Fable still has wings, 40 years on

Philip Temple says his classic allegorical novel about the New Zealand mountain parrot, the kea, would make a terrific film. He talks to Paul Mulrooney.

YHe was a self-described ‘‘£10 Pom’’, only two years off the boat, who joined a friend ... exploring around the West Coast.

ou have only to see Philip Temple’s email address to realise his lifelong fascination with kea. He appears to all email recipients as strongbeak@, which was the name of the protagonist of Beak of the Moon, Temple’s novel about the inquisitive New Zealand mountain parrot.

Within the book, published 40 years ago, lie two of Temple’s lifelong obsessions – his fascination with birds of every feather and writing about his adopted homeland.

Just this year, the Dunedin-based writer completed his two-volume biography of fellow author Maurice Shadbolt.

Now 82, Temple’s two avid interests first combined on a climbing trip to one of the kea’s natural habitats at Arthur’s Pass on the eastern slopes of the Southern Alps, in 1959. He was a self-described ‘‘£10 Pom’’, only two years off the boat, who joined a friend for a weekend exploring the West Coast.

Even the location of their climbing trip had an ornithological association – the Anti Crow area in Arthur’s Pass National Park. ‘‘There were these birds that were very strange to me. I’d always been interested in birds (but English birds) and I looked at them and thought ‘what are they?’ because they didn’t look exactly like a parrot or exactly like a hawk, they almost looked like a cross, and they did their usual antics, and as I climbed over the years, I encountered them many times in different places.’’

Those antics served as the genesis for Temple’s tale of a group of kea, including the aforementioned Strongbeak, exiled from their home, Kawee, by a dictatorial leader called Highfeather, but permitted to return so long as they obeyed the edict to stay in their now-changed environment, described by their leader as ‘‘Kawee, the way you want it’’.

If that expression conjures up faint echoes of the past, then that is deliberate on Temple’s part. Beak of the Moon was published in 1981, shortly before the combative Rob Muldoon won his third term as prime minister, having first emerged victorious in 1975 on the back of a particular campaign slogan.

‘‘It’s a partially political book. I drafted the book in 1977, and at that time Muldoon had become rampant, and Highfeather shouts out ‘‘Kawee the way you want it’’. Well, Muldoon said ‘‘New Zealand the way you want it’’.

If the book partially parrots Muldoon as a pseudo-dictator, its allegorical claims are further strengthened by the kea’s first encounters with humans – referred to as ‘‘tall birds with no wings’’. After first spotting the kea and throwing sticks and stones at them to keep at bay their curious nature, the men set fire to the valley to burn scrub to establish holdings for sheep – referred to as ‘‘pink faces’’.

‘‘So that early part of the story and structure is based on what was done in the high country by the early settlers, so in a way I wasn’t thinking about it too much at the time, but it could be taken as a metaphor for Pā kehā settlers and the local [Mā ori] inhabitants,‘‘ Temple says.

Set around the mid-19th century, the environmental desecration the kea are forced to flee mirrors the fears of something similar with the big environmental campaigns of the 1970s when the book was being written. One gentle inspiration was Tarka the Otter, written by English naturalist Henry Williamson who tracked and observed otters for his children’s classic. Temple’s book also gives a nod to George Orwell’s Animal Farm, where the creatures rebel against their oppressive human farmer.

‘‘So there is a political element caused by the stress on a society … so those were the two broad guiding books, not Richard Adams. In fact, I didn’t read Watership Down till after I’d finished mine.’’

Temple knew enough about the story of a rabbit colony to know a New Zealand version could be applied to kea. There are hints of Victorian nonsense writer Edward Lear as well as Lewis Carroll in his portrayal of the kā kā pō , while the book also mixes ornithological legends, including one about how the kea acquired its insatiable curiosity.

But apart from allowing his kea to speak, Temple did not want to anthropomorphise them. ‘‘I steeped myself in [understanding] how kea fly, fundamentally the same mechanism for all birds, but the difference for the kea of course is (and this is why they are so intelligent), they’ve got the ability to do things with the ‘pick’ and ‘chisel’ of their particular beak, plus the parrot feet, the zygodactyl feet, two claws forward, two back, which allows them to grip, so with those tools and being relatively large and strong and [some were] reasonably long-lived.’’

With fewer than 5000 kea now left in the wild, their existence is increasingly precarious –

exacerbated by the century-long bounty placed on them in response to a notorious reputation for attacking sheep. Temple uses such incidents in his book to explain what becomes, for the kea, a desperate struggle for survival.

‘‘When suddenly their food supply is burnt and all these creatures are sent in to eat the rest, what’s that going to do?’’

What the government did was impose a bounty from the late 1860s that saw an estimated 150,000 kea shot or poisoned till 1970, when the birds gained partial protection. Full protection was declared in 1986 in response to conservationist pressures and negotiations between the Department of Internal Affairs and Federated Farmers. Temple, who wrote pamphlets for Internal Affairs in support of the protection campaign, believes his book helped too.

‘‘The impact of Beak of the Moon allowed the sort of environment for this pitch to be listened to,’’ he says. ‘‘It helped put pressure on the high country section of Fed Farmers who finally agreed to it.’’

It coincided with a general realisation that native species like the kea would be lost to future generations if more effort wasn’t made to protect such wildlife.

Fresh momentum continues to the present day, with a public fascination for our wildlife reflected in competitions such as the annual Bird of the Year contest. Broadcast and online series such as Fight for the Wild, which tells the story of the government-sponsored programme Predator Free 2050, plus Stuff’s recent print and online series This Is How It Ends, have also highlighted the risks to kea and other native taonga.

Temple rejects the idea that his book, and a reprint in 2008, missed opportunities to incorporate more Mā ori influence.

‘‘I used as far as possible Mā ori names for the plants and this was deliberate, because I thought this was their native environment . . . and also when researching high country regions I tried to understand the Mā ori. To me, I tried to make Beak as authentic as possible to the environment and to the bird.’’

The novel is enhanced by illustrations from Chris Gaskin, who worked with him on several other bird-related books, and whose sketches adorn the lounge walls of Temple’s Dunedin home.

Since its initial publication the book has sold more than 20,000 copies and Temple sees other ways the story could take flight.

‘‘It’s always been obvious to me it would make a terrific movie.’’