A rare bird

WORDS: COLLEEN BROWN

In her book The Bulford Kiwi: The Kiwi We Left Behind, author Colleen Brown explores the story behind the creation of a monumental kiwi carved into a hill by New Zealand soldiers in Wiltshire in 1919. Here she reflects on how the kiwi came about – and how it has endured for more than a century since

On Beacon Hill, above the village of Bulford near Salisbury Plain in southern England, lies a surprising sight – a gigantic chalk kiwi. Essentially created as a farewell gift from New Zealand soldiers departing for home in 1919, the monument – located just a few miles from the famed Stonehenge – is now more than 100 years old.

The Bulford Kiwi is an astonishing sight and an optical illusion. If viewed from across a valley you can easily see the outline of New Zealand’s national bird; up close, however, it’s more like an elongated fowl that stretches down the hillside.

And while the sight of a kiwi so far from home is surprising, so is the tale of how it survived. After it was nearly lost, the kiwi was resurrected by a British soldier who understood its significance as an emblem of the sacrifices made by World War I troops, and was determined that their legacy would not be lost.

A parting gift

The location of the kiwi relates to the area’s heritage as a military camp site and in particular as the site of Sling Camp – New Zealand’s chief training camp in the UK during World War I. And following the declaration of armistice on 11 November 1918, this was where New Zealand soldiers were to be sent to await repatriation home. However, funnelling more than 40,000 New Zealand troops previously deployed across Europe, all under the control of the British Army, back to Sling Camp was a logistical nightmare.

Sling Camp was designed to house around 4000 troops but by early 1919 it was bursting with around 6000 when a second wave of the influenza epidemic struck. Compounding matters were shipping strikes throughout the UK and the weather, which was cold and wet. It was a perfect storm. When planned repatriation sailings were postponed, the men became restive and trouble began brewing.

On 14 and 15 March 1919 the soldiers at Sling Camp rioted. While no one was killed, eight soldiers were court-martialled. Six of the accused were convicted (two of them were decorated, seasoned soldiers) and sent to Wandsworth Prison.

In order to keep the men occupied until their ships arrived, the camp’s commanding officers resurrected the idea of digging a giant kiwi into Beacon Hill above Sling Camp. What had previously been deemed an impractical idea when it was proposed earlier in 1919 was subsequently framed as a gift that the departing soldiers could leave behind – a memorial of the New Zealanders’ camp and a way to honour those soldiers who would never return home.

Three New Zealand soldiers were responsible for making the project a reality. Sergeant Major Percy Blenkarne drew the shape of the giant bird; Sergeant Major Victor Low was the surveyor who set it out; and Captain Harry Clark oversaw the men digging the emblem out of the grassed slopes using picks and spades.

Victor Low came from the first Chinese family in New Zealand (the Lo Keong family of Dunedin) and had served with the 5th Tunnelling Company in Arras, France.

The Beacon Hill site presented a number of technical challenges, with a 10-degree slope and a twist in the middle of the incline. Blenkarne’s drawing had to be transposed onto the site so it retained its proper perspective when viewed from a distance.

Harry Clark, a graduate of the Thames School of Mines (now a Category 1 historic place cared for by Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga), was used to working in challenging conditions. He volunteered as soon as war was declared in 1914 and fought in the crags and hills of Gallipoli using his mining expertise to devastating effect against the Turkish forces. Harry kept precise records of his thoughts and war experiences in diaries that, once completed, he sent home.

The conditions at Gallipoli finally laid Harry low, when he contracted dysentery so badly he had to convalesce in England. Then it was on to the battlefields of France. After being concussed then buried alive while sheltering in a shelled dugout, he was again sent to England, declared medically unfit and discharged late in 1916. Once back in New Zealand, Harry worked to get himself fit for service again and reattested in October 1917.

By March 1918 Harry was back in England and after armistice was declared he was appointed works and barracks officer to Sling Camp, which was teeming with men anxious to get home. Harry used his organisational skills to get 400 of the remaining men up Beacon Hill every day to work on the giant bird.

Eventually, on 28 June 1919 – the same day peace was signed with the Treaty of Versailles – the exacting task of creating the kiwi was completed. And as Harry noted in a Marlborough Express article in September 1919, when the men left for home it was with the understanding that the giant bird would be looked after: “The height is 420 feet [128 metres], the length of the beak 150 feet [45.7 metres] ... With a little attention from time to time, the emblem should last for all time.”

An enduring landmark

Following the soldiers’ departure, the kiwi was maintained for a number of years by shoe polish firm the Kiwi Polish Company. During World War II it was covered over after the Luftwaffe used it as a landmark in its bombing raids on military targets, and following the war it was re-cut into the hillside by the Bulford Scout Group. Unfortunately, the original drawing of the kiwi had returned to New Zealand with Percy Blenkarne, so when the re-cut image of the giant bird was finally revealed the outline had changed significantly from the original. The situation changed again after 1950, when it was decided the New Zealand government would take ownership of and care for the historic emblem. Unfortunately, those good intentions fell by the wayside with the turnover of government officials and indifferent record keeping. In October 1971, the government’s Bulford Kiwi file was stamped ‘closed’.

The kiwi then languished on Beacon Hill, with the surrounding trees obscuring it from public sight.

In 1980, when the Returned and Services Association was made aware of the plight of the kiwi, the British Army again approached the New Zealand government to help it look after the emblem; however, the government declined to do so.

It was around this time that a squadron of British soldiers commanded by Major Danny Fisher of the 249 Signal Squadron, which had just returned from a NATO operation in the Arctic Circle, stepped in.

Danny saw the overgrown bird and decided to fix it, noting in an interview for my book that it was a mission that could be carried out by present-day soldiers out of respect for those from a previous era.

On Danny’s promise of a few days off and some beers, the entire squadron resurrected the kiwi, carrying bags of chalk on their backs to fill the void within the body created by erosion over time. The kiwi has been cared for by all 249 Signal Squadron commanders and their units ever since, with members of the New Zealand High Commission pitching in to help clean it up for the annual Anzac Day commemorations that are held at the site.

In 2017 the Bulford Kiwi was listed as a scheduled monument with Historic England, recognising it as a nationally important archaeological site and protecting it from destruction and change.

For Danny, the kiwi is a “legacy passed down through the ages and between soldiers, not governments” – a sentiment echoed in his words inscribed on a cairn at the site of the kiwi on Beacon Hill. It reads: “To the old soldiers in the new country from the young soldiers in the old country. Our link is carved forever in the timeless hills of Salisbury Plain.” learn more

Kāwai: For Such a Time as This

Monty Soutar

RRP $39.99 or $49.99 HB (Bateman)

Monty Soutar is an excellent historian, a fact that both makes and occasionally threatens to break his phenomenally popular debut novel, Kāwai – the first in a planned three-volume historical fiction series and the best-selling work of New Zealand fiction in 2022.

Kāwai is destined from birth to be a warrior leader who will avenge the massacre of his tribe, and the narrative more or less follows the story of his life up to this climactic battle, just as Pākehā, with the twin tomes of muskets and Christianity, make landfall.

The book’s greatest gift to readers, and to New Zealand fiction, is to draw a line –unbroken, clear, and full of a powerful and transformative understanding – between past and present, so that readers are vitally aware of how recent Kāwai’s story is, and how present it remains.

One senses the author’s aim – that the knowledge and narratives of Māori life pre-colonial times be shared – and, research-wise, he delivers outstandingly well on this. The book is full of tangible heritage details on structures, tools, clothing, waka, landscapes, moko and weapons. And tribal life is detailed so thoroughly that a reader knows, by the end, how to prepare for a chief’s wedding, snare a bird and train for battle (amongst other things).

This valuable transfer of knowledge sometimes comes at the cost of the prose and the character development, but what emerges is, by the end, a fiction with justifiably different priorities, delivered in a way that ultimately fits its material well.

This is an epic story that in the framework of the book is told (not written) by a kaumātua to his mokopuna over rēwena bread and tea; a story that tells the listener who he is.

The prelude immerses us in Joanne’s childhood, via her family’s unofficial archaeological digs in Banks Peninsula. This signals the beginnings of a complex investigation into the value of objects and the stories they can tell, while exploring questions of land, belonging and identity. “Artefacts,” she writes, “are carriers of magic. They sing songs to the dead and herald the future.”

What follows is a different hybrid. The core narrative is a well-paced account of Joanne’s passage from curate’s wife to lesbian academic and writer, and all the challenges this entailed for her in the 1990s.

The Queen’s Wife

Joanne Drayton RRP $40 (Penguin)

The pitchline for Joanne Drayton’s memoir is an instant hook: ‘A modern love story: whakapapa, archaeology, art and heartbreak’. The chess pieces on the front cover –two queens, one Māori, one Viking – carved by Joanne, are line and sinker, promising an absorbing story of how she and her partner, artist Sue Vincent Marshall, left heterosexual marriages, blended lives and families, and connected with their respective heritages. And it’s all set against a rich backdrop of art history, painting and museum collections.

It stands solidly on its own, and a reader might wonder why two other threads are interspersed: one a fictionalised imagining of the history of the famous medieval Lewis chess pieces, which reads like a novel outline; the other, ‘Sue’s whakapapa’, an account of Sue’s Māori ancestry, told by Joanne. Like the museums, galleries and sprawling homes the book visits, this can feel cluttered and messy with appropriation, as well as charming.

Two threads remain hidden. The chess pieces on the cover are not mentioned until the final pages, while ‘the Queen’s wife’, Sue, haunts the account silently, spoken for, and sometimes over – although her astonishing paintings, featured in the photo insert, tell their own story.