‘We do just about everything’: the women running New Zealand’s ‘third island’

On a cloudy afternoon on New Zealand’s remote Stewart Island, Helen Cave is juggling multiple demands with aplomb: her latest haul of crayfish is due at the wharf, clients in China are phoning her about business and her grandson wants to take his new drone for a spin.

“I’ve always been a bit hyperactive,” she says, peering through her window overlooking Horseshoe Bay, where her cray boat is set to appear.

Later, she will drop in to the island’s only pub – the heart of the community – to check in with her staff.

It is a fairly normal day for Cave, who owns both the pub and the island’s only fish processing shed. She has been involved in a lengthy list of projects on the island in her 45 years living here: from the school, to running salmon and mussel farms, helping build the tiny airstrip and volunteering in community groups.

Cave’s multiple roles in the community while raising six children are impressive, but for women from Rakiura – the Māori name for the island – this is life as usual. Despite men outnumbering women on the island, a great many women are responsible for keeping the island running – a cultural phenomenon rooted in generations of history.

“Women do just about everything on the island these days,” Cave says – a notable shift from the “man’s world” she arrived into in 1969.

It was “very much a male society”, she says. “There were heaps of fishing boats, heaps of crayfishing boats – it was a bit wild west.”

Until recently, fishing was Rakiura’s primary industry, with men making up the bulk of its workforce. During the fishing season, men would disappear off the island for weeks at a time, leaving the women behind to run the community. While the industry has changed in recent years (women also work on the boats and fewer days are spent at sea), the legacy of that time lives on.

To outsiders, including New Zealanders who have never ventured this far south, Rakiura still holds some mystique as a remote and rugged outpost. Accessible by boat or a short flight on a tiny plane, the “third island”, as it is sometimes called, boasts pristine inlets, swathes of native forest and over 80% of the island is national park, accessible only by tramping or boat. Its tiny human population of 400 is vastly outnumbered by the endangered kiwi – the beloved national bird – which can be seen scampering about in residents’ gardens day and night.

Nearly all of the island’s residents are concentrated in Oban – the island’s only village – where there is one police officer, one grocery store, one school, a handful of eateries and a museum, but no hospital.

Rakiura’s economy now primarily relies on tourists, who flood the island in summer to experience its abundant wildlife, observe the pink and green glow of an aurora australis and tap out of the modern world.

But while the island may feel like a sleepy settlement from a bygone era, behind the scenes, residents – particularly women – are leading busy and resourceful lives.

‘A matriarchal society’

Margaret Hopkins sits in her living room on a hill overlooking Halfmoon Bay, which is shimmering gold in the evening light. Like many residents born off the island, Hopkins moved to Rakiura “for love”. Fifty years later, she recalls how she faced a steep learning curve in those early days.

“I was completely blown away when I first came here at how practical you had to be,” she says, remembering how quickly she learned to fix a coal range herself.

“The island was completely different then – very few cars, people walked everywhere and just about all the men were fishermen.”

During the fishing season, the community was “bereft of men” and “women stepped forward to fill the roles men would do”, she says.

For Hopkins, that led to more than 20 years serving on the local county council at a time when women were rarely represented in politics, and playing key roles in building the local museum and establishing the national park – all the while raising a family. In 2021 she was awarded a New Zealand Order of Merit for services to conservation and community.

At a community garden tucked behind the village, Hopkins’ daughter-in-law, Shona Sangster, is packing native seedlings into a stack of punnets, which will eventually be planted in gardens around the island.

“There is a perception that this is a hunting, fishing, shooting, blokey place – but it couldn’t be further from the truth,” Sangster says.

“Actually, it can be a very matriarchal society,” she says, adding that this is not born from an overtly feminist position, but rather, one of necessity. “If you sit around and wait for a man to do [something], nothing is going to get done,” she laughs.

Like most women on Rakiura, Sangster works multiple roles. She chairs local conservation and community boards, co-edits the monthly Stewart Island News and works part-time for a local merino business.

From early on, girls on the island are taught life skills that may be traditionally reserved for boys, she says.

“Granddaughters and daughters are taught to fish – there is never any thought that wasn’t an activity for them,” Sangster says, adding that this likely cultivates the particular characteristics Rakiura women possess.

“Women [here] have steely determination and grit,” Sangster says. “We are self-sufficient but it is nurturing – there is a really strong community both male and female,” she says.

Sangster moved to the island 10 years ago after she fell in love with Hopkins’ son.

“To give the blokes their due, they seem a bit more enlightened here than you might expect,” she says, crediting the women who raised them.

“Maybe that’s why so many Stewart Island blokes have been able to attract these women from faraway places.”

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A history of ‘female magic’

Māori first settled the bountiful Rakiura around the 13th century. When settlers from around the world began arriving from the 1800s to pursue sealing and whaling, many Māori men were taken away to work on the ships.

As far back as then, women were left behind to run the island, says Ulva Goodwillie who, for 24 years, ran guided tours on her namesake island Ulva Island – a tiny scenic reserve off Rakiura.

“Only strong women live here,” she says, standing in a patch of lush green bush in the hills overlooking Oban.

Goodwillie can trace her iwi (tribal) ancestry back to the earliest inhabitants of the island and some of her ancestors’ traditional knowledge has travelled through the generations. “My grandmother knew all of the plants, the families they belonged to and their medicinal [values] – every woman over here did.”

Goodwillie is too humble to claim to possess such knowledge, but over a short period in the bush she enthusiastically points out a native fungi, a rare native orchard and a juvenile bellbird learning to sing.

At her marae (traditional meeting grounds), situated in Bluff at the southern tip of the mainland, the ancestors depicted inside are all women, she says, adding this is unusual nationally.

“It is symbolic of how things were here and still are – the female magic has resonated ever since.”

Now a new generation of Rakiura women is stepping up to keep that history alive.

Lania Edwards can also trace her lineage back to the island’s earliest Māori settlers. As well as roles in community groups and working for local businesses, she sits on the board for the Rakiura Tītī Islands Administering Body, an organisation that oversees the carefully guarded customary harvest of tītī , a seabird found in the islands off Rakiura.

“It’s one of the few things we still really held on to down here,” Edwards says of the practice, adding the region suffered a great loss of Māori language and customs in the wake of colonisation.

Edwards has also been instrumental in efforts to start revitalising Māori language on the island, including a community project to write a waiata (traditional song) for Rakiura.

“If you want to do something down here you have to make it happen yourself,” she says, removing a whistling kettle off her fireplace.

“The women who thrive here are happy to roll up their sleeves and muck in – they are innovative, have great ideas and follow them through. A lot is achieved by women in this community.”