gear, a camera, a couple of sketchbooks, and a few things like oranges and bananas to fill the corners: no doubt there would be enough Chatham Island vegetation and rock samples to fill a couple of Bristol Freighters on the way home! I was pleased to note that we could see out: the Chathams plane has a passenger box that slides in and out, and its windows line up with those of the plane. What did we see?—we saw the sea; but the Pacific was terrific: just white-speckled blue from up there, but mighty crashing combers at boat-level. I shouldn't wonder. I'd like to have gone by sea, but the Holmdale is not a Women's Lib. ship. The freighter flew on, steady as a rock. We were given a tasty and substantial lunch.

‘Can you see anything yet?’ asked my husband; but I couldn't. I began to peel an orange for us, and just as we were dripping juice and bits in all directions, rocks and kelp and land appeared from nowhere and we were there! Dazzling white sand with foaming breakers; salt water clear as emerald (why hadn't we brought our togs?); moorland patterned in purple and brown; vast expanses of water inshore as well as out—and next thing we were charging a bright green runway, while neighbouring sheep and their tail-swinging lambs bustled for cover. Rows of Landrovers were there to meet the plane, and rows of trees, neatly fenced off. had shiny leaves as green as the grass. Our Chatham host couldn't have been kinder: ‘Had lunch? Well, how about a trip to Kaingaroa—you can see Chatham Island An old kopi—decorated tree An Eastern Bar-tailed Godwit forgetmenots in their wild state!—only, first, there's something I want to show you in a karaka grove—kopi, they call them here.’ He stopped the Landrover by the roadside. A walk over the paddock, through the trees, past a clearing into more trees—and there stood an old kopi, yellow with lichen, green with moss, and carved with a quaint and attractive figure—human or gnome?—with a tiki-like face set squarely, not over to one side, on a stripy body; the stripes looked a bit like those on a wasp, but they may have meant ribs. I wish we knew more about the Morioris! The last full-blooded one, the popular and jolly Tommy Solomon, died in 1933; there was a picture of him in our history books. His people were Polynesians, a branch of those who settled in New Zealand in far-off times to become the moa hunters. When the later Maoris reached New Zealand, the moa hunters faded away before them; but their Moriori cousins were left in

peace at the Chathams for several hundred years longer. It was only after Pakeha sealers and whalers arrived in the Pacific that the Chatham Islands were drawn to Maori attention: Te Rauparaha was then on the warpath, and ‘a displaced and restless group’ of Taranaki people took over first a trading brig and then the Chatham Islands. The poor Morioris didn't have a chance. The seal seems to have been important in their way of life. On a limestone wall by Te Whanga Lagoon is carved a great shoal of flickering seal-like figures; but we don't really know what they mean. But sealing was A rock painting on a limestone bank at Te Whanga Lagoon hard on the Morioris, for they ate seal meat and wore sealskin clothes; and although (as in New Zealand) the introduction of ailments like measles and influenza was quite accidental, it was still devastating to a people who had never met such things. Like the moa hunters, they seem to have been a peaceful, wandering people; that, and their undermined health and spirits, must have made it all the easier for the newcomers to take them over. Enough of them must have been killed and umu'd to show was boss; many became slaves. The women went to the victors. All this was according to the customs of Maori warfare of those times. A few years later, missionaries were persuading their converts to free their slaves, but by then the Morioris had little to live for. History is no longer treated as a matter of ‘goodies and baddies’ so much as a jockeying for position in the matter of land, food and other goods; but it is always sad when a whole race dies out. However, there are still strains of Moriori, as well as Maori. Portuguese, Russian Finn, Scandinavian, French and British stock, among the Chatham Island families; and they add up to a friendly, easy-going and kindly people. There are hundreds of Moriori carvings on trees and rocks if you know where to look; and in the sandhills you sometimes find middens of various ages. Sand blown aside revealed the place an old-timer had been laid to rest; it was so long ago, and he looked so peaceful, that one could only hope that no wandering stock would disturb his bones. One gets rather used to bones on the Chathams: sheep, cattle, horses, sometimes persons; and along the lagoon shore the teeth of sharks that died not thousands but millions of years ago. One is very much aware of the past, and of the fact that man hath but a short time to live; but at the same time there is every reason to enjoy life while the going's good! People live scattered about, but nowadays it isn't too difficult to hop in the Landrover and join the rest at some gathering: a wedding, a hangi, the pictures maybe. We saw the giant blue forgetmenots all right: a great shoal of them, as blue as could be, flowerheads the size of A & P Show

cauliflowers massed among enormous glossy leaves. Towards the other end of the island, we also came across patches of the lovely Chatham Island ‘aster’, a daisy-flowered shrub with silvery green, softish leaves and large flowers shading from lilac to deep violet. There are shrubs related to the New Zealand mingimingi, but with leaves like totara; they are crammed with berries just now, waxy white; white with a delicate flush of pink; rose pink; ruby red. Gentians were beginning to flower in the peat bogs, mostly white with delicate lime-green streaks, but I also found a lovely pink one. But the trees are sad. Except in one or two places where someone has fenced them off from stock, they are dead and dying, bleached like the bones, and there are no seedlings coming on. Even the famous blue forgetmenot is rare now, except in people's gardens—and of course even that is better than nothing. There are a few places along the lagoon shore where it's possible to collect seedlings of the interesting trees found only on the Chathams: a tree olearia (ours here are nearly all shrubs), a tree corokia, and so on—often a plant we know in New Zealand as a small shrub has a king-sized relation in the Chathams. But so many of the kings seem to be dying out, like the Morioris. The old Chatham Islanders, from early European times, have been fishermen and farmers. The crayfish boom of the sixties brought many outsiders to the district. At Waitangi, Government employees run the radio and weather stations, post office, marine department office and police station; there is a hall, a church, a small hospital, a pub, the beginnings of an interesting little museum, and garages. There are boats in the bay. There are other settlements, mostly fishing places with little freezers or factories, on other parts of the coast, Stewart Island is much better off for shelter, though! We had a trip across to the other main island, Pitt, and it was a real taste of the high seas. After all, these islands are away out in the middle of the ocean. But they are a very interesting, if semi-detached corner of New Zealand. I'd like to go back to ‘The Chats’!