Tim Saunders
Home is an Island: A writer’s tribute to the islands of Aotearoa New Zealand by Neville Peat (Potton & Burton, 2022), 200pp, $39.99
You can see an island from wherever you stand in Aotearoa New Zealand. Maybe it is one of the islands we live on—‘fish’ or ‘waka’ or ‘anchor’. Perhaps it is one of the offshore islands that surround us, constantly battered by southerly swells, or an island on one of our inland lakes. It could be an island of remoteness and isolation or an island of complex communities. An island of habitation or wilderness. This imagery of islands is central to the sense of ourselves as a nation.
And the dream of islands, isolated and mysterious and hard to reach, is part of the collective imagination. Robinson Crusoe and Treasure Island have fascinated readers since they were published, while generations of school children encountered the island hell William Golding depicts in Lord of the Flies, once a set text for English exams. The extraordinary story of survival told in Tom Hanks’s movie Cast Away seized our attention in the new millennium. But for New Zealanders, island life in these remote latitudes is also just day-to-day reality.
‘Islands have loomed large in my working life as a journalist, publicist and adventurer,’ says Neville Peat, author of Home is an Island. ‘I have selected eight of them as a collective platform for airing short stories and essays that reveal their life and times, diverse histories and individual essence.’
Peat is the author of forty books covering natural history, biography and environmental issues, giving him the credentials to create this ‘writer’s tribute’. A quick scan of my bookshelves reveals several of Peat’s books on topics as diverse as deer-hunting pioneer and aviation enthusiast Sir Tim Wallis and a history of the whisky found under Sir Ernest Shackleton’s hut in Antarctica. Peat was made a member of the New Zealand Order of Merit in 2018 for services to conservation and, as he explains in Home is an Island, his environmental work has taken him to some of the country’s most isolated places.
It was Peat who wrote the nomination of the New Zealand Subantarctic Islands as a UNESCO World Heritage Area in 1998 and who later put together the public discussion document for the creation of Rakiura National Park. The stories behind these momentous events unfold in Home is an Island.
Peat describes the book as ‘a memoir of sorts’ and writes about the islands in the order in which he first encountered them, first as a 20-year-old journalist and later writing nature conservation publications for the Department of Conservation. The first part of the book covers what the author calls New Worlds and explores his early experiences with humanity and island life on Rakiura, Rēkohu and Ross Island in Antarctica. The book’s second part delves into the wild places where nature is the coloniser.
As Home is an Island progresses, we are given an insight into Peat’s change in outlook. His motivation morphs from exploring new worlds to visiting islands that illustrate New Zealand’s passion for nature conservation, such as Kāpiti and Tiritiri Matangi. I have spent time on both of these islands, as well as the islands of Fiordland, and Peat’s enthusiasm for the relationship between land and kaitiaki is clearly evident. There are few things more invigorating than facing the southerly as it sidesteps the mainland and knowing that you are apart from the mundane and the ordinary.
Despite writing about remoteness and isolation, Peat is not cold or detached from his subject. Each island is given a chance to take shape through the salt spray of history and myth. Chapters are broken into subsections that cover geology and natural history, human history and exploration, and culture. We meet the people who experience island life daily, those who were born on islands and those who choose to live there. Peat visits each island over decades and is able to give firsthand descriptions of changes in wildlife, forests, and internal and external politics. Part memoir and part travel adventure, the book presents enclaves of history and conservation that take the reader off the beaten track of island tourism. Facts are written deftly into a book that is both deeply personal and reflective.
There is a common trend to use nature writing to blatantly make a political or environmental point, but this often comes across as contrived. A nature writer’s job is to make people want to care. Peat successfully uses Home is an Island to communicate his feelings on conservation and the legislative and economic problems associated with island life and to encourage the reader to care with him. He gently encourages us to mourn past mistakes and have hope for the future. Islands are, after all, microcosms of the wider issues facing the Pacific region. Climate change and the nuances of power buffet their shores as wildly as any southerly storm.
‘I regard these islands as a lens offering insights into nationality,’ says Peat. ‘Their stories [are] a narrative of place and belonging and a portrait of what makes our relatively young nation diverse, characterful, innovative, resourceful.’ Islands are in many ways like stories—they appear on the surface isolated and cut off but are, in reality, interconnected, their significance intertwined with our lives. As part of the South Pacific group of islands, we can relate to this easily. Islands are part of our fabric of life. Two-thirds of Kiwis live within five kilometres of the coast. With 11,000 kilometres of coastline and over 600 offshore islands within fifty kilometres of the mainland, Aotearoa New Zealand has no shortage of stories. Peat recognises this and weaves the narratives of island life into a journey across horizons:
Islands can induce powerful emotions, commonly an aching attachment … Whereas landlubbers tend to characterise islands as smallish parcels of land separate from mainlands, mariners are more likely to regard the sea as a connecting force rather than an isolating or estranging one.
The author’s voice throughout the book strikes the right balance between personal anecdote and island history. There is adventure within these pages, as well as tributes to our nation’s island character. Peat has met many of the conservationists who work hard to protect the native flora and fauna, and his work has put him in more than a few precarious predicaments. One sidebar recounts a close call with disaster while dog-sledding in Antarctica. Another takes us with the author as he visits the Auckland Islands aboard a naval frigate with Sir Paul Reeves and Tipene O’Regan:
On the second day of the voyage home, somewhere south of The Snares, it is calm enough for the frigate to heave to and stage a routine firearms practice for the crew, the target an empty drum, lowered over the side and into a zodiac that places it several hundred metres away. In groups of five or six, crew members and one or two invited passengers, notably the governor-general, lie prone on the deck with rifles aimed in the drum’s direction … At one point I am watching a couple of light-mantled sooty albatrosses, spectacular in the light air, until one of them diverts towards the drum and accidentally gets shot—just as the drum sinks… it’s a sad moment. As we resume course, the survivor of the pair of albatrosses is criss-crossing the area looking for its mate.
A sad moment indeed and perhaps a metaphor for many of humankind’s atrocities. Other parts of Home is an Island relate more horrors, such as slavery in Tokelau and the kidnapping of Moriori from Rēkohu. But there is hope here, too, in the successes of conservation efforts, species brought back from the brink of extinction, the fight against climate change, and the people working to bring about positive change.
Peat likens the isolation of island life to the isolation felt during the COVID-19 pandemic—much of the book was written during lockdown. But isolation can also bring a new way of looking at things, and that is what lies at the heart of this book—individuality and uniqueness. As the author points out, the words isolation and island are linked through a Latin root, insula, which is heard in other words such as insular and peninsula. Our collective experiences of isolation and bubbles may have increased our awareness of islands, their place in our oceans and the issues they face. Peat suggests that following the lockdowns:
there is a swing towards appreciating scenery and adventure closer to home … In the relatively new academic field of nissology—the study of islands and islandness—there are numerous references to the lure of islands. Islands offer a clear view of the ocean horizon, they set you up to see the curvature of the Earth, and may awaken something profoundly deep in you.
The oft-quoted John Donne line, ‘no man is an island,’ tells us no human can live totally isolated without being part of a wider community. As Neville Peat shows in this book, a sense of community is what lets islands thrive.
TIM SAUNDERS is a farmer who has had poetry and short stories published in New Zealand and around the world. He was shortlisted for the 2021 Commonwealth Short Story Prize. His books include This Farming Life (Allen & Unwin, 2020) and Under a Big Sky (Allen & Unwin, 2022).
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