Stewart Island Childhood

New Zealand Listener, Volume 30, Issue 764, 12 March 1954, Page 19

Stewart Island Childhood

AN ideal island, according ‘to Walter "de la Mare, has "a creek, a spit of quicksand, dunes, caves, precipices, cataracts, an unfathomable inland lake, morning mists, bright moon, an occasional spouting hurricane," and it’s "all but (and perhaps in one region quite) inaccessible." It doesn’t quite fit Stewart Island,. says Olga Sansom in the first of a series of talks, Growing Up on Stewart Island, to start from 4YA at 7.15 p.m. on Monday, March 15. Stewart Island, she points out, is very accessible. It has no spouting hurricanes but is content with a smoking gale once in a while. And an inland lake "would not. have tempted us. There was too much frisking life in the sea, about the nuggets and the rock pools of our two mile coastal and beach walk to school." But there were creeks, and caves, too, in one lived the rare bats, like fat flying mice; another was the storehouse of Maori relics; a third was: in later days the home of Cavey Bili"walls black with the smoke of years, but sweet, pale English primroses grew at his door. And there was a smuggler’s cave where we cooked feeds of mussels . . + kept a candle in a‘ bottle and a few treasures in a tin. . ." But smoking gales, life in the sea and in the creeks, caves and cave dwellers aren’t the only things Mrs. Sansom remembers in her first talk. She recalls the visit of Guthrie Smith (and the baby kiwi of his in an organ case that needed a tin of worms every day), and (from when she was 10) the return of Sir Ernest Shackleton from the Antarctic. And she tells tales of climhing into a Crow’s Nest and of adventures with sharks and prospecting for ambergris and eating Mason Bay Pie (which took four hours to cook and dictated the dinner hour). Olga Sansom now lives in: Invercar-_ gill where she is Curator of the Southland Museum and prominent in the affairs of the Southland Art Society and the Southland branch of the Royal Society of New Zealand. She is also well-known as a broadcaster in the 4YZ Children’s Session.