Human Godwits

Cockle Bay April 2005

A few months ago, I changed my blog name to Godwit Tales. Not that anyone noticed or anything. Thanks for asking. Anyway, Dr. Atchison and Mrs. Evans is probably a cooler title, but I suddenly decided I didn’t need my name – indeed both my names – in such a prominent position. Without any requests for an explanation, I will, in the grand tradition of blogs, give you an explanation for the Godwit.

I’ve always had a thing for godwits, which are of course coastal wading birds known for their impressive migratory journeys. The bar-tailed godwits notably migrant in March and April from New Zealand to Alaska and Siberia, with only a short stop in China on the way. They breed in the arctic and then make the return journey as the northern summer ends. It’s the longest non-stop flight of any bird.

Growing up by the mudflats and inlets of Cockle Bay, near Auckland, I knew about godwits. I also have a rather lovely memory from primary school of the intercom coming on in class one day and the voice of our excited principal telling all classes to go out onto the field to watch the godwits pass overhead. In my no doubt incorrect recollection he said something like, “Excuse me all classes, the godwits are flying, the godwits are flying!”

Several years later at university, I read Robin Hyde’s The Godwit’s Fly (1938) and latched myself ideologically onto her wonderful foreword “Concerning Godwits” with its perfect description of how we New Zealanders are “human godwits” and “our north is mostly England.”

Our youth, our best, our intelligent, brave and beautiful, must make the long migration, under a compulsion they hardly understand; or else be dissatisfied all their lives long. They are the godwits. The light bones of the mother knew it before the chick was hatched from the eggshell.

I knew Hyde’s poetry quite well, thanks to all those wonderful choral settings by David Hamilton, my school music teacher, and I was privileged to learn about Hyde’s place in New Zealand literature from Poet Laureate herself, Michele Leggott. But Hyde is one of those writers who unsettles me by articulating so clearly many of the things I always felt about New Zealand and my place in it, even though she died nearly forty years before I was born. It certainly helped that she set her novel Wednesday’s Children (1937) on an island in the mudflats of Cockle Bay. Anyone from Howick will know exactly the island she means. The rest of you can look at the photo above. 

So in honour of being a human godwit trying to live out the endless migratory compulsion written into my bones, I recommend to you her foreword. Hopefully in the process, it will remind me that “Only fools, said the sparse-ribbed rock, are ever lonely.”

http://www.nzepc.auckland.ac.nz/authors/hyde/godwit.asp

Be prepared for a pop quiz.