“I’ll probably die here eh. It’s a pretty mean spot to live. A pretty good spot to be bro.” Sticks Ogilvie, 22, spoke with one hand on the boat’s throttle, the other on its wheel, his black wetsuit folded at his waist, a cool breeze raising goosebumps on his torso. The swell—the reason he wasn’t out working that day as a commercial diver—swilled between the rocks, lifting the boat as we spoke. He kept an eye on the waves, manoeuvring the boat to meet them head on.

The red cliffs of Chatham Island, the biggest landmass in the archipelago of the same name, towered over the ocean, and occasionally the snorkel of 19-year-old Kodie Croon-Prendeville broke the surface as he scoured the sea floor for crayfish. Sticks isn't his real name. It's Devon, but the nickname fits—he’s enormously tall. Sticks moved to the Chathams from Taranaki about four years ago, following his parents when they resettled on nearby Pitt Island. He started life on the island working as a fencer, but soon got into diving. “Haven’t looked back. It’s pretty mean bro. It’s different to New Zealand: you can go and do a lot different shit over here eh. People go to nightclubs over there, we do this shit.”

Chatham Island lies some 800 kilometres east of Christchurch, its 920 square kilometres inhabited by just 600 or so people. Its main town, Waitangi, consists of a pub and hotel down by the water and on the rise above it a general store, an erratically open fish and chip shop, a petrol station, and perhaps three-dozen homes. Waitangi looks out over the bay, where its fishing fleet sits tugged by the wind or the tide to face in the identical direction in the lee of the wharf. It’s that industry—by far the island’s biggest—that keeps young people like Sticks employed: diving for paua and kina, fishing for cray and blue cod.