Travel
Edge of the island
by Jessica Le Bas
Farewell Spit has seen its share of history.
The day we drive over the Takaka Hill to Collingwood, the sky peels back and lets in a golden sun.
“It’s stopped raining in Bainham,” says Robbie, our bus driver and guide. A man from Wales with a penchant for wading birds bounces in his seat barely two minutes down the road to Puponga. “Stop!” he cries. “A Caspian tern!”
“More up ahead,” says Robbie, taking the corrugations slowly. He points to a black shag on the mudflats, wings spread in the sun. The black swans suck the eelgrass in the low tide zone. An American woman says, “Wow!”
“We’ve not seen this neck of the woods,” says an old man from Whangarei.
Robbie turns the big wheel and tells the microphone how the bay between Separation Point and Farewell Spit – Te Taitapu to the Maori – was named and renamed.
After local Maori killed several of his men in 1642, Abel Tasman named it Murderers’ Bay. On his first voyage, Captain Cook, sailing up the western shore of the Spit, stretched his neck to see but couldn’t; called the place Blind Bay. In 1827 d’Urville, taken with Tasman’s story, called it Massacre Bay, and the name stuck until European settlers arrived and plundered the landscape for minerals. In 1845 coal was found and the area became Coal Bay.
Robbie says he knows the real story well: God, you see, had a wee piece left over when he’d finished making the world, rolled it in his hands like butter and put it down right here – Golden Bay.
The gold rush of the 1850s had some bearing too, he says smiling, and the yellow quartz sands are particularly golden crusts round this loaf of God’s own.
The bus moves through the stock gates of Puponga Farm Park with its cattle dung, to Cape Farewell, the northernmost point of the South Island. West now, across the waist of the spit to Fossil Point where the wind picks up the sand and suspends it like a sheet of shimmering silk. Where the black-backed gulls and the white-fronted terns look indignant, and lone oystercatchers stand in little tidal pools, their backs to the wind. From our safari windows we watch three men spinning for kahawai.
Robbie drives up the spit, on the sand he knows to be hardened by the falling tide, to where the raw Tasman Sea runs up the West Coast. For 6000 years, they reckon, the sea has brought the grains of schist with it. It’s a living landscape, of moving beach and dunes, knotted in places by the native pingao and the marram grass.
We drive till a cluster of macrocarpas appears, with the little orange hood of the lighthouse above them. The first lighthouse on Farewell Spit was built in 1870 from Tasmanian hardwood, and eaten in no time by the salt wind. It’s said that Harwood, an early keeper, hauled saddlebags of soil to this desolate outpost and planted the first trees.
Today’s lighthouse was built in 1897 – with steel girders – along with three houses for three keepers. By 1984, technology had overtaken the need for the lot.
A kid walks up the clunky steel steps of the lighthouse and yells that she can see all the way to Australia. The digital cameras do their bit for preservation.
In 1984 thirty gannets took a liking to a secluded ridge 9km north of the lighthouse. For six months of each year now 30,000 gannets take up residence. In the little tearoom the kid buys a postcard with a gannet on it.
On the way back the bus turns into the sand dunes. “Welcome,” says Robbie pointing to what’s known as a “barchan” dune – a crescent-shaped ridge of sand – as high as a house. “The DOC has allocated us tour operators one dune,” he laughs.
The American woman gets out her camera and clicks like a bird, aiming at the stark horizon of sea and the inland sand. Up and down the crescent dune’s mouth the kid slides. The man from Wales says, “That wind’s getting icy.”
The sun falls slowly over Fossil Point, and a weak-tea sky is photographed again and again – because it is beautiful.
