A Letter from Oceania

1. From Raoul Island

The poems are lifted high into the air by a great hook and swung above a tempestuous sea. So begins their final approach to Raoul Island. The poetry books are inside a white sack which moves like a cloud above the deck of the HMNZS Otago then continues outwards, to be dropped into an inflatable boat. A diesel-powered hoist and derrick - with another conspicuously dangling hook - can be seen on the headland which is the destination of the bag-boat. Everything that reaches the island comes and goes by way of a hook.

Mid-ocean, 900 kilometres north of Auckland, Raoul Island is the remotest part of New Zealand. An active volcano located on an earthquake fault-line, it has the air of an island that wants to be left alone. Far from any shipping routes, it is without harbour, wharf or, for that matter, a viable airstrip. Hence the slow, sodden business of getting people and things ashore. Unless you're lucky enough to have a helicopter at your disposal, anyone wanting to get onto the island has to leap from the front of a boat. This procedure involves an inflatable RHIB being crashed into the headland and each passenger having to leap through a veil of spray then grasp a dangling rope and scramble up a rock face. All this has to happen in the gap between one wave and the next. With the human cargo deposited on the rock, the inflatable ...