The Wrestler

Few Barrierites have lived as peripatetically as John. Throughout a childhood spent on a Pukekohe sheep farm, he heard stories about his ancestral land of Mangati Bay, but it would take nearly 40 years for him to come “home”. Photo: Chris Morton

The old wrestler clambers out of his dinghy, drags it on to shore. It’s not much of a beach, 30 metres wide at the most, and it’s stony, slippery as hell. He looks up the valley, dark and damp this winter’s morning, and breaks into a grin. “This is a truly special place,” he says. “You’ll see.”

He first came here in 1971. He was 37 years old, the British Empire professional wrestling champion. “There’s always someone in the family who’s got a feeling for ancestry. And I had the bug. I was the first to come back.”

Growing up on a Pukekohe sheep farm, the youngest of six, John da Silva had heard all the stories about Mangati Bay. How his grandfather, a press-ganged whaler from Santa Catalina, Brazil, had washed up there. How he cobbled together a home from stray kauri logs and scavenged iron. How he and wife Polly Mary hacked out a farm, raising pigs, goats, ducks and nine kids.

These were good yarns, but for John it was incidental colour framing the real story: Mangati Bay as a place of magic and myth.

He’d pester his old man: tell me more. Well, Domingo Silva would say, when it was stormy and the wind howled down the valley, you’d sometimes hear the sounds of battle. Now. Shhhhhh. Listen. Listen carefully. Can you hear that? That noise? What is it? A distant haka — the roar of a hundred warriors. But from where exactly? And then — thud, thud…