Brian Rudman: Walkabout on Kaikoura Island

By BRIAN RUDMAN

What's all this about Kaikoura Island being difficult to get to? It took longer for the 8.40am bus from Herne Bay to turn up and get me to town yesterday than it did the day before to helicopter across to the island airstrip. And the landing was gentler.

From the flattened vantage point in the island's centre, shadowed by the island's highspot, jagged 185m Mitre Peak, it's easy to see why the owner's kids call the place Jurassic Park. Even if the only immediate signs of animal life are the prolific droppings of fallow deer, and the topiaried gorse their browsing creates.

Unlike Tiritiri Matangi and the other inner Hauraki islands' gently undulating contours, Kaikoura and immediate neighbour Great Barrier have the primeval ruggedness of the nearby Coromandel Peninsula.

I'd expected bare abandoned farmland, but found scrub and trees everywhere. Mainly regrowth, but here and there a large pohutukawa, a struggling kauri, a cliff-hanging kawa kawa.

Nature has battered this place over the ages. Mitre Peak is the exposed core of an ancient volcano, while down at sea level great rock bluffs stand guard against ocean storms. Fingers of the sea interlace around the two big islands and the dozens of little ones as though they are remnant high points of a sunken entity. That, or sea levels rose.

Loud chattering gave them away. High above, a flash of crimson underwing drew my eye to a kaka shuffling towards another pine cone. I'd travelled the rough road from the centre through a forest of second-growth manuka and kanuka and had stopped at a large grove of towering pines. The ground around each tree was littered with the battered and gnawed discards of the grazing birds.

On Kaikoura Island, these natives had learned to adjust to foreign fare.

Just before the pines, a collapsed and decaying sign points to earlier times on this most distant suburb of Auckland City. "The Lost Resort Lodge," read the peeling red paint, enticing passersby with the lure of cabins, showers and a "now open" restaurant. Bookings recommended, it said. The resort opened in the late '70s but little passing trade came.

The main building remains though, complete with pool table and bar. Nearby are five bunkhouses, which could, with a bit of sprucing up, accommodate volunteer tree planters. That's if the island was to become the dreamed new refuge for endangered birds and other wild life.

Yesterday, Auckland Issues Minister Judith Tizard was mocking the plans for the sanctuary because there was "no water on Kaikoura Island, which makes it difficult to plant trees and put birds in". Ms Tizard, if she ever makes the trip, will find pure spring water aplenty.

I saw several streams and ponded areas which, I'm told, are spring fed. In fact the spring-sourced reticulation system for the old lodge continues to keep a large water tank full.

Further proof of adequate water is the thriving deer population, put at 300, and the widespread, naturally regenerating tree cover.

The lack of fresh water idea flows from the myth that Kaikoura is tiny. It's not. It's 564ha - that's well over twice the size of Tiritiri Matangi, 218ha, and even bigger than Motuihe, 179ha.

Nurseryman Geoff Davidson, one of the Native Forest Restoration Trust activists, is fizzing over the island's potential. To him, the best part is that 50 years of regrowth has already taken place. Eradicate deer and rats, plant broad leaf, berry and nectar trees - species now killed by deer - as food for birds, and the project would be well under way.

Standing on a hilltop above sheltered Bradshaw Cove where Sir Peter Blake used to moor on holidays, it does seems an ideal project in his memory. Whether that comes to pass or not, it's impossible not to see this as a dream whose time has come.