It's back to the past as kiwis reclaim isolated farmland

For two decades a family battled to farm at Mason Bay. These days, writes CATH GILMOUR, trampers come from around the world to see kiwis.

Times and tide have changed for Tim Te Aika at Mason Bay. For 20 years, he farmed the land, eking a subsistence income from land better suited to kiwi than sheep. Buffeted by wind and rain, isolated by pounding seas and, as the years went by, a target for the growing green movement which felt farming did not mesh with Stewart Island.

The family's Stewart Island sojourn started in 1966 with the realisation of his lifelong dream to farm. Years of shearing and mustering had finally provided the deposit to buy the 400ha pastoral leasehold land from Stanford Leask.

"It was easy for me, harder for my wife," says Te Aika, who, although retired and living in Manapouri, frequently visits the island.

"All the Oscars and medals and other commendations belong to Ngaire. She, with her two small girls and worldly goods were planted into the middle of nowhere, even having to walk the last 16km to get there."

They had no electricity, no refrigeration, no radio, no car, no roads and no shops. She had to be teacher, mother, housewife and farmhand.

Lynette was in standard one and Wendy had just started school. On top of lessons, they had several chores on the farm and at home, including caring for pet kiwis, an umbrella moss garden and lily ponds.

As Te Aika puts it: "Everything was gut-busting."

He had to build 11km of fencing to keep the wild sheep from his own 1200-head flock. Each fence post, split from sand-filled totara logs washed up on the beach or dead broadleaf trees from the surrounding forest, had to be carted out by hand along the fence lines, as did the wire. Few fence lines could be accessed by tractor. And that 11km of fencing created just nine paddocks from 240ha of rough and sandy land.

The family helped with many of the routine jobs while mainland mates and some local Forest Service men helped with the biannual musters.

Getting wool to market was tricky. At first Te Aika carted bales behind his tractor to Paterson Inlet's Freshwater River, along the track trampers now use to reach Freshwater Hut.

For a couple of years, he tried sending the bales out from the southern end of Mason Bay on fishing boats, but fishers' needs and bad weather put an end to that.

During his last five years at the bay, his son-in-law, a pilot, helped out. He would fly six bags of super-phosphate from Invercargill and return with one bale of wool. Even at mate's rates, Te Aika admits it wasn't an economic option. But the super did help him increase both grass growth and lambing, the latter lifting from 50 to 85 per cent.

Te Aika turned to the land to glean other income.

He trapped possums for the annual Dalgety's sale in Dunedin which attracted buyers from around the world. Venison recovery was also a good option, thanks to a plentiful supply of both red and white-tailed deer.

And, in 1975, he started a hunting-safari business after a chance meeting with two Australian hunters in Invercargill's Railway Hotel. The two men, a gun-shop owner and a printer with a bent for promotion, helped Te Aika set up a lucrative business that soon accounted for half the family's income.



Even so, by the mid-1980s Te Aika knew the land's larder would soon be empty. Mutual need led to discussions with the then-Department of Lands and Survey about giving up the pastoral lease.

He could no longer make a living, he said, and the department was being pressured to rid this natural paradise of farming, to create a red tussock reserve.

The result was a land swap of Te Aika's pastoral lease for a 40ha block in Manapouri.

The Te Aikas come back to their old homestead in the shelter of the Mason Bay dunes every couple of years.

Their daughter Wendy died two years ago. On a recent trip they brought 8-year-old grandson Shannon to see where his mum had spent her childhood. A land in which to place the tales he had heard. A land to go hunting on with Granddad. To climb Baldy and tend the umbrella moss garden and lily ponds as his mum did many years before.

The old homestead is now a Department of Conservation's staff base. The stock, chooks and pets have gone. The vegetation is higher and thicker, hiding the fences that once separated stock from wild flock.

Gone, too, is the solitude, as trampers from all over the world converge in search of kiwi and Mason Bay's endless stretch of beach.

Some staunch conservationists saw Te Aika and other Stewart Island farmers as predators on the land. The age-old farming practice of annual burning to encourage new growth was particularly unpopular.

"It was sensitive, because of the kiwis. But kiwis can run pretty fast."

Kiwi numbers when the family left showed the local population was thriving despite years of burning, he says.

Te Aika feels comfortable with conservationists. "Without them, we'd lose a lot. But I hope we can strike a balance.

"I don't believe so much in preservation as using resources in a sustainable way, because that's what we've got in New Zealand."

What about the proposal to make much of Stewart Island a national park? "I have reservations about that. I think the Department of Conservation has taken on a bit more than it can chew.

"There's a lot of hype about cleaning up the debris on the beach, but the place is overrun by possums.

"I suggest time, effort and money would be better used controlling them. They're the greatest threat to island flora and fauna."

However the national park debate ends, Te Aika still loves to come back to his old haunt.

It has its own quietness, amid the roar of the sea and wind. And, despite the huge modifications by deer and sheep, possums and man, its own naturalness.