The New Zealand Railways Magazine, Volume 4, Issue 8 (December 1, 1929)
Charm of Islands
Charm of Islands.
Our country is a land of islands, great and small; islands guarding the gulfs and bays, islands strewn like tree-groves on the calm waters of sea-lochs, islands bold and cliffy presenting a granite front to the long send of Southern seas; islands woody and resounding with the bell-song of birds, charmed isles of Aves. All manner of shapes and sizes in islands, some islets of a fairy-like beauty, some craggily hard and savage of aspect.
.jpg)
“Golden the prospect, earth, sea and azure heaven.“—Robert Buchanan.
(Government Publicity photo.)
A glimpse of Half Moon Bay, Stewart Island.
But here, right away down at the butt-end of the mainland, the largest off-shore island of all seems to combine in itself something of the features that distinguish, in their several ways, the other isles of the New Zealand coast waters. There is something of everything here—a coast here wildly rugged, precipitous, facing the howling gales that come from west and south; there softly verdant, clothed from mountain range to sea-shore in an almost unbroken green blanket of foliage; mountains of rounded form, a mountain that was once a roaring volcano, its crater now a peaceful lake; bays and coves innumerable, and archipelagos high and hummocky or low, and everywhere clothed in forest and fern and bright in season with the gay flowers of the Maori isles. Beaches curving in dainty crescents of shining sands, bastions of rock, tree-hung, dividing bay from bay. And over all the land a kindly breath of air, a climate mild and pleasant for work or play; a place of sunshine and warm airs on its sunward looking northern and eastern parts.
A place of birds, where the tui and the bellbird, the pigeon and the kaka parrot liven the allenveloping bush. These are some of the things that make Stewart Island so attractive, strangely attractive indeed, when we consider its distance from the centres of population and its isolation.
But half the interest of a land of landscape beauty often lies in its human interest, in its atmosphere of history and man's adventure and endeavour. Stewart Island has a background in quite curious contrast to the sedate plains of Southland, a little more than a score of miles away to the north. No doubt its greatly broken coast outline, and its in-and-out contour, with bays within bays and sheltered cove after cove, its deep harbours and small-craft retreats, is the feature that had most part in shaping its story. It seems formed by kind Nature as a place of haven—many havens—for far-wandering sailormen, and a breeding-place for generation after generation of the men that follow the sea.