Terressa Kollat has been living off the land her whole life. Born and raised on the Islands in the Hauraki Gulf, she's no stranger to remote living and has always been close to the sea, thanks to her lighthouse-keeper parents.
These days she lives in the South Island - Wallacetown near Invercargill.
She has also become a TikTok star, famous for her content about hunting, kaimoana gathering, and is being watched by thousands all over the world.
TikTok star Terressa Kollat uses her videos to show people the beauty of nature and how to be self-sufficient and stick to conservation rules. Photo: TikTok / Terressa Kollat
Kollat and her seven siblings spent their life hopping from island to island every couple of years with their parents, who were lighthouse keepers.
“They did things like weather reports from the lighthouse, they had to know Morse code for navigation purposes, but they also had to be semi self-sufficient as well because some of the boats couldn’t drop off stores and things like that so you had to know how to live off the land,” Kollat tells Charlotte Ryan.
Kollat’s father, of Irish descent, used his skills from the time of World War II to live off the land, and her mother passed down her own knowledge from iwi.
“Like most families of that time, we had a huge vegetable garden, Dad knew how to dive, he knew how to hunt, and he knew all his plants,” she says.
“He was a schoolteacher prior to going on the islands, at Tokomaru Bay so he learnt a lot from the local iwi around that area, Ruatōria, how to grow certain things, and identify certain plants, and that’s where he met my mother.
“She’d show us what to eat during winter … she’d show us how to identify when certain shellfish was ready in the sea by watching certain plants that were in flower, the kōwhai tree or the pōhutukawa.
Terressa Kollat doesn't like wasting anything and in this TikTok video advises people on what to do with the guts of pāua. Photo: TikTok / Terressa Kollat
“They taught us to take only what we needed and not to waste anything. There was always the karakia, prayer, done at mealtimes, and prior to going into the water. So, she taught us tikanga and how to respect the environment that we were taking food from.
“Everything was used, if not, even the fish brains, for stock or back into our veggie garden for compost.”
Her nieces and nephews come down for the school holidays to hunt and dive with her, and that’s what sparked her TikTok account.
“My nephew Michael said to me one day … after we’d been hunting, ‘oh Aunty, you should put what you do on Tiktok’. I said ‘what would the point of that be?’ He said, ‘well you could teach a lot more people, Aunty, they’d really like this sort of thing, a lot of people my age’.”
He helped her upload a video of her eating a fresh kina sea urchin and just a week later, he was stunned by the number of followers she had gained, she says.
Terressa Kollat first video on TikTok was of her deliciously eating a big kina sea urchin she had found. Photo: TikTok / Terressa Kollat
Since then, Kollat has amassed fans everywhere across the world, with about half being Kiwis, 20 percent Americans and the rest Canadian, British or Australian, and of all ages, from eight to 80 years old.
“I bring back memories for a lot of people, especially Kiwis in Australia, or other people wanting to live off the grid, you know, I host people here who want to live off the grid and then they soon change their mind after spending a couple of days with me.”
But the experience she provides for people seeking to go off the grid gives them food for thought about whether they can handle this way of life, she says.
“We have a lot of rules and regulations in New Zealand but if I was to say to someone can you tell the difference between a male and female and how these breed, they won’t know and I know this because I’m taking people out all the time and they aren’t aware of these things.
“So, if I can teach them … they can make more informed decisions when they’re gathering food. So, the abalone and paua, even just shucking it and opening it with your hand, how to do that, collecting kōura crayfish, kēwai we call it, the freshwater one, how to catch it.
Terressa Kollat shows her TikTok followers an impressive amount of smoked kai from just two fish, a salmon and trout, which she fished. Photo: TikTok / Terressa Kollat
“It looks all nice seeing all the nice food, it’s all prepared in a three-minute video and I show how I get it, but what they don’t see is me getting up at five o’clock in the morning, driving and then walking to the destination, then jumping into cold water, looking around for kaimoana, hopping out, carrying my weight bout, everything else, and getting back to the car then driving all the way home then having to either shuck or if I’ve been fishing fillet everything.
“It’s the hard work or mahi that goes into it that they don’t realise. You have to fit in with the elements, the elements don’t fit in with you.”
One of her most popular videos viewed 3.2 million times was of her showing how to use seaweed kelp as a food parcel for cooking.
“The biggest thing when you’re tramping or hunting is you don’t want to carry a lot of weight so you have to think of methods to use where you’re not having to use utensils or pots and pans.
One of Terressa Kollat's most popular TikTok videos is of her using this bull kelp to cook seafood over the fire. Photo: TikTok / Terressa Kollat
“So I use bull kelp and I cut it and I use it like a cooking bag or little pocket and I put my food in that and then I’ll place it on top of the fire and cook it inside that.
“People were quite fascinated with that, you can put anything in it, it doesn’t taste like salt or anything, it just keeps everything nice and moist.
“The things I take for granted that I think are normal, obviously to other people are not.”
Kollat also uses the Aotearoa Kai Gatherers social network and hopes to start up a YouTube channel soon.
