Book extract: Rakiura, the wild landscapes of Stewart Island

Sunset, Gog, Port Pegasus

Most days on the top of Bluff Hill/Motupōhue, at the extremity of the South Island, the wind buffets and bullies the land so that everything – trees, scrub, communication towers, the odd bird, rocks, hardy travellers – looks as though it is holding on for dear life. From the viewing platform there is a 360-degree view, but the eye is drawn south to Stewart Island/Rakiura, an island of nearly 180,000 hectares, which, incredibly, has survived the last 220 years of human impact pretty much unscathed. The island sits like the anchor stone of Māori legend, tossed out of the waka at the end of Aotearoa; a remnant of the old world that awakens something deep in our cultural memory.

It was the early 1990s when I sailed out of Bluff Harbour into Foveaux Strait for the first time. It felt as if I were heading to some mysterious, faraway and unfamiliar place. Landing at Port Pegasus and watching the ship slip away, I had an overpowering feeling of isolation; an isolation that pushed away any initial thoughts of beauty and awe. The landscape and climate were unlike anything I had experienced. Years of wandering in the Southern Alps had not prepared me for how completely remote an island could feel. On the mainland, I can shoulder my pack and walk in any direction towards civilisation but on Rakiura, all directions in the wilderness lead to an even wilder ocean, and this took a little getting used to.

West Ruggedy Beach and Codfish Island - Whenua Hou

As I walked around, the more I saw, the more I knew that I would return. Familiarity of the place has since brought me a certain peace with the isolation and perhaps with age I’ve grown into my appreciation of the subtle. From this early courtship, Stewart Island/Rakiura grabbed a piece of my soul and has never let it go.

Evening light looking north to Codfish Island, Whenua Hou, Mason Bay.

One place I want to always come back to is near The Gutter, at the southern end of Mason Bay on the west coast. Here, from some easily accessible elevation, you can get a feel for the lie of the land and how it’s surrounded by big ocean. A scramble around a boulder-strewn cove leads to a grassy slope, and beyond this to an area of sculpted rock and wind-battered muttonbird scrub. Standing on this high rocky cliff, looking southwest, a cold steady wind blows in off the sea. It is not unusual from here to see a mollymawk, one of the lesser albatrosses (if there is such a thing), effortlessly cruising on invisible wind shifts. The coastline sweeps away to Big South Cape Island. Swells crash into the sea cliffs in an explosion of white spray. And further still, limitless sea stretches towards the sky. You can see the weather approaching, almost always from the west and almost always approaching faster than anticipated. Looking north, the view is no less commanding. Mason Bay curves in an extensive sweep of sand and rolling dunelands, while in the distance, Codfish Island and the Ruggedy Range give form to the horizon. On a clear day the Fiordland mountains shimmer in the distance.

Sunset near Gog, Port Pegasus

Ulva Island, Paterson Inlet - Whaka a Te Wera

I’ve been to The Gutter many times and sat, often crouched in the lee of a boulder or some shrubby leatherwood, watching the way light and weather change the landscape, and casting my eyes over now familiar territory. It feels both powerful and peaceful, and when those moods co-exist, they evoke a sense of humility.

Often while I’ve watched and waited, for nothing in particular, I’ve thought about how resilient the wildness of Rakiura has remained during its limited contact with humans, and how an absence of people has helped ensure its survival as a wilderness. But an interesting human history has emerged all the same. For over a thousand years, people have come and gone from here according to their changing fortunes; today there are close to four hundred hardy souls who call the township of Oban at Halfmoon Bay home. Most of these residents work on the island, some are escapists, and no doubt a few are addicted to that feeling of living at the edge of the world. Less-permanent human activity includes the trampers who come to roam the tracks, and hunters. While these visitors escape to the island, the islanders take some mainland time; one group heading for mud and freeze-dried food, the other for civilisation in Invercargill.

The Gutter and the Ernest Islands, Mason Bay

As in the rest of New Zealand, human contact with Rakiura began with explorers from Polynesia, although it is not certain when they arrived or how long they stayed. To date, there has been no firm archaeological evidence on the island to indicate that Māori settled permanently here for any substantial period of time before 1800, although the recent discovery of more ancient human remains on the island is raising new questions. The climate and much of the soil was not right for agricultural practices such as growing kūmara, and there were simply more prosperous places to live in New Zealand. For many years there was also uncertainty as to whether Rakiura was home to the moa because most of the moa bones found on the island were incomplete skeletons, suggesting they were brought to the island as cooked food. However, around 2001, complete skeletons of smaller bush moa were found near Mason Bay and The Neck, and in 2021, a full skeleton of a South Island giant moa was discovered on the western side of the island; a discovery that is rewriting some assumptions about the island’s history.

Southern iwi valued the sea around Rakiura for its abundant fish, seals, shellfish and seabirds, the most important being tītī, or muttonbirds (sooty shearwater), which now nest in their millions on the islands adjacent to Stewart Island/Rakiura. Tītī are a migratory species that travel to the northern hemisphere for the winter and return in the spring to nest. By April, the adults stop feeding the new chicks, which, by then rolling in fat, are ready for the taking – initially needing to be pulled from their burrows but later in the season they can be found wandering around the island at night. They are quickly killed, then cooked in their own fat before being packed and transported to the mainland for sale. Until the early part of last century, the bags were made of bull kelp (pōhā-tītī). Not only did this method of preservation make the resource readily tradeable around Aotearoa but also it was an important component of the southern Māori economy.

Tarn beneath Mt Anglem, Hananu.

The muttonbirding industry proved so vital to early Māori that protocols for the harvest evolved and were strictly enforced. Kaitiaki insisted that “no feet were to walk upon the motu between the seasons” and that in harvesting, there should be no damage to the ground or burrows. Tītī traditions still exist today on 21 birding islands around Rakiura, and little has changed in the basics. What has changed is the labour and time invested: helicopters have replaced waka for transport to the island, and plastic buckets with salt are the preferred preservation method. Like Bluff oysters from the Foveaux Strait, the taste for tītī is very much a Southland delicacy that transcends cultural backgrounds.

The Tītī Islands were never settled and were only ever visited in the muttonbird season. Similarly, the main island of Rakiura appeared to be used by Māori as little more than a temporary camp on their way to them. Archaeology is still trying to reveal an accurate picture of which tribes were involved in these annual expeditions for the collection of tītī and from which parts of the country they voyaged. In 1999, hunters discovered a canoe prow at The Gutter. The prow, now held at the Southland Museum, has been identified as Ngāti Mamoe in origin, an iwi originally from the West Coast of the South Island. This canoe gives an indication of just how mobile various tribes were in pre-European times and the importance of seafaring skills when harvesting food. It is also likely that Ngāti Mamoe had ventured here in part to search for resources as well as a place of refuge after a long-running conflict with the dominant Ngāi Tahu tribe.

Rakiura: The Wild Landscapes of Stewart Island by Rob Brown (Potton & Burton, $65) is available now.