KEY POINTS:
Friday, 9.30am. Simone Croon briskly waters the marigolds in a tub on the veranda of the Waitangi General Store. Across the road, the beach is empty, the surf fretful in the gusting 40-knot sou'wester, which has been howling all night.
It's a vigorously peaceful scene, with the surf nagging at the empty beach - but the Chathams' future may also be blowing in the wind as its 600 people face issues like population loss, an uncertain island economy and the protection of the unique island lifestyle they love so much.
One of the recurring features of that lifestyle - hairdressing week - is taking place at the end of the verandah, in a tiny salon where Chris Parker waits for her first customer. Since July, Parker's flown here one week in seven from Auckland, where she manages a salon in fashionable Sylvia Park, to cut Chatham Islanders' hair. Today is no-appointment day, and she expects she'll trim 50 heads before five. She loves it here. "It's a tight, tight, neat community."
She's called the salon Chat-A-Box. Parker is a chatty, genial 50-something, with a smoky voice and earthy, playful wit.
A steady flow of pick-ups and 4WDs pull up beside the shop, the Chathams' only general store. Here, everybody knows your name, or they make it their business to know it. A hardware and gardening store with diesel pumps in front, a bottle store, a cafe-cum-fish-and-chip shop, Hotel Chathams with the island's only pub, a bank-cum-post office, courthouse-cum-police station and the council building make up the rest of town.
Beyond, tarmac gives way to gravel, and the Chathams' desolately beautiful landscape opens out, all muted tones, rippling grass and wind-sculpted trees that look like they're blowing in a storm even when it's still, which it almost never is.
Croon's parents, Lois and Valentine (Val), drop by to reserve a session with Parker. The couple live next door, behind the Travellers Rest lodge. Lois, 60, is one of the Chathams' omniscient matriarchs, and the Croons are a dominant force in the island's economy.
Singly or in partnership, the parents, two daughters and one son, own and run the general store, the hardware and gardening store, hotel and pub, three lodging houses, and own fishing boats and quota. There's only one other substantial place to stay, a lodge run by the Moriori trust.
Val and his South Canterbury-based business partner, Kelvyn Leslie, also operate the only shipping freight service to the Chathams, Black Robin Shipping.
Floyd Prendeville, Simone Croon's partner, arrives to hang a blind in the salon. Normally he'd be out diving for paua, but the weather's too rough. Free-diving is the norm here, sometimes down to 40m.
Prendeville, a rangy 38-year-old, was born on Chatham Island but grew up in Gisborne, returning at age 19. Life's good here, he says. Even better since broadband arrived a few years ago, making email and internet shopping from New Zealand feasible (Chatham Islanders talk about New Zealand as if it's a different country, which is what it feels like).
It's the best place for kids, he says. "Here your child could travel from one end of the island to the other safely, not that we let them. Everyone knows whose children are whose."
Doesn't it get claustrophobic, everyone knowing everyone else's affairs? Prendeville shrugs.
"If you let it worry you what everyone thinks of you, you'd never get through your day."
WELCOME TO New Zealand's edge, an outpost so remote it's left off most maps. Nearly 800km from mainland New Zealand, roughly the same distance as from Whangarei to Wellington, the Chathams group officially comprises 10 islands, though 25 islands have names. Only two are inhabited: Chatham (90sq km, population 574) and Pitt (6sq km, population 35).
There's one hospital, really a general practice with three beds, four nurses and one GP. Wellington-based Westpac Life Flight air ambulance flies emergencies to the mainland: last weekend that involved a burns victim who had a barbecue accident and a touch rugby player who tore his toe.
There are three schools up to Year 8, one on Pitt Island. Most children go to secondary school as boarders on the mainland.
Air Chathams, locally owned and operated, makes eight round trips a week, with return tickets costing up to $650 depending on the season.
Black Robin's 50m general cargo vessel Rangatira crosses from Napier or Timaru to Chatham Island every 10 days, weather allowing, calling at Pitt Island nine times a year. A good crossing takes 2 1/2 days, but this strip of water is one of the roughest in the world and the ship has this year already lost 58 days to bad weather.
The Chathams' extreme isolation defines the local character, society and economy. What characterises all small, remote rural communities is even more marked here: a tight-knit community co-existing with family feuds, fierce loyalty to the place, hardy resourcefulness, the dominance of traditional family life and of the land and sea.
Fishing accounts for 60 per cent of the economy, farming 30 per cent and tourism the remainder, though the balance is shifting.
In many ways, it's a man's world - blokes outnumber girls by nearly four to three. Women have babies young; early 20s is nothing unusual. This year a mini baby-boom has produced 14 new islanders.
People work hard, many at several jobs. There's a saying: If you're hungry, then you're lazy. The cost of living is about a third higher than the rest of New Zealand (2 litres of milk costs $6.80, electricity is 72c per kw/hr - compared with about 16c on the mainland - a three-bedroom Waitangi house goes for about $300,000).
For fun, you go eeling or hunting pigs or weka, (not protected here); you take the quadbike or the kids to the beach or lagoon; go to friends' places, or to the pub, or the sports club in the tiny northeastern fishing settlement of Kaingoroa, whose white sand beaches and aquamarine water rival any island resort.
There's touch rugby on Friday nights, netball for the women, and through winter a women-only darts night at the pub, which can get pretty lively. (A joke doing the rounds: What's the most confusing day on the Chatham Islands? Fathers' Day.)
Island traditions feature alcohol heavily. For every spade used in a ceremonial grave-digging by mourners, a bottle of spirits must be consumed; an initiation for newcomers requires necking a whisky shot.
Those who can afford it visit New Zealand regularly for a shot of city life or to visit people. The most popular order from Chatham friends is for KFC - the Kilbirnie branch in Wellington has got wrapping for the flight down pat. Others haven't been off the island for decades.
The other thing that distinguishes Chatham society is its history. Little more than a century ago, the original Moriori settlers were nearly annihilated through massacres and enslavement at the hands of later arriving Maori and European-introduced disease. Today, Moriori descendants make up a minority of the islands' 60 per cent Maori population. But they're talking cultural renaissance. The other main iwi is Ngati Mutunga.
Newcomers such as Parker, who love the lifestyle and respect the Chatham ways, are embraced warmly. There's organised betting on how long a newcomer will last. Explains one local, "People that you know aren't going to last, you say, 'I'll give them three months'. Some people fit right in and others last five minutes - the islanders break them down slowly." He laughs: "Especially if they're a threat - if it's a woman, and she's nice-looking, the girls will make mincemeat of her."
Theres another type of threat on the Chathams - an economic one. Jan and Robert Holmes are in survival mode. The couple farm 900 ewes and a handful of cattle. With depressed livestock prices, times are lean for all sheep and beef farmers but more so on the Chathams, say the Holmes. The main handicap is a shipping service that, they say, is failing farmers.
Since June last year, when second operator Reef Shipping pulled its service, the Chathams have relied on Black Robin. The Holmes express a common view among farmers that the Rangatira alone isn't big enough, and doesn't cross often enough, to transport livestock when the market demands. Lambs are nearly mutton by the time they hit the mainland freezing works (there's been no abattoir on the islands for 26 years).
"Shipping is our lifeline to the mainland, without it we're all in the water, not just farmers," says Jan. "It's totally strangling the community."
"Until this issue with the ship, there was good money in [meat farming]," says Robert, who's farmed for 40 years. "We've become just like peasants. Yet the island's just got so much potential."
It's an old, sore point. At different times, farmers have looked into chartering their own ship, but found it too expensive. Recent reviews have concluded that the islands' economy can't support two shipping lines.
Black Robins' Kelvyn Leslie says the biggest limiting forces are beyond his control. "We've not been able to provide the service we'd like to, but it's only because of weather and the fact the [Waitangi] wharf is unprotected."
The company's in the process of buying a 60m vessel to supplement the Rangatira.
Farming's not the only activity in a precarious state. Government money props up the council. And the charitable trust that owns the diesel power plant, Waitangi wharf and airport, along with some fishing quota and forestry, has been petitioning the Government for more help for years.
Chairman Gary Cameron says the trust, set up in 1991, was undercapitalised from the start. "And we certainly weren't given funding to drive economic development, though that's fallen to the trust by default."
The wharf and airport have always run at a loss, electricity, too, for the past two years because of maintenance costs.
The trust is looking into hybrid hydro-wind generation, but again cost is a barrier.
Many islanders feel the Chathams are being cheated of the bounty of their waters. Of the $120 million worth of fish caught in Chatham waters, only about $20 million comes across the island's wharves.
The rules state that fish processed on Chathams' soil attracts a levy - so many fishermen choose to take their catch elsewhere.
Again, it's an old issue and the Chathams' folk once again sound like they are inhabitants of another country when they raise it.
"The Government haven't come to the party," says Holmes. "[Early whalers and sealers] took everything and bolted, and the Government did nothing to stop that pillaging."
Owen Pickles, Chatham Islands Council general manager, says: "There's a huge amount of wealth being extracted from Chatham waters that Chatham Islanders never see."
Cameron is worried by the Chathams' population decline - 15 per cent between the past two censuses, although it is not yet clear whether this is a permanent drift to the mainland or a temporary statistical blip. "We want to ensure it's economic for people to live here, we want to encourage people to live here or get our people to return."
On Sunday evening, some locals join the tour group at the Croon's family farm, Admiral Gardens, for croquet and a barbecue.
It's a Sunday tradition for the Croons. Lois has created an English cottage Arcadia: roses, low hedgerows, pond, glasshouse and a sunken conversation pit.
She and Val snr have been bringing tour groups to the Chathams for 12 years, mostly older New Zealanders, retired farmers, conservationists.
Now, says Val jnr, tourism is poised to take off. In five years, he's aiming for 5000 tourists a year, up from the current 2000. Marketing will build on word of mouth.
"We're at the crossroads at the moment," Pickles says. "Farming is struggling, not necessarily because of the shipping but market prices for stock are depressed wherever you are...
"Fishing seems to be going reasonably well. There's a lot of bitterness about the quota system [most of the fishing quota is in the hands of a few] still lingering...
"We're at the crossroads: at the stage where probably there needs to be more investment in tourism."
Don Merton, the conservationist who famously helped bring the Chatham Islands Black Robin from the brink of extinction, has been coming here for half a century.
His view of the islands is that "tourism is their saviour".
People will come here, for the unique ecology, the history, the isolation.
As Val jnr says; "It's still the last frontier."
