Reporter David Fisher and photographer Mark Mitchell drove from Cape Reinga to Bluff, meeting amazing Kiwis. Today we wrap up their series with a double header - the former Dunedin rock chick who has never forgotten her lost love, and the Foveaux Strait lighthouse keeper and his wife.
Day 24: Bluff
Robyn Valentine was expecting. In fact, her second child was due any day.
"You delivered the lambs so you can deliver the baby," she told Don, her husband and lighthouse keeper on remote Dog Island.
Don wasn't so keen. He was actually pretty keen to get Robyn completely off the island.
But what's a man to do when he marries a woman who's stubborn enough to stick with him through some of the remotest parts of New Zealand?
Subterfuge lies at the heart of this story, played out in the dying days of manned lighthouses in New Zealand.
Don was one of the last lighthouse keepers on Dog Island, charged with keeping ships in Foveaux Strait off the rocky floor of the sea.
Dog Island can be seen from Bluff, right at the bottom where the signpost tells visitors it is 1402km to Cape Reinga. Watching from there, the flat slab of granite has a patchy carpet of green across it and is ringed by swells which appear from nowhere before disappearing in a violent crash, becoming chasms.
Rising from Dog Island, straight and tall, is a 36m white tower built from stones quarried on the island. At the top, a flashing light can be seen 35km distant.
It was an odd job but one Don had grown up with.
Born in Christchurch, he lived around lighthouses after his dad took the job keeping the signal going at Farewell Spit.
From there, home was at lighthouses as remote as Cape Brett and Stephens Island.
Robyn grew up in Palmerston North, where she met Don. They married in 1957 and she thought lighthouses sounded fine, so that's what they did.
"When we found out we were going to East Cape, a television programme came on about Te Araroa," she says. The tiny town would be the closest to civilisation the couple would have at their new home. She watched closely. "That just about put me right off," she says, but agreed to go anyway.
There was no power, no general store and no post office. She could almost see the tumbleweed blowing through town. "I got out there and there was a coal range. I'd never seen one in my life."
Ah, it was a great little house, says Don.
Told we travelled that way on the trip to Bluff, Robyn exclaims at the luxury of it now. "You had a road," she says, because they didn't back then. Instead, it was a scoot along the beach when the tide was right.
Don tells a classic from the Cape. There was this guy who wanted to go to the pub one night. "He tried to get his lorry going," says Don. It wouldn't, so he tried to saddle up his horse but it was an unco-operative beast. "So he put a saddle on his cow and rode that into town."
It was a sought-after cow. "It took two days for the milk to get in and it would be off when it arrived," he says. "The publican tried to buy the cow - said he needed the milk for the kids."
Well, the cow's owner resisted and resisted.
"Then one day he asks [the publican] 'you still want to buy my cow?"'
The publican did, and they settled on $40, which was quickly turned into beer and drunk.
"The next day, the publican turns up to buy the cow and there it is - dead on the ground!"
Their eldest was aged 5 when they went to Dog Island. They had initially put in for Puysegur lighthouse, which is far out on the western end of the South Island, below Fiordland. "They pulled the pin on that when they found out I was pregnant," says Robyn.
Dog Island was marginally acceptable to the lighthouse authority but as the due date approached, there was debate over when and where the baby would be born.
Robyn: "I wouldn't go. I didn't think I was really due." Don disagreed - so she told him he could deliver his second child.
How different could it be to the animal husbandry which came with living so remotely, she asked.
Then Robyn was surprised and delighted to be told the captain of the visiting Wairua, which came every three months, wanted to host her to morning tea. She accepted. "I'd never been invited for tea by a captain before so I was going," she says. Not going to happen, says Don.
Robyn: "He told me if I went my suitcase would be on the next boat out to the Wairua."
A likely story, she thought. So off she went for morning tea.
Don says he wished her well when she got on the boat. "I knew the suitcase would be on the next one."
Robyn, meanwhile, was excited about morning tea with the captain. Climbing the ladder to board Wairua wasn't easy but the effort was worth it. "It was lovely," says Robyn. There were pikelets and scones and plenty of jam.
Don went back to the lighthouse and fetched her suitcase, packed in that way suitcases get packed when babies draw near to entering the world. He went back to the beach. "The next boat that went out had her suitcase on it!"
Robyn finished morning tea and discovered Don had held true to his promise. She peered over the side of the boat at the ladder swaying back and forth.
"It was hard enough climbing up. To climb back down would have been harder. I conceded defeat. When my suitcase came aboard, I stayed on the boat." Daniel was born a few days later.
Don was one of two keepers on the island. "You have to be very careful you don't live on top of each other," says Robyn.
Don: "You just have to look at some of the old log books. Letters written to the head office in Wellington, complaining the other keeper's dog had barked or bitten a child. We never had those problems."
The outrages buried in the logs reveal the wilder times of our young country. Passing fishermen were a threat to marital longevity - they helped a few women escape husbands and the island.
Supplies came once every three months on the Wairua. The boat's arrival was a big deal.
Beer was loaded on the first surfboat and opened soon after the keel crunched its way up the beach. An airstrip was built on the island in the 1960s - drops of fortnightly essentials eased the isolation.
Morning began with a weather report and a climb to the top of the lighthouse, where the keeper would draw a curtain to protect the delicate lighting mechanism from the sun.
They slept with an alarm next to the bedroom. If the light stopped, for any reason, the alarm would rouse the keeper who could start the generator to power the signal.
There remains a time famous in stories around here of a time when the keeper couldn't save the ship.
A goods transporter loaded with children's toys was wrecked in the 1930s. Its cargo began to wash up as Christmas approached. That year, everyone had a good Christmas.
They thought there would be a repeat one night, with the booming of a ship's propeller so close to the reef it "shook the whole house, every time the propeller went around".
"He'd dropped both anchors. He was full ahead but going two-to-three knots backwards. He was that close to the island all we could hear was BOOM BOOM BOOM." With this, Don winds his arm up and punches it around in circles, as if it's the propeller fighting against the current.
"That's what woke us," says Don. "We got up to see what was going on."
At the last, the ship pulled clear of the rocks.
There were others who came ashore less accidentally, with a more malign purpose. Don remembers standing on the shore, shouting at invaders who came to take paua: "Would you go into someone's backyard to swipe the mushrooms?"
It was paradise in that way. "You used to be able to go down and pull back the kelp and get a feed of paua without getting your feet wet."
There are no rats or mice on the island's 15ha. There was a flock of 80 sheep, a cow and a bull, the latter two intended to breed. They didn't, so the cow became dinner.
"Then there wasn't much point in having a bull without a cow so we ate him too," says Don.
Sure, there was bitter cold at times. Never freezing, says Don, because the sea around the island kept the temperature just high enough above zero.
Eventually, lighthouses and people went their own way.
"They were all going automatic," says Robyn. Don, who left to drive buses and work in roading, says: "There wasn't any future in the job."
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