An eagle, and its place in our history. The legend of Pouakai, aka the extinct Haast's Eagle, takes Peter Walker on a journey from an 1860s Canterbury sheep run to a deep cave near Karamea as he learns the story of the mighty hunter that inhabited a peak in the foothills of the Southern Alps. Was it the same creature as The Rukh of Arabic legends? And, if so, was that evidence that in the twelfth century Arabic and Chinese explorers ventured as far as the South Pacific, saw Pouakai, and traded with Maori?From Kai Tahu's fatal encounter with colonisation to the glories of tenth century Baghdad and ceremonies at the great Tahitian marae Taputapuatea, Hard by the Cloud House is a heady, powerful and seductive mix of history, memoir, science and myth, crafted by an esteemed writer. Creative non-fiction at its best.
Table of Contents:
Part I
To Honeycomb Hill 9
Part II
In Canterbury 75
Part III
Meadows of Gold 149
Notes 277
About the author 285
Acknowledgements 286
About the Author :
Peter Walker grew up in Christchurch and began his writing career as a journalist in Wellington and then Sydney. He moved to London in 1986 and joined The Independent and later the Independent on Sunday where he was Foreign Editor. He also wrote for the Literary Review, the Financial Times books pages and Granta. He is the author of the historical memoir The Fox Boy (Bloomsbury, 2001), set in Taranaki, and his first novel The Courier’s Tale (Bloomsbury, 2010), set in Italy and the court of Henry VIII. In 2011 he was a Randell Cottage fellow in Wellington and began another novel, Some Here Among Us (Bloomsbury, 2015). He now lives on an orange orchard near Ninety Mile Beach in the Far North.
Review :
‘This might be a heady, occasionally breathless ride, but by the book’s final paragraph, you are also left slightly breathless, exhilarated and ultimately beguiled by what you have discovered in this cabinet of curiosities’ — Chris Moore, New Zealand Listener
‘This is popular science writing of the first order: as good as anything by Richard Dawkins or Stephen Jay Gould’ — Jack Ross, Landfall Online
‘There is much to love about this book . . . it is a poetic ramble, beautifully written, wildly speculative — at its best, revealing and laugh-out-loud funny’ — Jenny Nicholls, Waiheke Weekender
‘In testing each fantastical account against the hard facts of geography, oceanography, maritime history and linguistics, Walker wrenches these huge-winged predators out of myth and brings them closer to the flight path of the mighty Pouākai. He does so with a sense of wonder and acuity, building his own, at times conjectural path out of scholarly research and scientific evidence, but also with a deep appreciation of landscape and the people involved in the story of a fabulous bird re-created from fantastic stories and found bones.’ — Sally Blundell, Aotearoa New Zealand Review of Books
