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The Waiwhetū has seen better days

Waiwhetū has been in the news recently, with the controversy over whether the waka Te Raukura should have a home in the new whare waka on Wellington’s waterfront or at the Te Āti Awa marae in Waiwhetū, in the Hutt Valley. Waiwhetū is a river and was the name of an historic settlement at some distance from the present marae. On a recent weekend I walked the length of the Waiwhetū, from near its source in the hills above Naenae, to where it joins the Hutt River close to the latter’s estuary. This journey along the Waiwhetū from north to south was geographical, but it was also a journey through different settings, times and histories.

The hills where the Waiwhetū rises are home to the rather confusingly named Taitā cemetery – it is reached through Naenae. But the cemetery’s name is reminder of the fact that when it was established in the early 1890s Taitā was a farming district more extensive than the present-day suburb.

The Waiwhetū then takes a course through Naenae itself, a suburb that was an experiment in social engineering through state (public) housing, which was laid out in the 1940s and 1950s. The name of Naenae’s shopping centre, Hillary Court, honours the country’s hero of the time, Edmund Hillary, who reached the summit of Mt Everest in May 1953, along with Nepali climbing partner Sherpa Tensing Norgay.

There’s not quite the same spark in Hillary Court today, yet something of the vision that made Naenae survives. The Olympic swimming pool, opened in the 1950s, and Wellington’s first of such dimensions, remains a draw card. And Naenae’s ideals also express themselves in new ways. With depictions of a variety of ethnic groups, large colourful murals are a reminder of how much the ethnic composition of Naenae and its neighbours has changed in the last half century – Sherpa Tensing would not be as out of place in Naenae in 2011 as he would have been in 1953.

Multicultural mural at Hillary Court

From Hillary Court it is only a short walk to Riverside Drive which – as its name suggests – follows the Waiwhetū, and does so for most of the rest of its distance. In this stretch the river has a tranquil, almost rustic, air and ducks settle in happily under pūriri trees overhanging the bank.

By this point we have reached the suburb of Waiwhetū itself, at the heart of which is the impressive Waiwhetū marae. Its meeting house dates from 1960 and is a confirmation of the tribe’s history of settlement in the Hutt Valley. Nearby Te Whiti Park, named for the great Taranaki pacifist leader, is a reminder of links with that part of the country, from which Te Āti Awa hapū migrated in the 1820s and 1830s. A new cultural centre, opened in 2005, has striking architecture, carvings and motifs.

For Māori in years gone the Waiwhetū was a fruitful source of food – both eels and other fish in it, and the plants that thrived along its banks. That’s not so today. The river has to cope with run-off of many kinds, much harmful, and the problems intensify as it enters an industrial area, as signs soberly indicate. Some of the factory names are very familiar: Griffins has long had a big plant not far from the river, whilst a Masterpet plant nearby caters not to man but to man’s best friends. On the opposite bank lies the Hutt Park raceway.

Ōwhiti cemetery

We approach journey’s end, in more ways than one. Near where the Waiwhetū joins the Hutt – and across the busy main road to Eastbourne – is Ōwhiti cemetery. It is on the site of the historical Waiwhetū pā, but rather unhappily penned in today between river and fuel storage tanks. It is a mundane end to the river too, but with a certain fitness that a water course that starts with a cemetery also ends with one, yet traverses in between such a variety of past and present lives and livelihoods.

In February English singer/songwriter P. J. Harvey released an album called Let England shake. It’s a great album, and in what may be a world first, New Zealand writer Maurice Shadbolt is credited with inspiring lyrics for a couple of the songs, including the beautiful song that really grabbed me on the first listen.

The opening lines of ‘The colour of the earth’ are ‘Louis was my dearest friend / Fighting in the Anzac trench’. For every Australian and New Zealander there is only one possible location for ‘the Anzac trench’ and beyond the fact that the song is a present-day retelling written by an English woman (though the lead vocals are sung by men), it got me wondering about the role of contemporary songs as folk songs, as aides-memoire and as (war) memorials.

Anzac Day commemorations at one of New Zealand's many physical war memorials

A quick think and I came up with a couple of Australian songs, the 1971 Gallipoli epic ‘And the band played Waltzing Matilda’ by Scottish-born Eric Bogle (made famous by the Irish band The Pogues), and the 1983 minor hit and Vietnam requiem ‘I was only nineteen‘ by Redgum. The Pogues were often inspired by historical events, ‘A pair of brown eyes’ being another of their ‘war’ songs. And of course there are plenty of tracks about various wars by American writers – the thoughts of a returned soldier in Lyle Lovett’s ‘Pontiac’ being a favourite of mine.

If there was any local band from the last 20-odd years who might have attempted writing a song recalling the events or aftermath of the Gallipoli campaign, I would have put The Warratahs at the top of the list, but I can’t recall any them doing anything.

There are, however, a few examples of more recent events being commemorated in song. Generations of punk bands have written highly politicised songs, but generally they rarely enter the mainstream public consciousness. I have vague memories of a punk band writing a song about Neil Roberts, who blew himself up in 1982 outside the building that housed the Wanganui police computer. Andrew from the Mysterex blog reminded me of Harry Death’s ‘Maintained a silence’, though that wasn’t the one I was thinking of.

‘Murder in Manners St’ by Wellington punk band The Mockers (prior to their reinvention as a chart topping pop/new wave band) was about the unprovoked, broad daylight stabbing of a 20-year old student, but could also be seen as a reference to the Second World War ‘Battle of Manners Street‘. Later the pop/new wave version of The Mockers released ‘One black Friday’ recalling the 1984 Queen Street riot, which occurred after an outdoor concert they were due to perform in was cancelled part-way through (though the band’s chief songwriter was safely ensconced in Wellington during the proceedings).

There were two reasonably quick musical responses to the 1990 Aramoana massacre – the heartfelt but unambiguous ‘Strange case,’ with its chorus of ‘never trust a man in camouflage gear’, from The Chills album Soft bomb, and probably my favourite Don McGlashan song, The Muttonbirds’ beautifully understated ‘A thing well made’, from their debut album, which imagined the story of a gunshop owner – ‘It’s Wednesday so I do the mail orders … one of those AK47s for some collector down the line’.

On a somewhat lighter note, more recently, ‘Billy the Hunted One’ by Robbie Robertson (the Cantabrian, not the Canadian) wrote a song about the fugitive William Stewart quick smart.

I think it’s quite interesting that we live in a nation in which every town has at least one public war memorial, and while many writers and visual artists have responded to these and the circumstances of their being, few of our better-known songwriters tend to dwell much on our country’s history. With public participation in Anzac Day on the increase, maybe it’s time for some new folk songs to add to the commemorations.

Old Blue, from whom all other black robins are descended

Ornithologist Don Merton died on Sunday 10 April 2011, some 27 years after the black robin dubbed ‘Old Blue‘. Don pioneered conservation techniques of intensively managing the last remaining individuals of a species to recover the population and also of transferring species from one island to another, where habitats were more favourable and predators absent.

In the 1960s active management of predators and manipulating breeding at an individual level was not the done thing. Managing threatened species was pretty much a case of preserving habitat and then leaving them alone. An experience on Big South Cape Island in 1964 changed that. Rats got onto the island and Don and his colleagues transferred the only known South Island saddlebacks and the tiny Stead’s bush wren to nearby rat-free islands. The Stewart Island snipe and the greater short-tailed bat were not transferred and they soon became extinct. While the wren was transferred, it did not breed on its new home and it too ceased to exist.

Don later recalled: ‘The tragedy of Big South Cape was a timely and valuable lesson for us. It convinced even the most sceptical that predators could induce ecological collapse and extinctions. But it also has a massive, enduring impact because it shaped the way we developed policies about conservation and put them into practice.’

His most startling achievement occurred in 1976, when the remaining seven black robins on Little Māngere Island, one of the Chatham Islands, were transferred to nearby Māngere Island, which had better forest. As a young boy Don had successfully placed goldfinch chicks in his grandmother’s canary’s nest, which the bird then raised as her own. Using this age-old cuckoo’s trick as a cue, he gave the eggs of the last surviving female, named old Old Blue, to tomtits, which they successfully incubated. Old Blue would then lay another clutch. Slowly the population grew and so the species was saved – from just five individuals and one breeding pair. When Old Blue died at age 13 her passing was announced in Parliament. All of the 250 or so surviving black robins are descended from her and her breeding partner Old Yellow.

Few people could lay claim to saving a species, yet Don, as well as having a major hand in saving multiple bird species, also developed approaches that could be adapted for other threatened species. The Department of Conservation’s current recovery plans for threatened species build upon the work of Don and other conservationists of the late 1970s. The continued existence of the kākāpō and black robin are his most visible legacy, yet the hands-on approaches he and his colleagues developed, and that many others have since built upon, continue to offer hope for retaining biodiversity both in New Zealand and overseas.

In conservation circles Don Merton was not only world famous in New Zealand, he was world famous worldwide. And rightly so.

Recently I spent a week in the King Country on a field trip because I’m writing the Places entry on this region for Te Ara. Published sources tell us so much – but only so much. Knowing the lie of the land solidifies research and provides new insights.

Some time before I left Wellington, I had browsed artist Peter McIntyre’s illustrated book New Zealand (1964). He included some King Country scenes, including the ‘village’ in which his holiday home was located. McIntyre didn’t give its name and his Dictionary of New Zealand Biography entry didn’t record it either. I noted this as something to find out later.

South of Taumarunui I turned off State Highway 4 and headed towards Kākahi, which was only a name on a map to me then. The road from the highway heads down rolling hills. The farmland is pleasantly wooded and my travelling companion said it reminded him of a Capability Brown landscape – this may sound very peculiar, but it did have a park-like air to it.

Kākahi itself is no English village. It’s a very New Zealand little place, with one main street lined with a small group of old wooden shops and a town hall. On a side road we noticed and photographed an unusual old building – unusual because the weatherboards were placed horizontally on one part and vertically on another. No one was around, quietness ruled. The whole place felt quite special and I remembered it better than many of the other places I visited.

Kākahi in 2011

When I got back to Wellington I followed up Peter McIntyre for my section on the arts and culture of the region. I re-read his 1964 description of his village and the surrounding landscape, and his words felt familiar. I noted that he’d painted mounts Ruapehu and Ngāuruhoe. I scrutinised his painting of the main street. That looked even more familiar. I thought to myself ‘I bet his village is Kākahi’. I soon found out that McIntyre published a book called Kakahi in 1972. He’d even painted the unusual building – a blacksmith’s workshop – and included it in this book.

Mid-way through my King Country visit I wrote ‘King Country is made of hills, rocks, old derelict houses and wild goats’ on my facebook page. McIntyre ended Kakahi with a plate of an empty cottage and wrote ‘old abandoned houses like this are almost a symbol of the King Country, gazing with the sightless stare of empty windows to hills rising above the winter mornings.’ He even sketched a billy goat with great horns, noting that ‘wild goats are another feature of the riverside and bush. All sizes and colours, they come down to the river to drink and then toward evening they can be seen grazing their way up through the clearings.’ I think Peter McIntyre was with me on that journey, even if I didn’t realise it at the time.

The Waiatoto River in its breath-taking surroundings

‘The Waiatoto – it’s inland from Jackson Bay – some nice views of Aspiring apparently,’ my paddling friend Nick said as we left Wānaka. Anyone familiar with Jackson Bay at the bottom of South Westland knows it’s a remote place, so I figured the Waiatoto would be isolated, even for a bunch of white-water kayakers. This would be the perfect way to top-off two great weeks spent on some of the lower South Island’s wild rivers.

As we drove over Haast Pass in heavy rain, other local rivers looked full and enticing. Nerves caught me in the throat as I peered out the car window at the water pounding over the Gates of Haast. The next morning we crammed dry clothes, food, sleeping bags and tarps into dry bags and 12 of us set off from Haast beach to meet helicopter pilot James Scott. With no road access anywhere near the river, James would chopper us with our kayaks to Bonar Flats where we would start our two-day journey down the Waiatoto to where the river meets the sea south-west of Haast.

The Waiatoto drains the Volta glacier system on the western side of Mt Aspiring. Several smaller rivers flow into it, fed by glaciers. The river travels north along a valley flanked to the west by the Haast Range before turning north-west to reach the Tasman Sea. Much of the river’s length is within the bounds of the staggeringly beautiful Mt Aspiring National Park.

White water on the Waiatoto

Soon after getting on the river, we paddled down some tricky boulder sections, many of the rocks submerged by a high flow from the recent rainfall. Stretches of flat paddling between white-water allowed us to ogle the scenery: waterfalls spilling over schist rock formations, moss-covered valleys, beech forest and groves of tree-ferns. On our first day a kea flew over the river, swooping low, screeching and laughing at us as we paddled on. We set-up our tarp bivvies on a grassy spot on the first night and fell asleep – covered in insect repellent to ward-off the notorious West Coast sandflies – to the sound of the river flowing past.

John Breen, in his book River of Blood, has introduced readers to some of the stories of the Waiatoto, a place he calls New Zealand’s version of the Wild West. A few families of West Coasters tried to live in the river valley, hacking out livelihoods despite the isolation. The fierce battles before Europeans arrived gave the river its Māori name, Waiototo, which means ‘Blood River’. Explorer Charlie Douglas travelled the length of the river in 1891, adding to the folklore, and William O’Leary, otherwise known as Arawata Bill, spent time on the Waiatoto as a ferryman.

After an adrenalin-filled day of white-water rapids and a dinner of dehydrated spag bol, I sat on the river’s banks in the evening light. The ghosts of the warriors, the pounamu-gatherers, the hunters, the explorers and the drovers who had lived up this river seemed close to the surface. I felt lucky to be here.