Style: January 13, 2021

24 Style | Feature
He’s been busy working on his house when he takes the
phone call. But within seconds, he seems to almost physically
shift gear as he delves into the vast tracts of history he holds
in his head and the piles of notes he has. Pahia is named after
Tahu Pahi (Ngāti Māmoe), chief of the pā on the northern
shore of Foveaux Strait. Pahi drowned alongside 40 men
when the Foveaux Strait claimed their double waka in 1823
after a trip to Ruapuke Island to get mutton birds.
He reels off this and more, before pausing to catch his
breath. It is an astounding thing. Between him, Janice and
Peter, they bring the story of this beautiful area to life with
vivid sepia-coloured strokes.
“When I was a child, we always went down to the bay,
where the boats and cribs are, and at the weekend people
went down there in their dozens. You went down there
and you couldn’t park. It was an extraordinarily popular
area,” she says of Mullet Bay.
They came, says Peter, for the offerings from their
dads’ boats.
“They’d come into the wharf with their fishing boats and
sell fish – blue cod, groper and things like that. In those
days, there wasn’t much else on in the area. People would
come down from Riverton or wherever. There was always
a big crowd. In the ‘60s, though, when diving gear came
in, that was sort of the start of the end,” he says, his voice
becoming subdued.
“Mum would say to us, ‘Go down and get us eight paua
for tea.’ There was plenty of everything. But over the years
it sort of got – greedy, that is what it was. Everyone taking
more than they should’ve.”
As the years wore on, Peter’s dad extended the home,
adding in “beautiful big windows” after swapping timber for
them with an Invercargill friend called William Smith, who
was a joiner.
“One of the fellas who worked there [at William Smith
joinery] would come out and stay the weekend with us
– he was a very good piano accordion player, so we had
some pretty big nights,” Peter chuckles.
And so the two Jacks and their neighbours would sit
around the boatshed or crib, doing what good mates do.
“They’d be playing the accordion, drinking beer, with the
woman running around cooking the food and bringing it
out to them. The men would be half-bombed and singing
up large. They were pretty happy times,” he says.
And living there was even better, says Janice.
“It is an extraordinarily beautiful place. It’s calm. A nice
place and you felt good being there,” she says.
When she turned 18, as people did back then, she spent
her weeks in Invercargill working in a milk bar as a waitress
and caught a ride home with the people who lived in the
brown crib. And on that drive home she would see people
perched up on the hill painting.
“On a rough-weather day and the rugged coastline,
people say it looks like a Scottish fishing village. Many, many
people have painted the area from all over the world. My
dad used to get mail from those people because he would
talk to the visitors. It was addressed just to Jack White,
Fisherman, Pahia. He always got the letters!” she says.
Janice went on to marry and worked as a florist in
Invercargill. She hasn’t been down to Mullet Bay and Cosy
Nook for a few years now, but she remembers taking
her own grandchildren down there, winding through the
beautiful scenery.
“It just draws you back there. It is home. The house isn’t
even there anymore, none of it’s there, but it is still home,”
she says.
There are some people who are so intricately woven into
the land that it is almost as though they and it are one.
And this is no more so than for those who grew up in
this tiny rugged coastal area. They are a special lot, these
Cosy Nookers, the type of folk who say “pop in any time”
if you happen to be down their way.
Peter’s back on the phone. He’s spent a few hours
tracking down photos, include a beaut of his dad just after
the crib was built, plus articles. On a second copy of the
photo, he has carefully drawn numbers on key areas, like
where each crib was built, and he’s written in his neat print
an explanation of what each area is. He’s off now to the
post shop.
“If I find the book Pahia in a second-hand shop on the
way, I’ll send that on too,” he says.
The family no longer own the crib – Jack had to sell it
after his sawmill burned down – but its memory has carried
on in a different way. Those two boys, who would be up at
the crack of dawn to begin a day of adventures, now have
children and grandchildren who chase that same spirit.
“Errol has nine grandchildren and he’s got them all away
in the holidays catching crawlies, up in the bush building
huts – that sort of things stays with you,” says Peter.
As for Peter? Well, his son lives next door to him in
Riverton and has “taken over” from Peter and Errol.
“He’s always off getting pauas, blue cod, venison, whitebait.
So I don’t have to get it, he gets it for me!” he says.
So, the story continues, in its own way. All four cribs
are still standing and some are lived in permanently. The
Southland District Council owns the land and the cribs
have licences.
But Jack’s first vision, when he spied that nook in a
little out-of-the-way place, still lives and breathes. His
story is still whispered from the grain of the timber he
used to build the first crib, woven with the sounds of
grand evenings with a piano accordion and songs out of
tune. He was simply a fella who wanted a bolthole – a
place where he could fish and hear the simple sounds of
pounding bare feet on the hallway as his children created
summer memories.