Stewart Island

Rakiura, usually translated as glowing skies, has been known to Māori for centuries as a seasonal food-gathering place, reached by canoe across Foveaux Strait for fish, shellfish and above all tītī, the young sooty shearwaters harvested from small islands off its coast. Kāi Tahu tradition ties the island to the anchor stone of the canoe from which Māui fished up the North Island, and the name Te Punga o Te Waka a Māui is still used for it. Sealers arrived early in the 19th century and worked the offshore rocks hard; whalers, boatbuilders and timber cutters followed, and mixed European and Kāi Tahu families settled around Paterson Inlet and Halfmoon Bay. The English name commemorates William Stewart, first officer on the Pegasus, which visited in 1809; he charted the southern harbour that still carries the ship's name and showed that Rakiura was an island.

Most of the island later passed to the Crown, while Rakiura Māori kept reserves and the tītī islands, where the muttonbird harvest still takes place. Later ventures came and went: timber, flax and trading schemes, sawmills in the inlets and whaling bases in Paterson Inlet. Each left rusting machinery and overgrown clearings in the bush.

By the middle of the 20th century fishing and crayfishing had become the mainstay, and the population settled into a few hundred people concentrated at Oban. In March 2002 Rakiura National Park was opened over about 85 per cent of the island, confirming a change already under way from extraction to conservation and tourism, and the island was recognised as a dark sky sanctuary in 2019.

The island's culture is that of a very small, remote community that has learned to be self-reliant. Fewer than five hundred residents share one village, one school, one store, one pub and a volunteer fire brigade, and nearly everyone has more than one job — fishing in season, guiding, driving a water taxi, running a guesthouse. Boats matter more than cars, weather forecasts are read closely, and the ferry timetable structures the week.

Rakiura Māori remain a distinct part of the community, and the annual muttonbird season still takes families out to the tītī islands, a right held and managed by descent rather than by permit. The whakapapa of the old sealing and whaling families, many of them of mixed Kāi Tahu and European descent, is woven through the island's names and headstones.

Conservation has become a shared identity as much as an industry. Residents trap predators, watch for rats coming off boats and take pride in birdlife that mainland New Zealand has largely lost; kiwi wandering across a lawn or a kākā raiding a deck are ordinary events. Visitors are welcomed without ceremony and expected to fit in: mud on boots, an early night before an early boat, and a willingness to talk to strangers at the bar. The bar of the waterfront hotel is the closest thing to a formal social institution.

About 480 people live on the island, almost all at Oban, making it one of the smallest permanently settled districts in New Zealand; the number swells in summer with holiday-house owners, seasonal staff and trampers. The economy rests on fishing — blue cod, crayfish and paua — together with tourism, conservation work for the Department of Conservation, and the services the village needs.

Everything else arrives by sea or air: groceries on the ferry, fuel by barge, mail and freight by plane. Power has come from local diesel generators rather than the national grid since 1988, which makes electricity about three times the mainland price and heating a constant consideration in a wet, windy climate. Housing is scarce, and finding a rental for seasonal workers is a perennial problem.

The school teaches a few dozen children, who leave for the mainland for secondary education, and health care is provided by a small local centre with patients flown out when needed. Daily life follows the weather and the tide: work on the water when the strait allows, jobs ashore when it does not. Current concerns include the cost and reliability of the ferry link, the pressure of visitor numbers on a tiny infrastructure, and long-running plans for a predator-free island.

Seafood is the island's food. Blue cod, caught in the strait and the inlets, is the standard fish in the pub and the takeaway, fried in batter or pan-fried with lemon, and is often the reason people order fish twice in three days. Crayfish, the southern rock lobster, and paua, the black-footed abalone whose shell is prized for its colour, come and go with the seasons and the quota. Bluff oysters, dredged from Foveaux Strait between the island and the mainland, are eaten in autumn and winter, usually raw or lightly crumbed.

The most distinctive local food is the tītī, or muttonbird, the salted young sooty shearwater harvested each autumn from the islands off the coast. It is strong, oily and salty, boiled or roasted after long soaking, and is far more a family and community food than a restaurant dish, traded and gifted within Rakiura Māori networks and sometimes sold on the mainland.

Otherwise the cooking is plain southern New Zealand: lamb and mutton, venison from deer shot in the bush, whitebait fritters in spring, and the cheese roll, that southern invention of grated cheese and onion rolled in bread and toasted, which turns up in island cafés as it does everywhere below the Waitaki. Because supplies come across the strait, menus change with the boat and self-catering visitors often bring their own provisions from Invercargill.