Suddenly a big wave breaks and slams against the shelf, sending them sprint-waddling back.
Theirs, I decide, is an unenviable way to start the day. Today, however, all is well.
The penguins approach closer and closer to the edge, run out of room to procrastinate any further and take the plunge. Once in the water, they are transformed, liberated from landlubberly clumsiness. They porpoise about the kelp for a moment, then dive out of sight. But he also has his worries. The road south of Papatowai is one of the last unsealed highways in New Zealand—a classic rural road, pot-holed and corrugated, where you can see farm utes fishtailing around the corners.
In a year or so we should have a nice smooth road all the way through the Catlins. The tooth-rattling drive, the relative remoteness of the region and the lack of services have acted as a natural tourist filter. The sealed road, he tells me, will be good for business but not so good for the soul. About half of the editions are put together by Noonan in a tiny sleep-out adjacent to her Catlins home.
Their hospitality is instant and warm.
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We talk about everywhere, it seems, but the Catlins. The buses will come and go, confining the throngs to their air-conditioned capsules.
But then I look around and see a family who, like the Sutherlands, have carved out for themselves a comfortable, out-of-the-way niche; people living off their gardens and the work they love, perfectly content and simply wanting to be left alone. For them, a writer snooping around can mean nothing but more limelight for the place, and for their Catlins the best publicity is no publicity. They stay for longer and become friends. Her message seems to be this: come in twos and threes, stay a while, explore the coast, then go back and tell only a few friends. The Catlins, she says, has always been divided into two parts: north and south.
During the logging era, two railway lines—from Balclutha and Invercargill—inched slowly towards each other. But building them meant going against the grain of the land.
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Just out of Owaka, 70 men with picks and shovels dug a tunnel m long—just one of many required. When the logging industry declined, so did the impetus to finish the railway. The two lines never met.
One railhead stopped at Tahakopa, the other at Tokanui. The early settlers had about as much success making ends meet as the railway workers. In the end, the only money they made was from selling the seed. The new smooth road may change all that. I follow, intrigued to see what kind of music the pair might make.
Fiddle-playing Steven, who has never had any formal music tuition, won the award for best instrumentalist. After Australia, the world seemed theirs for the taking, but they came back to their farms and now make only sporadic appearances at country dances and such notable events as the locally staged world possum-skinning championship. Steven pulls out his fiddle.
When he plays, he appears to be trying to saw his arm off at the elbow. With Peter on accordion, they let rip with a couple of fast and furious reels. The temptation to join in is irresistible. Peter dismisses my trepidation about not being able to keep up.
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And we make it up as we go, anyway. Theirs is a down-to-earth repertoire, simple in its three-chord structures but remarkably soul-stirring. The wind has abated. Farm work calls. Fire in the soul.
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We fish and camp. From many campfire evenings our clothes have begun to smell of wood smoke. Our mindscapes no longer seem so gloomy. As we break camp next morning, I hear him singing to himself. We drive to Slope Point, the southernmost outpost of the mainland, and into the face of apocalyptic-looking squalls that bear down on the land like giant waves. There are bands of brilliant sunshine in between, and full, double-arc rainbows, and it seems for a moment as if a hand might appear out of the sky and deliver a new set of tablets.
We have come to the edge of the world, and now it is time to turn around and face that world once more. But before we do, Seagull shows me one of his childhood secret places: a gnarled macrocarpa tree forced by the wind blast to grow horizontally. Its canopy, coiffed by gales into a woolly futon, is as big as the floor of a living room and solid enough to walk across. The tree is in pollen and at the slightest move it puffs clouds of fine yellow dust, engulfing us with its piny fragrance.
We lie on our backs, squinting at rainbows that seem chiselled in the cold air. Another hailstorm is coming, ready to beat us down like bad news, but we can see that the next sunny patch, large and brilliant, is already on the horizon. Usually, the two went together. The first sawmill was established in on the Owaka River, Captain Charles Hayward bringing in equipment and supplies on his schooner, Nora.
The story of the Catlins River branch railway is one of the sagas of the district. While the original intent—to connect the north and south of the Catlins—was never achieved, the line eventually reached Tahakopa, 69 km from the main line at Balclutha. The bush-clad country in which the railway gangs worked was bone-chillingly cold and wet in winter, with access roads and tracks smothered in clinging mud and pools of dirty water, while in summer the marshlands spawned swarms of sandflies and mosquitoes.
Foundations were hard to establish in the spongy soil, and most culverts and bridges required substantial quarry-cut stone blocks, which remain to this day on the track of the disused railway. Equipment was primitive—picks, shovels and wheelbarrows. Many smallholders joined the gangs, often living in one of the Public Works camps during the week and returning to their farms at weekends.
Engines tackling this section, with its gradients of 1 in 55, often lost traction when the rails were frosty, and the trains had to be divided in two. Economically and socially the railway was a success, as it permitted sawmilling to expand south of the Catlins River and encouraged further settlement.
Each small community had its station: a waiting room with a dim kerosene lamp above the entrance, a toilet of sorts and a goods shed. Cinders, soot and smoke were a constant annoyance, as was the steam heating, which was slow to warm up on a cold morning and then became too hot, misting up the windows. The toilets were of the long-drop type, with sprung seats. They were only to be used while the train was in motion.
Trains stopped at every station, jolting and rattling as goods trucks were shunted on and off. They moved very slowly on the hills and sped up on the downhill grades. The line closed in , but memories of the rail era linger. Paths and roads were muddy and rutted, with deep ditches on each side for the unwary, the latter being one reason for dances to continue until daybreak, when we could see our way home to milk the cows.
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Sounds were more important than today: train whistles, hopefully on time, mill whistles for work times and smokos, and a continuous whistle for an accident, which brought the women hurrying to find out what had happened. There were other sounds, too. In the present age of four-wheel-drives and campervans it is hard to visualise the customs of half a century ago.
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Members of one family recall an annual holiday at a Pounawea crib, when the animals came too: a bird in a cage, a cat and its kittens, and Rosebud, the house cow, the last being walked from near Owaka on a lead behind a light truck. While the family swam, fished and explored the estuary, Rosebud chewed through the grass on the back of the section and provided fresh milk.
I, too, remember those times. I am a grandson of the Moffats, who had a boarding house at Pounawea, ran the post office and managed a farmlet with about six cows. While holidaying as a teenager in the s, I used to get the cows in for milking, either searching for them amid the bush at the back of the farm or retrieving them from the roadside. We walked the dusty, rutted road to Jacks Bay, near Catlins Heads, had a swim in the cold surf and tramped to a sea cavern known as The Blowhole.
Despite its long coastline, the Catlins has never supported much commercial fishing, there being no safe ports.