There once was a time when no thinking person with any claim to being a true intellectual would be without a personal collection of objects biological, zoological or palaeontological, each labelled, catalogued and housed in cabinets of curiosities.
Peter Walker has resurrected this notion in his own literary cabinet. The time has come, he suggests in this intriguing new book, to talk of many things. But instead of cabbages, kings and sealing wax, the returned expat author (The Fox Boy, The Courier’s Tale) and journalist focuses his attention on a single fabled creature, one that casts a long shadow throughout the book’s myriad twists and turns. The extinct Haast’s eagle, Harpagornis moorei, Te Hōkioi, the largest eagle known to have existed, hovers over these pages as it once did from its eyrie in the South Island mountains.
With a wing span of 2-3 metres and a body weight of up to 15kg, the formidable hunter preyed on the much larger but flightless moa placidly browsing below. Te Hōkioi, also known as Te Pouākai, is thought to have evolved from smaller species of eagles 1.8 million to 700,000 years ago. By the early 15th century, it was extinct, alongside the moa, but it had survived long enough to encounter (and probably alarm) the first Polynesian settlers of Aotearoa, stamping itself into their psyches. European arrivals later dismissed these stories as a folk myth – until the discovery of a small piece of Te Hōkioi that changed everything.
It’s at this point that Walker launches his voyage of discovery. The book doesn’t focus only on a single bird, interesting though that would be. It becomes a potently fascinating mix of myth, scientific fact, human experience and personal revelations.
Only a foolhardy writer would consider weaving together Arabian tales, Chinese navigation, early Persian voyages, eccentric amateur fossil hunters and the ramifications of a 19th-century European land grab into a single book, but Walker has sufficient chutzpah to engage you with what obviously became, in the best possible sense, something of a personal obsession. There were moments when I wondered where precisely he was taking me, only to have the mystery solved on the next page.
Walker launches his far-reaching tale in the autumn of 1860 with the suicide of a homeless swagman, a travelling maker of hurdles (fence panels) on the fringes of a sprawling North Canterbury estate owned by George “Moneybags” Moore, pastoralist, self-made millionaire and colonial hardman. Moore had personally refused the hurdle maker shelter on this dark and stormy night, dispatching him into the rain and cold where, despairing and alone, he shot himself. Moore’s callousness earned him Canterbury’s collective outrage and loathing.
But Moore did leave one positive mark for posterity. In 1866, he invited Canterbury’s government geologist and the founder of the fledgling Canterbury Museum, Julius Haast (later von Haast by order of the Austrian Emperor Franz Josef), to excavate a swamp on the Glenmark Station that was filled with a mass of strange bones. These were eventually identified as the remains of huge herbivorous flightless birds that had roamed the region’s hills and plains in the ancient past.
The giant moa mesmerised the world’s museums but it was the discovery five years later of a single huge claw, “like a dagger at a pyjama party”, as Walker adroitly puts it, that Harpagornis moorei took metaphorical flight again.
Debate about the bird raged on. It wasn’t until the 1980s that further incontrovertible fossil evidence emerged from caves on the West Coast and Nelson to prove that Te Hōkioi had indeed lived, flown and died in ancient Aotearoa.
All this happened in places familiar to Walker, who spent his childhood in Canterbury. Move forward in time to the moment when he read a newspaper article about this giant prehistoric eagle. If the journalist’s eye was intrigued by the story, his storyteller’s heart beat faster.
Could the long-vanished eagle be connected in some way to Sinbad’s legend of the Rukh? Could Te Hōkioi have been seen by early Chinese and Persian navigators in the South Pacific and become embedded in cultural memory? Maybe. Unproven, of course, but it’s not entirely impossible that in the distant past Asian voyagers were blown off course and swept south to make brief landfall on a strange coast inhabited only by birds, including a terrifying winged predator. They survived and returned home to tell and retell their fabulistic story.
The book’s exploration of time and place incorporates Walker’s personal return (he spent many years in journalism in the UK), where an ancient land containing the familiar and unfamiliar inspire observations and reflective passages of unassuming lyricism.
This might be a heady, occasionally breathless ride, but by the book’s final paragraph, you are also left slightly breathless, exhilarated and ultimately beguiled by what you have discovered in this cabinet of curiosities.
Hard by the Cloud House by Peter Walker (Massey University Press, $39.99) is out now.
