Chatham Islands - the End of the World by Richard Newton

After three days on the Chatham Islands, a South Pacific cluster nudging the International Date Line, I did something that I will regret for the rest of my days: I cooked an endangered species and ate it for supper.

I had flown here from Wellington aboard a cramped, 19-seater turbo-prop, leaving daylight behind. Five hundred miles east of the mainland, we reached an archipelago that does not feature on most maps of New Zealand - even though the Chathams constitute a county of that country.

The plane touched down on Chatham itself, the largest in the group, two and a half times the size of the Isle of Wight with a population of just 700. The only other inhabited island is nearby Pitt, with 55 residents.

I disembarked into the kind of complete, black darkness that envelopes only the remotest of places. A draught from Antarctica blustered across the airfield. Baggage was reclaimed from the back of a truck. Among the small knot of people waiting for it, I was the only outsider; an interloper at a closed get-together. A weathered little man saw me loitering on the periphery and wandered over. “Visitors are welcome,” he said, shaking my hand. “Tourists can **** off.” It was an inauspicious start.

Headlights blazed in the car park. A silhouette called Rhonda Preece met me there; I would be staying at her motel for the duration. She had lived on the Chathams since birth and exuded an air of calm authority that assuaged my initial unease. “You’ll be needing a car,” she said as we drove towards Waitangi, the main settlement. “Come up to the house tomorrow and I’ll lend you one.”

Rhonda’s Sunrise Motel was a prefabricated house that I was to share with four researchers from the Ministry of Fisheries in Wellington. They were here to set the lobster quota for the coming season. It was a contentious undertaking. A recent quota dispute had resulted in three fishermen from the mainland being severely beaten up in the local pub. A contingent of armed policemen had to fly in to arrest the offenders.

“You’d better not let on you’re sharing with us,” one of the researchers advised. “We’re not the most popular people around here.”

A gale kept me awake for long periods during the night. It died before daybreak and I stalked out into stillness as dim light filtered through low cloud. This was the beginning of the world’s day. The Chatham Islands are twelve hours and forty-five minutes ahead of GMT.

In the run-up to the year 2000, the Chathams were gripped by millennium fever. Everyone was convinced that there was a killing to be made. New Year tours were slapped with a price tag of £75,000, and local farmers vied with each other to sell the television rights for the first dawn of the new century.

The owner of a farm embracing the easternmost point of Pitt Island reckoned that he was in pole position, but another farmer on Chatham Island – a little to the west – possessed the highest point in the archipelago and contended that from the top of his hill he could see the dawn a least a couple of minutes before it was visible on low-lying Pitt.

It was all unseemly and totally unrealistic. Some islanders were convinced that the television rights for the first millennium daybreak could be sold for many millions: “It’ll be worth at least as much as the Olympics,” was a typical assessment in the pub. As the dollar signs flashed before their eyes, the islanders were collectively gazumped by the scattered Pacific republic of Kiribati, which redrew the International Date Line to its own advantage and consequently beat the Chathams to the first sunrise by 22 minutes.

I walked up from the motel to Rhonda’s house through bleak, rolling countryside reminiscent of the Yorkshire Moors. The first small building on my right was the studio of Radio Weka 92.1 FM. The second was Rhonda’s. Escorted by her two barefoot toddlers, we crossed the toy-strewn backyard to view an ensemble of rust and rubber that turned out to be the car she was lending me.

The engine stirred after the third turn of the key, emitting the guttural gurgle of a badly tuned rally car. I coasted down the hill and gained my first daylight view of the corrugated rooftops of Waitangi. From a distance, the village looked like a holiday trailer park surrounded by grotesque, wind-sculptured trees. Closer inspection showed it to be composed of simple, whitewashed wooden bungalows overlooking Petre Bay, a prime haunt of the great white shark. The Chathams Islands do not fit the idyll of the South Pacific. There are no palm trees or rosy coral reefs here.

This community of 300 people is exposed to the full force of the Roaring Forties. During two centuries of European settlement, seeds of optimism have occasionally blown in on the wind. Sealing, whaling, sheep farming, lobster fishing, and millennium tourism have all promised to turn the place into something more than an outpost. But ambitious plans consistently flounder on the awkward Chatham coast, and Waitangi remains a fishing village.

I stopped at the general store for supplies – Coke and chocolate bars – and then at the garage for petrol. Filling up was a matter of guesswork because the car had no petrol gauge. Indeed, it had no other instruments either – the dashboard was absent.

Brief conversations with the villagers stuck to a now-familiar theme. “We don’t want tourists coming here to spoil everything,” was the inevitable mantra. And then: “But you’re welcome, of course.”

I drove north, with two maps for navigation. One was contemporary, the other was a copy of an 1883 survey. There was not a great deal of difference between the two, and for the most part I relied on the latter. It showed an island divided into angular plots of private land. The same plots are demarcated today by fences. Hand-painted “Keep Out Or Else” signs warned against trespass. A visitor information leaflet underlined the message: “Most Attractions are on Private Property and Permission MUST be Obtained!!”

“What’s the deal with all these trespass warnings?” I asked a local farmer in Waitangi’s only pub that evening. It was a cautious session – my cohabitants at the motel had warned me against accepting free drinks (“they spike them; their idea of entertainment.”). As at the airport, I felt like a gatecrasher.

“Strictly off the record,” my acquaintance said, lowering his voice, “a bit of rustling goes on here. “It’s outsiders responsible, which is why we don’t like blokes like you tramping all over our land.”

“Outsiders? You mean from the mainland?”

“Yeah. And foreigners.”

“Rustling sheep?” I said, unable to conceal my scepticism.

“Yes.”

“How do they get them off the island?”

The farmer shrugged. He tapped my empty glass. “What are you drinking?” I hastily made my excuses.

On my way out, I carefully skirted a group of bikers playing a rowdy game of pool. Chatham claims to have the world’s highest concentration of Harley Davidsons – a contention that I was not going to question. Outside, a trio of the famous machines gleamed by starlight.

I walked back up the hill to the motel, relieved to have sloughed the prickliness of the pub. There tends to be an ingrained remoteness about people who choose to live in remote places. Most of my interaction with the islanders was made treacherous by currents of wariness. Once they had ascertained my identity and purpose, they offered a degree of tolerance; like a barren shore reached through turbulent surf.

The fisheries researchers had decided to lie low and were watching The Bill in the motel lounge when I returned. Chatham Island boasts the world’s smallest television station. Apart from the nightly news, which is beamed in live from Auckland, the output is a selection of videoed soaps and sitcoms. Between programmes, islanders transmit typed messages: a death announced; a council meeting postponed; a fridge for sale.

I headed off for a shower, but the washing facilities were communal and one of the researchers had beaten me to it. I was always beaten to it, and didn’t get to wash properly once during my stay. Or shave, even.

The gravel roads didn’t help matters. Each day of driving added new layers of dust to my hair, clothes and skin. “If we earned a bit more from tourism, perhaps we could fix the roads,” Rhonda told me. She, at least, appeared to accept that the world beyond Chatham’s shores had benefits to offer. “With sealed roads, our vehicles would last longer.”

When I next bumped into the weathered man from the airport, he dismissed the idea; “Paved roads’d ruin the island. We’d be overrun with Japanese tourists buying up the place. Lord knows, they already own most of mainland New Zealand.”

I nursed my jalopy around the island, visiting the few attractions open to all-comers. On the western coast, I scrambled over an impressive expanse of basalt columns – Chatham’s answer to the Giant’s Causeway – as pounding waves flung up frayed sheets of spray. Here was geological evidence of the volcanic eruptions which gave birth to these islands 70 million years ago.

On the shores of Te Whanga Lagoon, which accounts for twenty per cent of the island’s total area, I sifted the sand for 40-million-year-old fossilised sharks’ teeth. My chances of success would have been increased had I been willing to extend my search into the shallows, but the water was cold and full of jellyfish.

Chatham was the ultimate terminus of the Polynesian migrations. The first people to settle here were the Moriori, and in a remnant patch of forest, on the trunks of living kopi trees, they have left a haunting series of etchings; mainly of primitive stick men with strange, frog-like faces. These dendroglyphs, which are gradually fading into the bark, are the poignant echo of a culture that effectively died out in 1933 with the death of Tommy Solomon, the last pure-blooded Moriori.

The Chathams were once predominantly forested and supported a wealth of unique wildlife, but successive waves of human migrants slashed open the landscape and drove numerous species to extinction. A few have been saved. Most notably, the Chatham Island black robin, which was the beneficiary of an urgent conservation programme in the 1970s.

The buff weka is a curious exception to the usual chain of events. This flightless bird, which resembles an undernourished hen, was introduced from the New Zealand mainland at the turn of the century. It is now extinct there, but flourishes on Chatham in such numbers that it is legally hunted. Despite its localised abundance, it is officially classified as an endangered sub-species.

“Would you like to eat one?” Rhonda asked.

With no restaurants on the island, and my chocolate diet becoming monotonous, I set aside my sensibilities: “Okay.”

She brought me a plucked weka in a plastic bag. “Boil it until the flesh falls off the bones.” I dumped the sorry little carcass into a bubbling pot and paced the motel kitchen as it simmered, never quite managing to shake off my sense of guilt. Hunger is a powerful persuader. When the time came, I tucked in. The meat tasted like gamey chicken.

I had just finished supper when there was a knock at the door. One of the fisheries men answered it, then came to the kitchen to inform me that two Maoris were outside demanding to see me. I assumed that they’d got wind that I was eating a weka; I hastily scraped the evidence into the bin, then headed out into the darkness to face the music.

A man and woman were waiting for me, grave-faced. The man spoke: “Is it true that you went to Manukau Point?” It was true. I had driven there to visit the lonely statue of Tommy Solomon. To reach the statue I had to scale a locked gate. Perhaps I had trespassed. But how would anyone know? As far as I could tell, the only witnesses were sheep.

“Why did you go there?” asked the woman.

“Was it to see the statue?” asked the man.

“Are you going to tell lies about our history?” asked the woman.

Belatedly I realised what this was all about. I had blundered into a historical minefield. According to the history books, the first settlers to arrive here after the Morioris were European farmers. The two communities coexisted until 1835, when a group of Maoris hijacked a British ship in Wellington and sailed it to the Chathams. Here, claiming ‘right of conquest’, they killed (and ate) many of the Morioris and enslaved the rest.

My visitors were keen that I portray the Maoris’ arrival in the Chathams against a background of colonial repression, and that I draw a clear distinction between what happened here and the European conquest of New Zealand. “Right of conquest only applies to Polynesians,” they told me.

For more than an hour I sat alone with my guests in the lounge, maintaining a fixed smile as outlined what would and would not be acceptable for me to write. After they’d left, the fisheries men stalked back in.

“Why didn’t you help me out?” I asked.

“The less we have to do with the islanders the better,” one of them said, switching on the TV. “Bugger it, we’ve missed Flying Doctors. Can’t wait to get back to civilisation.”

I decided to take another walk. As I followed the road by torchlight, I could hear sheep baa-ing in the surrounding darkness. The wind was in my face, the stars glittered above. I walked for twenty minutes until I had left even the sheep behind. Finding a tussock for a seat, I snuffed out the light and enjoyed the feeling of solitude, of being, in effect, an island.

When I returned to the motel, the fisheries men were all in the lounge in front of the telly. I joined them, but things had changed, I had changed. My short walk had given me new insight; I fancied that understood why people might choose to live here. My companions eyed me distrustfully, as if they sensed something different about me: a new detachment. A remoteness.