Where The Godwits Fly - Robin Hyde on Kuaka

Robin Hyde

New Zealand novelist, journalist, and poet, Robin Hyde, (1906-1939) is currently featured as Kiwi of the Week on New Zealand History On-Line. Her short, tragic but creative life speaks of a time when society was more unforgiving of the independent woman blazing her own trail away from the prevailing social conventions. Robin Hyde was the name of her dead infant son, born out of wedlock, that Iris Wilkinson kept alive and immortalized by using as her pseudonym for her serious writing.

In the foreword to her novel, The Godwits Fly, (1938), Hyde casts the godwit (kuaka) as a metaphor for the migratory New Zealanders who left their home shores driven by some urge to explore the world, in her day to "return" to Mother England, today to become a part of a more dispersed Kiwi diaspora. Names in bracketed italics have been added by this blogger  to identify notable New Zealanders who left the country to live abroad. The full text of The Godwits Fly is available at the very useful The New Zealand Electronic Text Centre.

To those of us kuaka, it bears a message. More on the feathered godwit kuaka here.

Author's Foreword - Concerning Godwits

"But many people do not know what a godwit is. And the dictionary says sourly, a kind of marsh bird. Of the immense northerly migrations that yearly in New Zealand, when summer is gone, shake wings into the sky as if from a giant's salt-pot, nothing is told. But this is true: every year, from sandy hollows in the north of the northernmost of those three islands, the godwits set out on a migration beside which the swallow's blue hither and yon is a mere stroll with wings.

And it is true, too, that the godwits, flying north, never go near England. They fly to Siberia. But to a child in this book, it was all more simple. A long way was a long way. North was mostly England, or a detour to England.

Later she thought, most of us here are human godwits; our north is mostly England. Our youth, our best, our intelligent, brave and beautiful, must make the long migration, under a compulsion they hardly understand; or else be dissatisfied all their lives long. They are the godwits. The light bones of the mother knew it before the chick was hatched from the eggshell.

England is very beautiful, she thought, staring at a tree whose hair … not properly flowers… was the colour of fire. And this also is very beautiful.

‘Where is Mowbray? Where is Mortimer?’ whisper the old leaves of their history. ‘Nay, and more than all these, where is Plantagenet?’ But ours, darker, might cry, ‘Where is [Bishop] Selwyn? Where is [Ernest] Rutherford? Where is Katherine [Mansfield], with weeds on her grave at Fontainebleau, when what she really wanted was the dark berry along our creeks? (Don't you remember? We call them Dead Man's Bread.) Nay, and more than all these, where are our nameless, the beautiful and intelligent who went away and died, in wars and otherwise, the beautiful and intelligent who went away and hopelessly failed, or came back and were never themselves any more?’

Passing judgments on any circumstance, compulsion, fate, is no use at all, she thought. England is beautiful: this also is beautiful. They are the godwits. Still, I think it odd, because I know this country.  Think not without a bitter price.… That's for the easy brittle plough, that wants our hills.

We are old and can wait, said the untamed soil against which she pressed her fingers; although it, more than anything else, was awake and aware of its need to be a country… the integration of a country from the looseness of a soil. Maybe, responded the girl; though logically, living or dead, they ought to have the same compulsion to come back… the godwits, I mean. And, of course, there's something fine, a King of the Castle feeling, about having the place almost to oneself. Fine but lonely.…

Only fools, said the sparse-ribbed rock, are ever lonely."

Better Britain - Cultural Cringe in New Zealand Schooling in the 1930s

As a British settler colony, New Zealand and New Zealanders sought to build a new, better Britain but were inextricably bound to "Mother England" as her farm and by blood ties. But this social conditioning, accentuated in the teaching of young New Zealanders in their schools was a process of denial: denial of their new land, denial of the Maori who they now shared this land with; and denial of their evolving roles as South Pacific Islanders. The result was a form of social schizophrenia and a cultural cringe. Novelist Robin Hyde summed up the situation nicely in 1938. 

From Robin Hyde's The Godwits Fly, chapter three, Bird of My Native Land:

"Sometimes in class Mr Bellew talked about the godwits, who fly every year from the top part of the North Island to Siberia, thousands of miles without a stop. They fly north, they fly north.… They lined a dell one night with secret olive wings, and next morning were gone. Mr Bellew said, with melancholy satisfaction, ‘And the eye of white man has never looked upon their flight.’

Something there had been, something delicate, wild and far away. But it was shut out behind the doors of yesterday, lost beyond the hills, and sticking a dead twig of it into a hole in the playground, or a rotten poem in the school journal, only made it sickly and unreal. You didn't really have to think about it—Maoris, godwits, bird-of-mynative-land. Attending to it at all was a duty call to a sick-bed. History began slap-bang in England. ‘At the Battle of Hastings, in 1066, William of Normandy defeated King Harold.’ A picture showed King Harold very angry and frightened because William had tricked him into taking an oath on the bones of the Saints. You were sorry for him and didn't want him to be beaten, but of course he was; especially you wished the arrow had hit him anywhere but in the eye. Normans in England said ‘Bœuf’ and ‘Mouton’ at first and the old Saxon tongue struggled and died out, till nobody understood it, any more than people here understood Maori.… You had to know that much, or you failed in your examination.

You were English and not English. It took time to realize that England was far away. And you were brought up on bluebells and primroses and daffodils and robins in the snow—even the Christmas cards were always robins in the snow. One day, with a little shock of anger, you realized that there were no robins and no snow, and you felt cheated; nothing else was quite as pretty. The tall sorrel heads of the dock-plants were raggedy under your hands, and the bush of daisies with brown centres stuck out from under the bedroom window, its roots somehow twisted into the asphalt of Calver Street."

Full text available at the New Zealand Electronic Text Centre.

Frighteningly, this "being English, yet not being English" message persisted in the New Zealand school system well into the late 1960s, if not beyond, given this blogger's experience as a school pupil in that era. Thankfully, some progress has been made in the last couple of decades in developing a stronger emphasis on New Zealand's own culture, politics, history, and science in its educational institutions.

But the jury must still be out for some years to come on the success or otherwise of this process, especially in an era where a narrow policy objective of commercialism is used to drive the educational system at all levels. One god may simply have replaced another.

Christchurch Past & Present #6 Sumner Clifton Hill

Northerly view from Clifton Hill, Sumner looking across Estuary mouth to South Brighton Spit, home of the godwit / kuaka

The kuaka

Birdseye view looking north, Clifton in centre bottom, looking north along New Brighton dunes & beach.

Early Arrival of Godwits - Kuaka at Christchurch Estuary

The Press in Christchurch reports that the first godwits have arrived from Alaska at the Avon-Heathcote estuary some two weeks earlier than expected, causing concern as to why they left their northern hemisphere grounds so soon.

Feeding sites used by the birds on their way north to Alaskan breeding grounds have been steadily eroded by human development in recent years.

So far some 122 birds have been recorded arriving at the Estuary in recent days. Since the non-stop trans-Pacific flight commonly totals 11,000 km, the new arrivals are reported to be eating ravenously to regain body weight loss.

What’s In A Name? The Godwit or Kuaka

The bar-tailed Godwit or Kuaka

The bar-tailed godwit or kuaka, its Maori name, is a migratory bird that spends the southern summers in New Zealand then migrates northwards to Alaska, via China, Japan, and South Korea, for the breeding season, returning in the southern spring. Its trans-Pacific migration includes one of the longest known non-stop migratory paths.

In preparation for its migration the godwit puts on 60%–70% of its weight. By departure 55% of its weight is fat since fat is both light and yields eight times more energy than muscle protein. While seasonal changes in day-length trigger hormonal changes to initiate migratory preparations, the godwit’s navigation over such long trans-Pacific flights is thought to be guided by a combination of cues, including the earth’s magnetic map, sun angles, star movements, flock behaviour and memory, and landmarks to correct its course as it travels.

In 2007, the inimitable “E7”, her tag reference for satellite tracking, posted a trans-Pacific journey of 18,000-mile-long (29,000 km) series of flights tracked by satellite, including the longest non-stop flight recorded for a land bird.

E7’s Remarkable Trans-Pacific Journey

Source: US Geological Survey Alaska Science Center

On 17 March 2007, E7 departed Miranda in the North Island of New Zealand, flying non-stop to Yalu Jiang, China, completing the 6,300-mile-long flight in about eight days. After a 5 week stopover, she departed on 1 May for the Yukon-Kuskokwim River Delta in western Alaska. On this five day 4,500 mile non-stop leg of her journey, she crossed the Sea of Japan, Northern Pacific, and the end of the Alaska peninsula.

The breeding grounds in Alaska are tundra, moss and swamps, rich in insects that the godwits feed on. Godwits almost always lay 4 eggs and the chicks can fly after about 29 days, with the parents leaving the chicks soon thereafter. After breeding, the godwits move to the shorelines and estuaries along the Alaskan coast to fatten up on shellfish and sea worms for the return flight to New Zealand.

The most remarkable flight of E7 was her return journey to New Zealand – some 7,200 miles non-stop in eight days from Alaska to New Zealand. It is longest non-stop flight recorded for a land bird.

Since kuaka are land birds, they are unable to stop to eat or drink while flying over open-ocean. The constant flight speeds at which E7 was tracked by satellite indicate she did not stop on land.

On her arrival back in New Zealand, E7 touched down at a spot just 8 miles east of where she had been tagged before she started her pan-Pacific journey.

It’s estimated that over the course of a 20 year lifetime, a godwit’s migratory mileage could top 288,000 miles.

In addition to locations in the North Island such as Manukau and Kaipara Harbours, and the Firth of Thames, the kuaka roost in large colonies at Farewell Spit and the Avon-Heathcote Estuary in Christchurch in the South Island.

Every southern spring, a watch is kept for the harbingers of spring on the Avon-Heathcote Estuary. Upon the first arrival, the bells of the Christchurch Cathedral are rung for 30 minutes to herald their arrival.

Upon arrival, the kuaka appear bedraggled having exhausted their fat reserves during the long journey. Their roosting colony at the Estuary is on the South Shore Spit in South Brighton. The kuaka fan out to feed at lowtide, foraging over the mudflats and shoreline for molluscs, crabs, marine worms and aquatic insects, probing the mud with their long bills as the tide recedes.

The Avon-Heathcote Estuary – the godwit colony is at the southern tip of South Shore Spit

In February-March, the godwits are farewelled by residents of Christchurch as they leave on their northern journey.

Kiwis of the human kind in the far flung Kiwi diaspora around the globe might adopt the godwit or kuaka as their emblem. However far they may be from their multiple homes, they can look to this humble bird for inspiration on how to close the distance between them.

Welcome to the New Zealand Journal!

Welcome to this small beginning of a journal covering anything and everything about New Zealand - Aotearoa by a Kiwi in the diaspora. Topics covered may include: history, culture, politics, science & the environment, sports, business & economics, literature and music, or whatever else comes to hand.

The journal is not intended to be an opinion piece, though some may creep in, but a reporting of matters related to New Zealand in the past and the present. Some topics will undoubtedly receive more attention than others because they are current in NZ society or because of the personal interests and biases of the author of this blog.

Hopefully over time a modest accretion of entries will garner some reader interest & curiosity.

Kuaka