of battered cars parked outside. Where do the owners of these cars drive? There’s nowhere to go.
Were it not for the simple memorial to the soldiers who died in the Great War, the peaceful cove would seem totally removed from the rest of the world. Of the one hundred thousand Kiwi troops sent to fight, seventeen thousand were killed and another forty-one thousand wounded. The names of several brave local boys are inscribed on the stone monument.
I stride along a narrow, winding asphalt road leading to the start of the Rakiura Track. Rakiura, I read somewhere, is the Maori name for Stewart Island. Unfamiliar birds are everywhere,
including a black bird with an iridescent shine on its back and twin blobs of white feathers like wattles hanging under its throat. I stop to listen. Its voice is almost, but not quite, melodious, fluid chimes followed by an assortment of harsher notes, clonks, chuckles, squeaks, clucks and clicks. It sounds drunk. I stop, unload my pack from my shoulders and seek out my bird book. Inevitably it is at the bottom of the pack, and by the time I successfully extract it the scene looks as if there has been a traffic accident: clothes, plastic bags of food, stoves, pots, pans and a sleeping-bag are scattered on the empty road. Thankfully there isn’t any traffic. I look the creature up and discover it is a tui, New Zealand’s national bird.
I divert off the narrow lane skirting idyllic coves, to shuffle my feet on sandy beaches, sucking in salt air pungent with the odour of rotting seaweed. Waves wash over the beach. White daisies and garlic flowers, thick patches of gorse and broom sprout like weeds beside the road. I cross over a headland thick with bush, past the decaying remains of a sawmill. The tallest trees are rimu, a red pine, but there are also kamahi, thin-barked totara and southern rata, providing a canopy of foliage up to twenty metres high. Ground ferns, tree ferns, vines, perching orchids and moss completely blanket the enormous trunks; there is such a profusion of burgeoning parasitic vegetation that it is often impossible to identify the trees underneath. Grass trees and lancewood saturate the middle layers; clumps of gahnia tussock fill the spaces at ground level. Dense colonies of crown fern and taller wheki tree fern fronds pack the gaps. At the bottom level are bush lilies and a variety of orchids. A stinkwood tree proves, when I squeeze its leaves, fetid. I hear the raucous cries of what I think is a parrot, then see several bronze-coloured kakas swooping heavily through the bush. They resemble the alpine keas. One lands clumsily on a tree trunk and roughly rips off the bark with its beak as it searches for grubs.
Through a gap in the bush, I see the sun reflecting off water in a bay fronted by an expanse of dark sand. The sound of surging surf beckons as I descend to Magnetic Beach. The sea is placid,
its swells curling over in a long line to wash upon the shore. I dodge waves fanning over the exposed sand, which is littered with seashells. Stiff-legged wading birds strut along the beach; black swans, beaked bows facing into the breeze, resemble an anchored fleet of galleons.
A DOC hut is tucked in among a stand of tall eucalyptus trees. I rub my shoulders where my pack has hung like a lead weight and pull out a map. The Maori had a semi-permanent hunting settlement here, despite the inherent loneliness of this place. I stare out at the dense bush, the empty cold ocean. I imagine the sealers, the first whites to shelter in the bay in the early nineteenth century. The whalers, who came and made it a base in the mid-1850s, remained here for a year at a time, processing whale blubber before heading back to Europe. What was it like for these men isolated in this remote corner of the world, so far from home?
When gold was found in a creek in the middle of Magnetic Beach in 1867, the first resident police station had to be established to maintain law and order among the unruly
Were it not for the simple memorial to the soldiers who died in the Great War, the peaceful cove would seem totally removed from the rest of the world. Of the one hundred thousand Kiwi troops sent to fight, seventeen thousand were killed and another forty-one thousand wounded. The names of several brave local boys are inscribed on the stone monument.
I stride along a narrow, winding asphalt road leading to the start of the Rakiura Track. Rakiura, I read somewhere, is the Maori name for Stewart Island. Unfamiliar birds are everywhere,
including a black bird with an iridescent shine on its back and twin blobs of white feathers like wattles hanging under its throat. I stop to listen. Its voice is almost, but not quite, melodious, fluid chimes followed by an assortment of harsher notes, clonks, chuckles, squeaks, clucks and clicks. It sounds drunk. I stop, unload my pack from my shoulders and seek out my bird book. Inevitably it is at the bottom of the pack, and by the time I successfully extract it the scene looks as if there has been a traffic accident: clothes, plastic bags of food, stoves, pots, pans and a sleeping-bag are scattered on the empty road. Thankfully there isn’t any traffic. I look the creature up and discover it is a tui, New Zealand’s national bird.
I divert off the narrow lane skirting idyllic coves, to shuffle my feet on sandy beaches, sucking in salt air pungent with the odour of rotting seaweed. Waves wash over the beach. White daisies and garlic flowers, thick patches of gorse and broom sprout like weeds beside the road. I cross over a headland thick with bush, past the decaying remains of a sawmill. The tallest trees are rimu, a red pine, but there are also kamahi, thin-barked totara and southern rata, providing a canopy of foliage up to twenty metres high. Ground ferns, tree ferns, vines, perching orchids and moss completely blanket the enormous trunks; there is such a profusion of burgeoning parasitic vegetation that it is often impossible to identify the trees underneath. Grass trees and lancewood saturate the middle layers; clumps of gahnia tussock fill the spaces at ground level. Dense colonies of crown fern and taller wheki tree fern fronds pack the gaps. At the bottom level are bush lilies and a variety of orchids. A stinkwood tree proves, when I squeeze its leaves, fetid. I hear the raucous cries of what I think is a parrot, then see several bronze-coloured kakas swooping heavily through the bush. They resemble the alpine keas. One lands clumsily on a tree trunk and roughly rips off the bark with its beak as it searches for grubs.
Through a gap in the bush, I see the sun reflecting off water in a bay fronted by an expanse of dark sand. The sound of surging surf beckons as I descend to Magnetic Beach. The sea is placid,
its swells curling over in a long line to wash upon the shore. I dodge waves fanning over the exposed sand, which is littered with seashells. Stiff-legged wading birds strut along the beach; black swans, beaked bows facing into the breeze, resemble an anchored fleet of galleons.
A DOC hut is tucked in among a stand of tall eucalyptus trees. I rub my shoulders where my pack has hung like a lead weight and pull out a map. The Maori had a semi-permanent hunting settlement here, despite the inherent loneliness of this place. I stare out at the dense bush, the empty cold ocean. I imagine the sealers, the first whites to shelter in the bay in the early nineteenth century. The whalers, who came and made it a base in the mid-1850s, remained here for a year at a time, processing whale blubber before heading back to Europe. What was it like for these men isolated in this remote corner of the world, so far from home?
When gold was found in a creek in the middle of Magnetic Beach in 1867, the first resident police station had to be established to maintain law and order among the unruly
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