The year gave us floods, and one animal gives us hope, writes Toby Manhire.
On February 10, 2022, for the second time in eight days, Buller went underwater. It didn’t make much of a dent in news bulletins – that same day, 120 protesters were arrested at parliament as the occupation dug in. But on their farm on the flat above Maruia Falls in Murchison, Tony and Sarah Peacock assessed a crime scene, the second one-in-a-hundred year flood in a fortnight. Tony and Sarah mostly run deer. They were OK. They’re pretty good swimmers. But three bulls were lost, swept with scores of cows from neighbouring farms into the river and down the falls – a violent 11-metre drop that was axed into the landscape by the Murchison earthquake of 1929.
Ten or so days after the downpour, Tony got a call from stock trackers. A farmer in Westport had found an unfamiliar bull snuffling in a blackberry patch. It was one of his. The bull, 18 months old, had surfaced in a paddock almost 80 kilometres from home. The bull and its death-defying journey down the Buller made headlines in New Zealand and around the world. “I was quite happy when I got the call he was alive,” Tony told local media. “I think he will get legend status now and be put in a paddock to retire with some cows.” Tony couldn’t help those asking for the bull’s name. “He’s just a bull,” he said.
How did the bull do it? A journey as long as the Heaphy track and dramatically more dangerous. Did he fight the savage currents? Did he attempt to steer himself away from the sharp rocks and skyscraping cliffs? Did he, having survived the death drop on the Maruia river, give it up to nature and dream himself all the way into the Buller, gliding through the gorge, under O’Sullivan’s Bridge and out to the coast? Did he glimpse gold on the ride past Lyell Creek? Was it fate?
Or was it just statistics? The Peacocks’ farm ultimately lost two bulls to the flood; their neighbours had it worse. Jet boats were launched to salvage drowning cattle. Some were garrotted by fencing, others plunged to death by waterfall. Tony and Sarah’s neighbours lost 86 cows between them. Perhaps the exception proves the rule, in service of the laws of probability. Whatever. We celebrate survivors to honour the dead. To fend death away.
I was thinking about all this, about the Murchison bull, when I travelled to Wellington for a school reunion last weekend. Nothing formal – a group of teenage boys, suddenly, strangely deep in their 40s. Serge stood on a wall in the pub garden, dressed in shorts and a blue-and-white-striped Argentina football shirt, and raised a toast to those we’d lost. The list was long and groaned with cancer, suicide, the roads. “They say you die twice,” said Serge. “First when you stop breathing and second when your name is spoken for the last time.”
The Buller River is an upside-down question mark, running 177 kilometres from Lake Rotoiti to the Tasman Sea, opening its mouth at Westport. Westport, South Island: names that leave you in little doubt. As for the Buller of the river and district, that title, given by one or both of Charles Heaphy or William Fox, is for Charles Buller, a former British member of parliament and secretary of the colonising New Zealand Company.
The plaque beneath a marble bust of Buller in Westminster Abbey praises a man “distinguished by sincerity and resolution”. It says: “The British Colonies will not forget the statesman who so well appreciated their desires and their destinies.” Charles Buller never stepped foot in New Zealand, however, let alone in the river that carries his name. (Nor did the Scottish geologist Roderick Murchison.) The original, Māori name for the awa is Kawatiri: deep and swift.
The bull that swam the river has a name now. He was returned to the Peacocks’ farm via State Highway 6. The vet checked him out: nothing but a minor eye infection. He was in “remarkably good shape”, Sarah told me in an email. “After his vet checkup we put him in a beaut paddock full of the best of juicy grass and thought he’d make the most of the opportunity to rest and recover.” A couple of days later he went missing. “He had broken out of his paddock and we found him down the road at the neighbours, trying to get in with their heifers. Cheeky bugger! He got rounded up and sent home to his paddock in disgrace.”
He was already a local hero. Murchison Area School, where Sarah is deputy principal, launched a competition to name him, with the winner getting a $100 voucher at PGG Wrightson’s. “We had many entries from the kids, with some great puns,” said Sarah. Floatabull was popular. Inflatabull. Bob. But the winner was Kehu.
The swimming bull was named after Kehu of Ngāti Tūmatakōkiri, a local guide who led the way for Thomas Brunner, Charles Heaphy and future premier William Fox, all of the New Zealand Company, on various expeditions around the region. He was “a perfect bushman”, said Heaphy. “A good shot, one who takes care never to miss his bird, a capital manager of a canoe, a sure snarer of wild fowl, and a superb fellow at a ford.” Kehu was, Heaphy wrote, “worth his weight in tobacco”.
Shortly before Christmas in 1846, Kehu guided a group including Brunner down the Buller and to the coast. It continued deep into not one but two winters, lasting 18 months. The group came close to death more than once. On the return east, Brunner suffered paralysis. Kehu and his wife stayed to keep him sheltered and fed until he could be safely moved. In The Great Journey: An Expedition to Explore the Interior of the Middle Island, New Zealand, Brunner would later write: “To Kehu I owe my life.”
Brunner, Buller, Heaphy, Fox – all names inked into the top of Te Wai Pounamu. And Kehu? For him a stream in Cascade Creek, a tributary of the Buller. And now a supernatural bull.
To Kehu. In the last, maudlin mile of a year still healing from the fires at parliament, a year that seemed to last a year and a half, the miracle bull from Murchison that survived Maruia Falls and swam to Westport is something to cling to. Raise him up to the pantheon of animal gods, alongside Opo the dolphin and Nigel the gannet. Put him in picture books, in museums, on tea towels. Rename the river.
Back in Murchison, does Kehu think much about his trip down the Kawatiri, the depths and the rapids, the smell of blackberries? Lately, said Sarah, “Kehu has been hanging out in his paddock with a couple of paddock buddies. He is often asked about at the local museum by visitors passing through, and at school I still get queries from the kids as to his welfare.” She said: “He continues to make the odd attempt to escape and head off on his own. But on the whole he’s living his best life, and doing very well.”