Island on the Mainland

For 39 years not a peninsula but an island. It took that long for someone to go in for a closer look and Captain Cook’s maps were redrawn to show its connection to the mainland. Still I’m sympathetic to that description – for something so close it has always felt far away. Not on route to any place but a destination in itself.

A couple of times, when school holidays struck, my mother, my brother and I packed the Datsun till the axle bowed and drove there from Christchurch. We stayed in Akaroa’s hillside camping ground where we rented an immobilised caravan, a beige cave. The smell of old cigarettes came free. Fishing, swimming and exploring were at our folding doorstep, and my brother and I went wild, pausing from these activities only to eat saveloys and salads carefully hidden beneath condensed milk dressing.

Akaroa was, and still is, busy with cafes and gewgaw shops. You’ll never want for merino possum hats and gobs of blown glass. It’s at the heart of the peninsula, and on either side are all those bays: Chortlin; Waikerakikari or Hickory (once home to hermit Harry Head, known for having lived among the North American Indians and for his ability to go for long periods without food), Lavericks, Ducks Foot, Magnet, to name just a few.

Our trips inevitably meant a visit to Okains. My great grandparents lie in its tiny cemetery and a hundred stories float about the place – antics of the great uncles and aunts, tales of people long gone. The beach at Okains is a wide strip of sand framed by the bay’s long green heads, a great swimming beach. There’s no drop off, it eases into the water with no sudden deep. Ideal then for launching the boat. And for finding a feed too. I have returned to Okains from time to time, staying in its camping ground and it was on one of those occasions that staggering out of the water I felt something dense in the sand beneath my feet. I felt another one and then another, and with my toes dug out a pipi. I took a handful home that night, but ruined the lot by forgetting to soak them first. The result of my efforts was a tomato slop, fishy and gritty with sand.

One thing that Banks Peninsula is not is what people call an unspoilt place. When Maori arrived one thousand years ago it was entirely covered in podocarp forest, from the flatlands to the peaks. A third of it had been burnt by the time the Europeans came. They promptly got stuck in and finished the job, looking at those tremendous stands of totara, matai and miro and seeing fence posts, flooring and piles. The wood for the trees. Within 50 years almost all of Banks Peninsula’s forest was gone.

Sure there are stands of trees and work goes on to raise native bush, but Banks Peninsula can force us to contemplate farmed land, the exposed bones of the hills where there’s nothing wilder than grass, tussock and gorse fence. A track leads through it, one of the only private tramping tracks in New Zealand and for a long time I was sneering about this. Why would you pay so much money when there’s cheaper tramping and spectacular bush everywhere else? But I’ve started to come around to the idea and one day I think I’ll do it. Enjoy the chance to hike through worked land for a change, enjoying the scenery of an environment changed by people, and stopping each evening at the flash digs provided by the track owners.

I like to imagine that post hike you’d find me at a café in Akaroa, sipping chilled white wine at an outdoor table, indulging its fantasy of being a French town (all its streets are Rue and one local business is Le Mini Golf – references to a 19th century French settlement). Although the reality is that I’m more likely to end up with a beer at the Grand. Whichever one, I’ll be back. I’ve never managed to stay away from Banks Peninsula. Even when I think I find places I like more, when I decide Akaroa is just so much tourist tat and that there are nicer bays, I still find myself driving over the hills. Maybe it’s those ancestors or just that fine beach at Okains but it has a pull on me, this island on the mainland.