I met my Maori great-grandfather Joe on a recent trip to New Zealand. Not in the flesh; he died long ago. But if, as Thoreau said, your ancestors “leave their footprints in the sands of time”, I picked up his trail on a windblown hill at the southernmost point of the South Island.
I knew the history: in the middle of the 19th century, two whalers – one American (Dennison “Yankee” Smith) and one Portuguese (Manuel Gomez) – jumped ship when they got to New Zealand, married two Maori sisters and settled on the otherwise uninhabited island of Bravo, in a Stewart Island/Rakiura inlet.
From where I stood it was 30km across the strait, but worlds away from my 21st century reality back in Sydney.
Joe was one of 30 children in two families on Bravo, leading what could only be described as a Spartan existence, even for frontier New Zealand: fishing, canoeing, hunting mutton-bird and pigeon, and growing what they could on the land. No reading or writing, although the children reputedly played music by ear. It was a hunter-gatherer existence not so different from the one led by centuries of Maori and Polynesian tribes that had come before them.
Of course, by Joe’s time it had already been a long journey for the South Island Maori, their numbers decimated first in bloody intertribal battles, then by the pakeha demons of drink and consumption. In 1844, the paramount chief was moved to say of the Europeans “they brought us plagues unbeknown to our fathers till our people melted away”.
Still, when they were old enough the Bravo children didn’t hesitate to migrate to the “civilisation” of the NZ mainland. Joe’s great grandfather had been one of 500 chiefs who had signed the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi with the British Crown; for my family the symbolic meeting of cultures had only to become reality.
There is nothing in my appearance, nor in my family’s customs or the way we identify ourselves, to suggest my Maori heritage, although I do remember a visit to my grandparents’ place and an impromptu poi dance by a Maori relative. But I stood on that hill, above where my ancestors had made landfall on their fateful journey to the modern world, and felt the invisible thread of family pull tight.
I took a track that promised to lead to the water’s edge and a better vantage point. It meandered at first, a slow descent through dense, pretty scrub; then got steeper in places; then darker as the scrub got taller, grew impenetrable.
A rocky outcrop appeared and my instinct was to clamber up to take bearings, as a submarine puts up its periscope in unchartered waters. But there was nothing but more scrub to be seen; it seemed to be spreading, the sea and islands beyond receding further into mist.
I stood still, the gnarl of dark undergrowth crowding me on both sides, and was taken suddenly by the sense of great-grandfather Joe down-track a bit, the only sound the rustle of the day’s catch of pigeon hanging from his heavy belt. My mind playing tricks? Perhaps. A ghost? Maybe.
Certainly, it was an intimation of the past, of ancestral lives lived, of Bravo. In 1907, a visiting botanist had described Stewart Island as an “actual piece of the primeval world”. Perhaps I had crossed the sands of time into that world, Joe’s world. I shuddered at the thought of being trapped in such a Tolkienesque wilderness.
I have wondered since if my grandmother’s Irish farming family was unnerved when she married my grandfather Joseph, Joe’s son.
Joseph junior grew up in the port of Bluff, where Joe had stopped on his way to civilisation, a rough and rollicking town of sailors and fishermen, where you were known by your nickname: my grandfather was Bravo, his brother Couta, his sisters Doll and Dude. It was a halfway house between the still-primitive island communities and the Europeanised mainland; Joseph’s family, the Smiths, sang American folksongs alongside Maori ones. It was a place where the past was hurtling at breakneck speed into the future.
My grandmother’s family, the Fords, had arrived from County Galway about the same time the whaler Smith had sailed from Massachusetts. They quickly became successful farmers in the new land: her grandfather to be eulogised in the local paper as a “sturdy, upright man”; her father president of the regional farmers’ union, staunchly Catholic, politically conservative.
He must have been proud when three of his daughters became Catholic nuns, and at least somewhat doubtful about the fourth’s union with a Bluff Smith.
Oh, to have seen the sparks fly when Dude and Doll met Sister Celine, Sister Marguerita and Sister Theophane!
But then, broad brush strokes don’t paint a complete picture. The differences between the Smiths and the Fords suggest tension, and class and race prejudice certainly characterised the place and the times. But there must also have been a counterbalance of tolerance and goodwill. They couldn’t have survived without it.
Their story was New Zealand’s story, Australia’s too: peoples and cultures coming together, adapting to each other and to a changing world. There were clashes, and they must have had doubts. My grandfather, one generation removed from Bravo, would later write of the modernisation of his beloved Bluff, “one wonders if we are really progressing in our search for what really matters – a simple, better and contented existence”.
Yet they faced what the times and place required, wrote a new chapter in history to set the scene for the present.
Now I’m walking around with an extra piece of personal history since my encounter on that wild, lonely track, and I wonder now why I never looked for it before. I think of the river of successive generations, flowing from the ancestral past into the present, and there’s some comfort in knowing my family has navigated this far.
