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The New Zealand Railways Magazine, Volume 11, Issue 11 (February 1, 1937)

Variety In Brief — Fishing Around Wellington

page 54

Variety In Brief
Fishing Around Wellington.

The Maoris who occupied the many fortified hilltops around what is now New Zealand's capital city, lived largely on fish, and (like the often-quoted sage of another country) believed in catching their food before regarding it as edible. Elderly Maoris still assert that among the other virtues of this method, with regard to fish, it kept them free from goitre, now noticeably on the increase in some districts. “There was no name for this sickness, or sign of it, till empty fish-tins appeared in the rubbish-heaps instead of fish-shells.” They declare roundly, “It will disappear when we catch all the fish we eat, and eat seaweed, too, in the old fashion.”

Why there are varying seasons of plenty with varying kinds of fish, Maori observation could tell little more certainly than modern science. Different years will bring differing waves of fish immigration, and the essential thing is to use what comes, as its season may not recur for unknown years, whatever species it may be.

Once the English whiting was plentiful, once the blue cod. Where it was common to watch a stalwart, tattooed Maori marching along the beach, followed by a woman with a kit full of 4 lb. cod caught off the rocks, now motor-launches come puffing fussily in with hapuka from deeper water and the sometimes quiet Strait, for motor-lorries to hurry into town.

Where now will a shark hang, cut into strips, under a tree, to provide a feast? Shark may have its disadvantages, to the pakeha senses, but it is nourishing food and its highly flavoured flesh no more attracts blow-flies than does a side of bacon hanging from a rafter. It could hang, or lie on a beach, for a fortnight, if not needed sooner, without being “blown.” Once, say brown-skinned fishermen, a warm summer would have brought enough of them well in along the beach to make it wise to be sure, before diving, if a long grey shape in the water was an accustomed rock, or a visitor easily stirred to activity.

Yet, who knows how long before they stray in again more closely? The pawas are returning again in plenty to their old haunts. Around the rocks where they are thick the butter-fish will flock, though never more will they be lured by the native pole-pot. To make that a Maori went to the bush-covered hills—now bare, or gay with fragrant gorse-blossom—and selected a 14 ft. sapling, dried it, and fastened to its end a hoop made with supplejack into the shape of a crinoline, about 4 ft. across. This was covered with netting made of dressed flax, painstakingly scraped with shells, and filled with kelp.

Of the various kinds of kelp that grow freely along the coast, the fluted one of medium length, with little bladders and its own crop of barnacles, was that preferred by butterfish, when in suitable order. Earlier it may float in thick masses along the shore of any little bay where it grows, but is esteemed merely as a playground for silver herrings to dart among from the bigger fish hiding below. But when, fullgrown, the kelp has been broken off by the tides and swept out into the Straits, to drift or be driven about for several weeks, once a heavy tide brings it back on to the outer rocks again, in early February or March, they will eat it greedily. Then is their time to feast on it and its barnacles, and the ridged sea-lice that breed and grow in the sand just below low tide. They will come thronging in, two hours before the tide, for there, and two-legged hunters, very small and active some of them, rallied before the tide surges over their own playing-ground, find the butterfish, or larger prey, with their delicacy in their mouths. To-day's fishermen may wield nets, hand-knotted of brown Russian hemp, hanging from iron hoops, instead of the more supple Maori weapon, but the game is for exactly the same end.

—“Waiokura.”

* * *

Surely the strangest railroad ever built was that of Captain Bauendahl, a retired German navy officer, who the celebrated explorer Roald Amundsen encountered in Spitzbergen thirty-five years ago. Bauendahl had previously failed in several attempts to reach the North Pole; and perceiving that the prime difficulty lay in the extraordinarily rough surface of the ice in the Polar Sea, where the ice surface is broken into myriads of irregular hummocks, ranging in mass from the size of a brick to the size of a house, he commenced to build an overhead railroad track that would reach from Spitzbergen to the Pole, a matter of 800 miles. To this end, he brought from Germany a large number of heavy poles, to be set up in the ice at intervals, and heavy wire to stretch between them. Some kind of a car was to hang by an overhead wheel which should roll on this wire as a track.

Baeundahl actually managed to get a few miles of his quaint railroad built before the patience of his workmen gave out. Amundsen, in his “Life as an Explorer,” caustically cites the German's idea as a perfect illustration of the common human failing of inventing a plausible solution of a problem by considering only one of its obvious aspects.

—M.S.N.