How can human beings care for and reconnect with the oceans and waterways? Kennedy Warne, founding editor of New Zealand Geographic, dives into some urgent questions about the power of rāhui, Māori kinship and conservation.
I wake to the sound of faint crackling, like electrical static. It seems to be coming from under the hull of the family launch, Marline, which is anchored in Deep Water Cove, in the Bay of Islands. It is a calm, warm, summer morning. The cove, flanked by the hills of Cape Brett peninsula, lies in shadow, but sunlight is flaring the craggy branches of pōhutukawa on the ridges.
The clicking is incessant, and I want to know what’s causing it. I rouse myself to go on deck and look over the side, and the mystery is solved. Schools of fish are nibbling at the creatures that have attached themselves to the hull. It is the sound of their tiny teeth pecking at barnacle, bryozoan, alga and tubeworm that has woken me. I feel oddly pleased, as if I, a guest, am providing a breakfast snack for these residents of the bay.
More fish are shoaling near the kelp-fringed walls of the cove a dozen metres away. I watch them move for a few minutes in one direction, then turn as one and move back in the other. Soon I will slip into the water to join them.
This cove has become the best place to snorkel in the Bay of Islands, but it wasn’t always so. When I was a teenager, this area was as ecologically depleted as anywhere in the bay. I would see ubiquitous parore, the occasional wary red moki, perhaps the turquoise flash of a fleeing snapper. Reefs were typically denuded of kelp and covered with grazing sea urchins.
In 2010, dismayed by the disappearance of marine life, two of the local hapū placed a traditional rāhui — a temporary fishing closure — on Deep Water Cove and the wider Maunganui Bay. Fishing was banned until stocks recovered. The rāhui has stayed in place, renewed every two years, and the results have been stunning.
Near the entrance to the cove, close to where the navy frigate Canterbury was scuttled as a dive attraction in 2007, is a shallow reef known to locals as White Reef. According to friends who have offered to take my partner and me snorkelling there, the reef was given that name because it was largely bare white rock with minimal algae and encrusting life. It was like much of the rocky coastline of New Zealand: a marine ecosystem profoundly out of balance through unsustainable fishing pressure.
The rāhui has revitalised the reef. White Reef should now be called Golden Reef, because it is covered in the waving gold, mustard and brown blades of a variety of kelps and other seaweeds. Through the underwater forest swim demoiselles, scarlet pigfish, black angelfish, striped red moki, snapper, eagle rays and pigment-daubed Sandagers wrasse, patterned like a Kandinsky painting. Above the forest float dozens of comb jellyfish, translucent oval animals that show flecks of jewelled colour when they catch the sunlight. I watch four leatherjackets, a type of triggerfish, peck at one jellyfish, reducing the frail creature to strands of jelly. Yellow-tailed kingfish patrol the perimeter, occasionally darting into the kelp to hunt bait fish.
It is a reef restored, and I am elated. It is the same feeling I have when I step ashore on a predator-free island sanctuary: exultant, awed, hushed. One such sanctuary is Moturua, an hour by launch from Deep Water Cove, one of several islands in the bay that have been freed from introduced predators in a campaign led by conservation group Project Island Song. Here I see birds I rarely encounter on the mainland. Tīeke, glossy black songbirds with a rust-red saddle, hop and flit through the forest, uttering a gloriously noisy call that sounds like an engine being cranked. Whiteheads squeak in tall mānuka. A robin cocks its head inquisitively, standing on the path on matchstick legs, then darts into the leaf litter to peck for grubs. I sit beside a pool where water trickles in and then tumbles over an escarpment, and watch miromiro and pīwakawaka, tomtits and fantails bathe, dipping their bills and wetting their feathers. At night I see a juvenile kiwi, not much bigger than a rockmelon, striding across the forest floor on its stout legs, and hear the scritch, scritch stridulation of giant wētā.
In places like Moturua and White Reef I have the sense of being formed. Not informed — which has been a major motivation of my editing and writing life — but actually having my existence shaped by place. Land’s identity-shaping agency is something I have seen and learned from my encounters with Māori. I remember my astonishment at discovering that in te reo Māori the words for land and placenta are the same: whenua. The nurturing land and the nurturing mother’s body: one interconnected reality, one blood.
Māori kinship with land and water is nowhere expressed more succinctly than in the defining utterance of the tribes of the Whanganui River: “Ko au te awa, ko te awa ko au.” “I am the river, the river is me.” I once heard a kaumatua say that Māori as a people did not exist prior to their encounter with Aotearoa a mere 700 or so years ago. They became tangata whenua, people of the land, through engagement with the land. “We came here as Polynesian,” the elder remarked. “The land made us Māori.”
Whanganui River.
Is this process of engagement leading to identity something that Pākehā (non-Māori) can experience, and an outcome to which they can aspire? To be inscribed into the fabric of the land, even as the land is inscribed in them? When writing about the Whanganui River for National Geographic in 2019, I put this question to Whanganui leader Gerrard Albert. Could Pākehā experience a level of identification with land and water that would enable them to say: “I am the river, the river is me”?
“That’s what we want them to be able to say,” Gerrard told me. “The river isn’t just iwi, it’s community — and that includes Pākehā communities. Let everyone acknowledge the kawa [customs and traditions] of the river. Kawa doesn’t distinguish between Māori and Pākehā. Let everyone come in to that way of thinking.”
Tāmati Kruger, a leader of the Tūhoe iwi, which has custodianship of the forests of Te Urewera, told me something similar. “I see a time when all of us, regardless of heritage, come to understand that in Aotearoa we are all tangata whenua. And that means that we are of this land, that this land has made us who we are. We have let this land create us in its image, and together we are proud of who we are and where we come from.”
Māori carving, Whanganui
I find these generous words deeply heartening. They encourage me to follow my own pathway of kinship and connection, knowing a place like Moturua or White Reef in all its dimensions, animate and inanimate, and letting the place know me. Māori express this idea of reciprocity with the phrase “Titiro atu, titiro mai” — one glance directed at another, the other glancing back. The world beckons, I respond. I see, and I am seen. I love a place, and am loved and nurtured by it in return. It is the equivalent of pressing noses: a sharing of the breath of life.
Edited extract from Soundings: Diving for stories in the beckoning sea (Massey University Press, $39.99), available June 8
Kennedy Warne is the founding editor of New Zealand Geographic and has written extensively for that magazine and for its American counterpart, National Geographic. He has written books about the world’s disappearing mangrove forests (Let Them Eat Shrimp), on the Tūhoe iwi (Tūhoe: Portrait of a Nation) and on his first 20 years with New Zealand Geographic (Roads Less Travelled).
