Going South by Hogg Colin

Author:Hogg, Colin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2015-10-13T16:00:00+00:00

Gordie captures the insult with his phone cam and tweets it out to his twittering flock. Appalling grammar. Bluff Hill, he captions it. He has a thing about bad grammar.

Back down in the town at a homely café on Bluff’s main street, they’re offering venison pies, oyster pies and even mutton-bird pies. Not the sort of thing to eat ahead of a ferry ride across Foveaux Strait, perhaps the country’s most challenging body of water.

Gordie’s still full of mince anyway, and quite taken up with his expanding tweeting notoriety, endlessly on the lookout for a new photo opportunity to feed his thrill-hungry followers. There are few photo ops as we hang around the ferry terminal, though we do attract unwanted attention with the wet-weather gear Gordie thoughtfully brought with him from his office and which prominently features the TV3 logo.

‘Are you doing a story in town?’ people keep asking. Our replies vary.

‘Sorry, can’t talk about it,’ I tell someone, trying to look mysterious.

The ferry is $130 return and an hour each way in a big catamaran, a bit like the Waiheke Ferry. Bluff looks better from a distance as we whip out of the harbour and into the strait with 13 passengers aboard. It’s nearly 50 years since I was last on Stewart Island, which suggests I’m an older person than I feel.

There was no catamaran then. There was a proper ferryboat, though when it was mutton-birding season the birders would commandeer it and take it off to be a floating hotel while they hunted, leaving the rest of us with the dirty old Bluff tug for transport. It was a bad thing, I remember, crossing Foveaux Strait in a storm in that tug. It used to fill up like a swimming pool.

Ahead of us, that great big misty hulk of an island called Stewart is looming up at us. The sea’s fairly calm today, which is a lucky and wonderful thing. Many times when I was a kid, it wasn’t.

Back then, my mother and father and my brother and I came sometimes to Stewart Island for the school holidays. It was a magical time and such a haunting place that later I used to wonder if I’d dreamed it: the dripping bush, the fish that seemed to jump out of the sea onto our hooks.

We’d go over there with another family we were friends with and rent what was always described as a ‘fisherman’s house’, usually a neglected and damp old wooden place in the bush, no electricity, long-drop out the back somewhere, full of spiders.

The men would stay the weekends, then go home, back to work in Invercargill, and we’d amuse ourselves hiking about in the bush, fishing from rocks, and being taken out on the boats by fishermen the adults had got chatting to down at the pub. We’d come home sometimes to find scuttling sacks of crayfish left for us at the front door. I had a pet crayfish for a while, though that ended badly.

It was here that I had my one and only taste of kereru, New Zealand’s highly protected native pigeon.

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