She wrote, ‘Tata is a small, sheltered beach that faces west across Golden Bay. There’s no surf. The beach is on the west side of a slim peninsula, and on the other side there’s a tidal lagoon … The shags assemble at dawn. When they get close to the beach, they fly down, put their feet out in front of them and ski in on the surface of the water. You can hear them land. Usually there are hundreds, and once we estimated there were several thousand packed close together. In small group after small group, they trundle back into the sea…
‘Friends went round the islands at Tata in a canoe at Queen’s Birthday weekend this year. One said that she’d been surprised to see the shags had chicks even in the middle of June, and that there were three hawks hovering over the nesting area.’
The soundless water, the leisurely canoe, the thousands of pied shags on a bird island – this was the acceptable version of New Zealand as birdland. Another, harsher version, marked by slaughter, tradition, work, money and an appalling tragedy, played out that year at the other end of the South Island.
Young Wandering Albatross about one year old
To kill a muttonbird
THE LAST BOAT BACK from the Muttonbird Islands harvest of 2006 was due to tie up at Bluff on a Wednesday afternoon in May. End of the season, the last muttonbird – the sooty shearwater – caught and killed, their salted bodies pickling in their own marinade of blood and oil, packed 20 at a time inside airtight plastic buckets.
What, said locals, you’ve never eaten a muttonbird? Oh, they said, you don’t know what you’re missing. The knowledge of it brought such pleasure. They beamed. They were thinking of more than just the meal of that boiled, reeking sea bird. It was the whole thing. The hunt, the work involved, the fun of it, the precious time with family on the islands – the tradition. The tradition which led to a tragedy at sea on 13 May, the deaths of six muttonbirders returning from Kaihuka Island, the boat so suddenly and so swiftly punched by freak waves and sunk. The tradition which led to a mass funeral, held on a warm blue day in Bluff, the shops closed ‘due to a bereavement … out of respect … due to events’. The funeral began at 11 a.m. The streets were empty. The town was silent, motionless.
Five empty hearses drove along Gore Street at 10 a.m. towards the Topi house on Marine Parade to collect the bodies: Shain Topi-Tairi, nine; his cousin Sailor Trow-Topi, also nine; their grandfather, Peter Topi, 78; his daughter Tania Topi, 41. Family friend Clinton Woods, 34. The funeral of Ian Hayward, 52, had been held earlier in the week. The survivors – Paul Topi, 46, Dylan Topi, 16, and the Kotuku’s skipper, John Edminston, 56 – were joined by friends and family from across New Zealand, from around the world. They walked slowly, slowly, to and from the Topi house, cars lined up on both sides of the street, the sea at the doorstep of the Marine Parade house.
Actually, Bluff faces north, to Invercargill; homes up on the rise, beneath Bluff Hill, have clear views of the city lights at night. Like so many New Zealand harbour towns and cities, Bluff has its back to the sea. One of the best views of Foveaux Strait and Stewart Island is from the old cemetery on Lagan Street. It tells a brief history of Bluff: Bernard Lovett, drowned 1915; Arthur Light-foot, drowned 1913; James Waddel, drowned 1898; Andrew King, drowned 1894; Erasmus Duncan, drowned 1942. The cemetery also features a monument, a rock, dedicated to Bluff’s founder, James Spencer. It reads, ‘Died at sea. 1846.’
Any history of Bluff is a sea story. Its chapters record fishing tragedies. But what happened on 13 May 2006 was something archaic, singular, unto itself – a birding tragedy, a boat capsized in a notorious stretch of water, bringing death and grief to a corner of New Zealand that harvested sooty shearwaters.
How strange it was to hear people in Bluff refer to themselves as ‘birders’. This wasn’t the pleasant or obsessive pastime of the white middle-class. This was the seasonal ritual of slaughtering birds. It wasn’t bins and the Field Guide and pious talk of ‘good conservation practices’; it was the fridge and the wringing of necks and pious talk of ‘spiritual ancient practices’. You could say this was the real world, the seafood diet of see food and eat it. This was about birds as food, the moa disappearing into the ‘Black Hole’ theory of the human gob, the Maori harvests – banned in the twentieth century – of snaring tui, kaka and godwit for the pot. Quaintly, in August 2006, Dame Kiri Te Kanawa became patron of the Kereru Discovery Project, launched in an attempt to halt the population decline of the New Zealand pigeon; politely, no one made any reference to the ongoing trapping of the pigeon for food, by Northland Maori in particular.
Europeans, too, ate their share and more, right from the start. When the Endeavour sailed into Mercury Bay in November 1769, the ship’s naturalist, Joseph Banks, recorded: ‘About 20 birds [pied shags] were soon killed, and soon broiled and eaten, everyone declaring that they were excellent food.’ The introduction to the 1966 Field Guide comments on the colonial devastation of native species: ‘Of course, uncontrolled shooting, based on the philosophy of the inexhaustible, contributed to the general decline. Wekas commonly went into the pot; kakas were esteemed a delicacy; and the pièce de resistance of a bushmen’s feast might be a pig stuffed with native pigeons and
