Stewart Island, Rakiura to the Māori, is New Zealand's end of the world: the country's third island, remote, untouched and wild, south of the South Island across the rough Foveaux Strait. Its name means 'glowing skies', after the aurora australis that sometimes sets its nights ablaze, and 85% of its area is national park (Rakiura National Park). With a single small town -Oban, home to about 400 people- and kilometres of forest, beaches and coves with hardly anyone around, it's a sanctuary where nature is in charge.
It's one of the best places on the planet to see wild kiwi: here the Rakiura brown kiwi (tokoeka) outnumbers people and, unlike in the rest of the country, it's active by day as well as by night, with night tours that have extremely high success rates. A few minutes away by boat is Ulva Island, a predator-free sanctuary where the forest rings with the song of rare birds -kākā, weka, tīeke, mohua- and you can walk through nature as it was before humans arrived.
Rakiura is also a Dark Sky Sanctuary, one of only a handful in the world, free of light pollution and ideal for seeing the Milky Way and, with luck, the aurora australis. Add the Rakiura Track (one of the country's Great Walks, the most remote and peaceful), fishing, kayaking and the town's relaxed pace, and you have a destination for truly switching off. Getting there takes some effort, but that's exactly why it keeps an authenticity that's hard to find anywhere else.
Rakiura has been inhabited by Māori since the 14th century -Waitaha, Kāti Māmoe and later Kāi Tahu (Ngāi Tahu)-, drawn by its resources and, above all, by the tītī (muttonbirds, sooty shearwaters), whose seasonal harvest on the neighbouring islands is a customary right of Rakiura Māori that continues today. The name Rakiura refers to the 'glowing skies' of the aurora australis. After the sealers and whalers of the 19th century, the island lived off sawmilling and fishing, and today off nature tourism. Rakiura National Park was created in 2002. The full story is on the history page.
Read the full history ↓Murihiku, “the last joint of the tail”: the far south of the country, land of Kāi Tahu, of the first sealers and whalers, and of the vast, untouched Fiordland National Park, with sublime Milford Sound. Offshore lies remote Stewart Island (Rakiura), realm of the wild kiwi and the southern lights.
Read the history of Southland and Fiordland →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
At the southern tip of New Zealand, where the land dissolves into the Southern Ocean, lies an island whose Māori name says it all: Rakiura, 'the glowing skies', a reference to the aurora australis that sometimes sets its nights ablaze. It is the country's third-largest island, and also one of the earliest to be inhabited: archaeology suggests it was already occupied in the 14th century, shortly after Māori settled the South Island.
According to tradition, the first to arrive were the Waitaha, followed by Kāti Māmoe and, later, by Kāi Tahu (Ngāi Tahu), the iwi that would come to hold traditional authority over almost all of Te Waipounamu (the South Island) and its islands. There is another poetic explanation for the name: some say Rakiura is the short form of 'Te Rakiura a Te Rakitamau', the 'great blush of Rakitamau', after the embarrassment of a chief who was turned down when he asked for the hand of two daughters of a local chief. Whatever its origin, the name speaks of skies, light and legend.
For Māori, Rakiura was not a place to pass through but a rich and valuable territory, above all because of an extraordinary resource that would shape its history for centuries: the tītī, the bird that on the neighbouring islands would become the heart of Rakiura Māori life.
Around Stewart Island, especially off its northeast and southwest coasts, are three groups of islets known collectively as the Tītī Islands or Muttonbird Islands. Here the sooty shearwater (Ardenna grisea) nests in huge colonies; Māori call it tītī and Europeans 'muttonbird'. Every autumn, the plump chicks, ready to fly, are harvested in a seasonal tradition that Rakiura Māori have practised since time immemorial: 'muttonbirding', or hopu tītī.
This harvest is far more than a source of food: it is a pillar of identity, of the yearly calendar and of Kāi Tahu customary law in the south. And it has a remarkable historical twist: when the Crown bought almost all Māori land in the south in the 19th century, the Tītī Islands were set aside for Rakiura Māori, who kept the exclusive right to harvest the tītī. It is one of the few exceptions to the colonial logic of dispossession: access to the bird islands remained, and still remains, in the hands of the families whose whakapapa (genealogy) connects them to these islands.
To this day, every season, 'birders' with hereditary rights travel to these islets -closed to the public- to carry on the practice under strict sustainable management rules. Muttonbirding is a living example of how a people kept their relationship with the land and its resources through colonisation, an unbroken thread linking the 14th century to the present.
European contact with Rakiura began, as in much of the south, with the exploitation of its marine resources. In the early 19th century, sealers came to Foveaux Strait and the island's coasts, drawn by the colonies of fur seals and elephant seals, whose skins fetched good prices in the markets of China and Europe. They were among the first Europeans to set foot on these shores, and their hunting was so intense that it nearly wiped out the southern seals within a few decades.
After the sealers came the whalers, and with them, as at Ōtākou and across the region, small mixed communities took shape: European men who married Māori women and put down roots on the island, founding families whose descendants are still part of the Rakiura community today. The island got its English name, Stewart Island, from William Stewart, an officer who charted part of its coast in the early 19th century.
Later, the island's economy turned to timber. For decades, sawmills logged the forests of rimu and other native woods, and there was also mining, fishing and even an attempt at a tin industry. Small settlements sprang up and disappeared. But Rakiura, remote and harsh in climate, never attracted large numbers of settlers: its isolation, a drawback elsewhere, ended up preserving here a natural world that was lost in the rest of the country.
The 20th century brought a profound shift in Rakiura's relationship with its natural world: from exploitation to conservation. As the sawmills closed and the timber industry declined, the island began to be valued for what made it unique: its intact forests, its birds and its status as a refuge free of many of the introduced predators that devastated wildlife on the mainland.
A key milestone was Ulva Island, in Paterson Inlet, which became a sanctuary free of rats and other predators, allowing extremely rare birds -kākā, tīeke (saddleback), mohua, weka- to thrive in a forest like the ones of old. All of Rakiura became one of the last strongholds of the wild kiwi: here the Rakiura tokoeka outnumbers people and can even be seen during the day, something almost impossible elsewhere in the country.
This recognition culminated in 2002 with the creation of Rakiura National Park, New Zealand's fourteenth national park, covering about 85% of the island. The same protective spirit later led to Rakiura being declared an International Dark Sky Sanctuary, one of only a few in the world, thanks to the exceptional darkness of its nights. The island that started out as a sealing ground ended up as one of the country's most treasured natural sanctuaries.
Present-day Rakiura lives mainly off its nature and its isolation. Its only town, Oban, on Halfmoon Bay, has around 400 residents and a slow, close-knit pace of life centred on the wharf, the general store and the historic South Sea Hotel, with its famous Sunday quiz. The economy combines fishing -above all the prized blue cod, plus aquaculture- with nature tourism that draws people looking for wild kiwi, birdlife, remote trails and starry skies.
Today the island is home to the Rakiura Track, one of the country's nine Great Walks -the most remote and peaceful of them-, to night-time kiwi tours with very high sighting rates, to trips to Ulva Island and to hunting for the aurora australis that gave it its name. It is a place to truly disconnect, without the crowds of other New Zealand destinations, where nature is still in charge.
And, as across the whole South Island, the presence of Kāi Tahu is very much alive. The right to harvest tītī on the neighbouring islands remains in the hands of Rakiura Māori, and the 1998 Treaty of Waitangi settlement acknowledged the iwi's historical grievances and strengthened its role as kaitiaki (guardians) of this land. Rakiura thus distils a rare and beautiful story: that of a place so remote that it preserved both its natural world and the unbroken thread of a people's relationship with their land and their sky. Getting there takes a bit of effort, and that is exactly why it is so worth it.
