Never judge a book...

Joshua Kauta and his whanau train dogs and hunt pigs on their remote Bay of Plenty farm. Joshua is also a specialist bookbinder with a love of fragile heirlooms – a perfect example of that old adage. Words Sue Hoffart; Photos Simon Young.

JOSHUA KAUTA has the hands of a pig-hunter. Solid, weathered and pitted with fresh nicks and old scars, these are paws accustomed to the tug of a dog leash over steep, densely treed East Cape terrain. The woollen khaki bush shirt and well-worn boots also mark him as the kind of outdoorsman who can tramp home with the carcass of a tusked boar flung on his back. He is probably the world’s only professional pig-dog trainer. And he is living proof that no book should be judged by its cover.

Joshua is also a bookbinder, one of a small band of New Zealand craftsmen who specialize in dismantling and painstakingly repairing historic tomes. His workshop sits alongside the Kauta family home, above the pebble and driftwood shores of Te Hanoa Bay at Torere, 21 kilometres east of Opotiki. Wedged between an 18th-century British gold-blocking machine and broad ocean views, he sews, glues, embosses and covers fragile, damaged heirlooms.

It is slow, meticulous work. He can spend hours sourcing missing text from a museum in London or an internet website, then carefully match a repaired page by washing it with his home-made pigmented paste. Among his current projects is a family Bible published in England three years before Captain James Cook arrived in New Zealand waters in 1769.

“I love the contrast,” he says of his ability to inhabit both bookish and brutish worlds. “One time I was coming up on a horse, with blood all over me. These people came up in a car and said, ‘Excuse me, where would we find the bookbinder?’” Visitors are equally likely to find the gregarious 61-year-old with a grandchild or a guitar in his ragged-nailed hands.

Aside from composing songs, Joshua likes to impersonate Engelbert Humperdinck and Tom Jones for tour groups. Or don a sombrero and painted moko to perform the Mexican Maori musical comedy act beloved by visiting Probus clubs and 80th-birthday girls. Wife Sarah provides the cups of tea because no Kauta family member can escape involvement in Joshua’s schemes and dreams. Even the two preschool mokopuna sing alongside their grandfather.

Son David is learning to bind and repair books while his brother Caleb masters pig-dog training and the family’s newest business venture – teaching urban dwellers how to hunt. Both boys left Torere to learn a trade – David has completed a butchery apprenticeship, Caleb is a qualified mechanic – before returning home of their own volition to gather the reigns from their father.

Quieter, more patient David is happy to work indoors and showed early aptitude for the bookbinding trade, gluing scraps of paper at his father’s side from the age of four. Of course he also hunts and butchers pork for the family. Outgoing, outdoorsy Caleb thrives on the hunting, fishing and diving in his home patch and the sheer variety in his working day. He keeps the family fishing boat and farm machinery in working order, trains dogs, moves cattle and has his father’s easy way with visitors and clients. “They both went away to do apprenticeships,” Joshua says of his sons. “They had to leave home to get the feel of how things operate away from here. I felt it was very necessary in order for them to acquire the work ethic, being submissive to a boss or organization, not working for their dad. They couldn’t wait to leave – it’s natural – but I had an idea they’d end up back here. And they gained a deeper appreciation for what they had here.”

Daughter Rebekah studied tourism in Gisborne then headed to Auckland to study veterinary nursing before cutting her course short to have son Zion. When she’s not feeding or stitching up the dogs, the 29-year-old volunteers as a Christian youth leader in Opotiki and plans to develop a website aimed at attracting foreign hunters to the property. She and partner Rob Dench also hunt and train dogs. Even daughter Ruth Castles and her husband Mark, who work in Opotiki, have been roped in to provide catering for hunting students.

All of which means Joshua’s long-held plans are coming to fruition. The Kauta patriach was in his 30s when he returned to Torere to care for aging parents. He came home with a five-year apprenticeship behind him, nine years’ bookbinding experience at The Gisborne Herald newspaper and a will to live and work on the coast. “I live in an environment where people are very unmotivated and non-creative but I think I found my motivation living in Wellington. I had to fit in; I couldn’t just depend on my whanau. I’ve always been a person who, if there’s an opportunity, I go and do it.”

Which is how he convinced Sarah to marry him in 1984. His wife-to-be was working at Whakatohea Maori Trust Board in Opotiki and still reeling from the culture shock of returning to her mother’s birthplace in the tiny East Cape village of Waiaua. London-born Sarah (her father is English) came to New Zealand with her mother at age 15 and headed to Hamilton to learn secretarial skills at Waikato Polytechnic. Joshua teases his wife. “Her parents went to Egypt with her, so she was going to marry a rich sheik with a few camels. But she came back here and married a poor Maori with a few pigs.”

Now, after 26 years of marriage, Sarah has adjusted to the quietness and the quirks of her rural lifestyle. She has learned to keep doors closed against stray pigs or dogs and knows how to cut manuka scrub for firewood. She also home-schooled their children with Joshua’s help. Few traces of her English accent remain and she has come to revel in fresh kina gathered from the bay below her home as much as any local. However, other aspects of East Cape life still don’t come easily to the city-raised woman. She finds the bush overwhelming: too vast, too frighteningly far from the London streets of her childhood.

“I do the bookkeeping, the cooking and caring for the family,” she says. “In the bush, I’d get lost. And I’ve tried pig-hunting with Joshua. It was horrible. My boots were giving me blisters; I hate climbing hills because I’m so unfit. I ended up throwing my new boots at Joshua because he wouldn’t wait for me.” She and Joshua also help care for the grandchildren while their parents work.

Decades ago, Joshua started thinking about how best to utilize the 10,000-hectare block of whanau land without destroying native trees to plant forest or farm animals. The land is co-owned with assorted siblings, aunts and uncles who can trace their line back to the Tainui canoe that landed at Torere more than 20 generations ago. The village of Torere takes its name from the Tainui chief’s daughter and Joshua and fellow Ngai Tai iwi are among her descendants. His roots run deep and his ties to the land include years of hunting and fishing in the area.

“I had to think of an idea to turn this into a productive piece of land that could support myself and a future family without destroying its natural beauty. What I figured out was a lot of pig-hunters struggle to get a good dog up and trained. They don’t have access to too many good hunting areas and most people are committed to work. While they are working in factories or at jobs, their dogs in town are sitting in their kennels. We train them every day.”

He also deduced the viability of his businesses, both the dogs and the bookbinding, depended on his reaching beyond his remote coastal location. Torere is too small even for a shop. “I came to realize if I’m going to be working where I have chosen to live I need to be communicating with the people I’m providing a service for.” So Joshua bought his first computer in 1997 and launched a simple website soon after. He now operates two websites and advertises in specialist magazines.

Hunters pay $150 a week for training which takes anything from a fortnight to three months. Before Christmas there were 20 canines in kennels beneath the small pine plantation near the house, including a couple from Invercargill. Bookbinding clients, meanwhile, pay anything from $10 to $3000 to have their precious heirlooms repaired, while couriers deliver specialist book glue, fabric and leather ordered from Auckland.

Joshua prefers to stay close to home these days. “At my stage of life, probably the highlight is having grandchildren around me,” he says. “That, and being able to go down to the beach any time I choose, if the day is beautiful. A lot of people invaded this area. No wonder the Maoris fought for it. We have whitebait in the river next door, mussels at the end of the bay. When the sea looks good and calm or we see a big shoal of fish, we go out in the boat. Kina, paua, it’s the only place I know where we’ve got it all in one place.”

Joshua is confident his children will continue to find new business opportunities and plenty of kaimoana beside the bay their ancestors discovered. And he hopes his mokopuna will perhaps venture into the wider world before continuing the dog-training and book-repair traditions he has established. In the meantime, they know where to find a couple of extraordinarily capable guiding hands.