July 2008

By Chay Cotter

“I have a secret, a secret island with hot pools and lakes...” is part of what I remember of an older one of these diary entries. Such writing helped me decide to come here for my current five month volunteer stint.

While nice to look at from a distance, the crater lakes are off limits since the eruption two years ago. The hot pools are at the beach which is nice, but dragging into place a plastic, open-cut barrel over rocks, using buckets to fill with the right combination of hot spring and cold sea water, followed by squeezing oneself into said barrel, detracts a little from the romantism of it all. I'd prefer to think of it as a bonding experience when done with others, much like crashing through ferns, over and under wind fallen trees, and up and down gullies, which is what we do when out weeding.

Chay and fellow workmates enjoy the
hot pools

There are some pretty cool stories associated with the island. On their way to Aotearoa from Rarotonga and Tahiti, two canoes called in to the island known to them as Rangitahua for repairs. According to the legend, Turi, captain of the Aotea, gathered karaka berries to introduce that plant to Aotearoa. The sea voyagers also carried plants from their tropical home which still survive here. Ti pore, carried across islands from at least as far New Guinea, is one. Its role of providing food, cloth and medicine was perhaps taken over in Aotearoa by its cousin, the ti kouka or cabbage tree. Candlenut or kukui also remains here. Possibly native to Malaysia, it has been carried much like the coconut across the Pacific and is now the state tree of Hawai'i. Traditional uses there and in other parts of Polynesia are as a source of light, soap and food.

We are also privileged to have a variety of endemic plants, including two species of hebe, and our very own poplar, senacio, karo, pohutukawa, nettle, and nikau (shared with Norfolk Island). Add to that rare natives such as parapara, and the thriving native cucumber vine or mawhai, the population of which has been depleted on the mainland due to a disease. For this reason, members of the cucumber family are not grown in our vegetable garden. However with the prickles of mawhai often targeting weeders, some of us are of the opinion that having the disease and growing cucumbers at Raoul would actually be a win-win situation.

Instead our 'extermination list' for weeding consists of more ecologically sinister species such as buttercup and passion fruit. One might think that removing trees which bear such delicious items as passion fruit would be a difficult job. This would be the case, however, we continually find no more than the occasional group of two centimetre high seedlings or even rarer, the odd adolescent. Mature, fruit-bearing trees are long gone. It seems like the conservation battle on Raoul is being won. Finding little is less than rewarding for volunteers, but good news for DOC.

Bird life in the forest here is limited in variety, but abounds in tui and kakariki. I definitely prefer them to the pukeko, which are also numerous. With a few pukeko families living near the hostel, some have become quite accustomed to humans (and us to them). They up and eat (or, more usually, pull up and not eat) veges from the garden, while smaller birds too slow to fly away are also on the menu. Pukekos like to squawk. Various squawks can be recognised by any long term Raouler: the “get out of my face” or ”stop pulling my feather” battle cry squawk, and then there's the “lets get revenge for being chased out of the vege garden” 5:30 am wake up squawk, usually done just outside a window.

Despite the raucous birds, it’s a nice quiet place to study, read, practice hobbies (some, like fishing are off the list) or to just cleanse the soul. We have a 40 hour working week, but in the absence of TV, newspapers, transit and masses of people, free time is not scarce. Remaining time on Raoul is getting scarcer though...in fact it must be time for me to get back to all those books in the library whose titles have caught my interest.