The Last Laugh

Searching for the only wild kookaburras outside of Australia

In a flight of fancy 160 years ago, former South Australia and New Zealand governor Sir George Grey set up a personal zoo on a private island. Today, visitors enjoying a quiet break there can still find traces of his legacy: the kookaburras of Kawau.

The last place you’d expect to hear the chortle of kookaburras echoing across a valley at dusk is on a small island off the North Island of New Zealand – but there it is again.

As I hurry outside, gin in hand, head cocked and eyes squinting, I hear it: the unmistakeable sound of Australia's most famous bird. But what is it doing here? More than 2,100 kilometres from home, on Kawau Island, a place famous for … well, not much really.

Except that Kawau, nine kilometres from the mainland in the Hauraki Gulf, is the former home of colonial governor, adventurer and naturalist Sir George Grey, and the kookaburras are part of his legacy.

Grey governed South Australia and Cape Colony in South Africa, as well as New Zealand (twice), with mixed success between 1840 and the 1860s. He had a long association with the country and bought Kawau Island in 1862 for £3,700. Over the next 20 years Grey set about transforming the former mine manager’s house into a palatial private residence. He also imported an ark-load of fauna for the park-like grounds, including wallabies, monkeys, antelope and zebra (which he purportedly hitched to a wagon and drove around the island's rough tracks). The exotic animals are now long-gone, with the exception of the wallabies – which have exploded in number to reach pest proportions – and the only wild kookaburras outside of Australia.

I learn all this while reclining on the deck of a modest house I’ve rented, high on a ridge at South Cove, in – you guessed it – the southern part of the island. Most of the land is covered in bush, native kanuka and pines, but a neighbour points out a lone eucalyptus in the valley below. But unlike the lyrics in Marion Sinclair’s famous 1932 song Kookaburra, there are no laughing kookaburras in this old gum tree; maybe the Kawau birds don’t recognise their ancestral link.

Kawau island passed out of Grey’s hands in 1888 (eight years before Marion was born) and a succession of owners sold off parcels of land. The Crown purchased the property – by now known as Mansion House – in 1967, for use by the Hauraki Maritime Park Board. In the late 1970s the by-then decrepit property was extensively renovated, and it received a further facelift in 1999, at which time it began its latest iteration as a destination for visitors.

Today, some ninety per cent of the island’s 5000 acres are privately owned, with Kawau being home to an enthusiastic community of about 120 permanent and part-time residents. The balance of the land is currently managed by the Department of Conservation.

It’s a great place to stay for a few days if your aim is some quiet time in a quiet place surrounded by sea and nature. You’ll need to be pretty self-sufficient: there are no shops, services, medical facilities or rubbish bins on the island, and the only entertainment is the kind you make yourself. Walking, fishing and swimming are popular activities and some holiday cottages provide kayaks for their guests.

While Kawau has several small communities, most are not linked. In some areas you can walk between places, mainly across private land. Respecting the locals and their privacy is essential and appreciated.

Travelling by boat is still the only way to reach Kawau Island, and Governor Grey’s old Mansion House remains a popular day trip from the mainland. If you don’t have your own vessel, you can book a place on Kawau Cruises’ Royal Mail Run (believed to be the largest in the southern hemisphere). The Royal Mail Run departs Sandspit at 10.30am and will drop you at Mansion House Historic Reserve to enjoy a few hours of leisure time before collecting you on its return run in the afternoon.

Another option is to grab a ride on one of Kawau Cruises’ scheduled water taxis (bookings required at least two hours in advance). These travel between Sandspit and the various bays and private jetties on the island. Depending on how many stops the taxi has to make, travel times vary, with 40 to 60 minutes being a safe-ish bet for a trip between Sandspit and Mansion House Bay. The water taxi can be an adventure in itself: on a recent trip I was squashed in with nine other passengers, three suitcases, several rubbish bags, a chain saw, an empty fuel container, two yapping Cavoodles, a cranky cat in a cage, and a large bunch of yellow daffodils.

Parts of Mansion House are open to the public (the hours coincide with the Royal Mail Run timetable) and the gardens provide a pleasant spot for a picnic. Bring your own food and watch while over-excited kids try to catch the resident peacocks, Solo and Two-toes, or purchase a light meal or coffee at the small café in the grounds. The Royal Mail Run cruise also offers a fairly basic barbeque-and-salad lunch option.

The Department of Conservation manages several easy-to-moderate walking tracks in the area, although some are closed after brutal storms in 2023 brought down trees and caused slips. One popular walk is the 2.6km loop out to the 1840s copper mine, with its crumbling stone stack and views across the Hauraki Gulf, past South Cove to the mainland.

It’s here, at South Cove, that I hear the descendants of George Grey’s kookaburras cackling in the tree-lined valley. Later, I run a straw poll, asking the locals if anyone has actually seen these magnificent birds. Yes, long-term resident Lyn tells me, at the end of her property that adjoins North Cove. Yes, says her neighbour Fay, who has a place over the hill at Vivan Bay – the only part of Kawau with an accessible sweep of public sandy beach. Another yes, this time near the track that leads to the newly refurbished Kawau Boating Club, which has a great little bar and bistro on the water’s edge (and the only fuel pump on the island for boaties), now run by locals Daniel and Renee. Lois, the doyenne of Schoolhouse Bay, hears about my straw poll and sends a message saying she often sees the kookaburras, at the tiny historic cemetery up the back of the small settlement. “It’s spooky,” she says.

They cover a wide territory, these haunting, humorous birds, but I get the feeling that the laugh is on me. I search for them for days but the only physical evidence I find is a glossy striped feather lying in a tuft of long grass behind Mansion House.