Southern exposure

Stewart Island is famed for its kiwi, but when GLENN WOOD visits, it's the human drama that steals the show.

- GLENN WOOD

Recently, I travelled to Stewart Island with a group of six friends. Our aim was to explore the island and check out local bird and marine life, including, hopefully, spotting a kiwi in the wild.

This was my first visit and I didn't know what to expect. I'd done my usual amount of research (none) and was happy to let everyone else do the organising.

The sum total of my knowledge of the island was as follows: it was somewhere south of Bluff and was probably named after someone called Stewart.

Post-trip research reveals that my postulations were bang on.

The island, New Zealand's third largest, does dwell on the other side of Bluff and is, in fact, named after William W Stewart, a Scottish sealer and whaler who sailed to New Zealand in 1809.

While tootling (nautical term) about in boats, he corrected two errors in the map James Cook had made during a previous bout of tootling.

Firstly, he established that Stewart Island was indeed an island, and secondly, that Banks Peninsula was not. Glad to have that cleared up.

As the Māori didn't know Stewart, and got there a long time before him, they had their own name for the island - Te Punga o Te Waka a Maui or "The Anchor Stone of Maui's Canoe" (the South Island being Maui's canoe). From it Maui fished up the North Island, then neglected to throw it back for being undersized, thus starting the North-South rivalry.

The more common Māori name for the island is Rakiura, or "glowing skies", in reference to the aurora australis, which we totally didn't see.

I flew from Invercargill in a very small aeroplane run by the imaginatively named Stewart Island Flights. The company did what was written on the tin (or plane, as they called it), so I can't fault them, especially as the wind got up and really buffeted us around. I took my mind off possible impending doom by chatting to the woman beside me.