Neck-twisting at the inlet scenery one evening, too close to The Entrance, an ebbing tide did catch me. It was clearly impossible to reach the spot where I’d left the van, so I took the next best option. An hour bent against the flow left me stranded in water too shallow for paddling, and still moving in the opposite direction. Knowing time wasn’t on my side, I ran with the canoe until the film of water was too thin to slide it any more. Alternately pushing and dragging, I made it to the nearest landing, the gravel beach of Coal Point, a headland that guards the little bay of trees like a crab’s pincer.
Weary from the effort, I sat down and gazed back at my tracks. The last of the sun sparkled off old bottles poking out of the mud, sand-blasted by a century’s storms. Two rusted bits of a horse-drawn plough littered the beach. All around them were water-worn jet-black pebbles of coal. Offshore in the mud, I could see the last remains of the jetty from which they were spilt. A primeval place?
Coal Point would barely be 50 metres across. It’s nothing much, a low-lying flat of tide-winnowed gravel at the foot of a steep spur, barely a metre above highwater. But in an environment like this, that’s enough to focus human interest. Apart from an even smaller flat across the bay, there is nothing else like it in this southern part of Whanganui Inlet. No other shoreline that isn’t steep, hard rock. Nothing loose for the tides and winds to dissolve and re-form, break up or extend. Nowhere else for people.
Whanganui Inlet supports more species of shellfish than any other New Zealand estuary with which it has been compared. Every strandline carries the evidence in the myriad whelks and cockles among the leaves and driftwood of the enclosing forest. They are common enough among the wrack of Coal Point, as you might expect given their abundance in the surrounding mudflats, but strangely outnumbered by pipi which live miles away in the sandy tidal flats by The Entrance. It wasn’t the tide that brought the pipi shells here. Sure enough, if you look under the rank fescue where recent spring tides have been at work at the edge of the flat, shells, almost all of them pipi, are spewing onto the beach. Following the edge of fescue, my fingers black with the unmistakeable smears of charcoal, I discover most of the flat, here at least, is a shell midden—the rubbish heap of a long-ago settlement.
By the time I return to the canoe, the tide is well on its way out. At a safe distance, a pair of herons stalk the retreating film of water. Feeding like gourmets, they step delicately over what looks like the arcing parallel lines of a railway without rails. Months later, when the railway comes up in the memories of one of the men who laid it out, I can tell him I’ve seen it—bits of it anyway.
My questions rekindle memories. Countless trucks of white pine for butterboxes, silver pine for posts, bales of flax and woolclips rumbling along now-vanished rails. Flat-bottomed cutters from Nelson with names like Maid of Italy waiting alongside the mudflat jetty for men to tip wheelbarrows of coal into their holds. Stories of hard miners and boatbuilders. Songs echoing off the bluffs. Mudflat rugby matches when low tide and Saturday afternoon coincide. Billy Addison clearing Coal Point’s bush to build a shed and yards. A century on, his posts and rails, a saddle even, rotting into the leaves of another forest. The potatoes that grew so well on the little flat, and the pipi shells that digging for them brought to the surface. ‘The Maoris,’ said someone, ‘had been here.’
Just because the land has revealed something to you, however, doesn’t mean it can be easily explained. Lying in the mudflats at Coal Point, there is a perfect circle of round stones—the trace, undoubtedly, of someone’s efforts. Archaeologists I have taken to see it have walked around and around it, photographed and puzzled over it, but in the end we were none the wiser. Every one of its thousands of stones—all quartzite from nearby rivers, hard as you can get and infinitely more rounded than any stone in the inlet—was gathered and brought here. Precisely why, though, remains a mystery. I’ve heard people argue it is the collapsed foundation of an ancient Māori fish trap. Others insist that despite its perfect symmetry it is nothing more than a pile of ballast from one of last century’s coal cutters.
Reading the landscape—like using a tiny net in a big river—you can catch only some of the infinite detail. The rest is washed away beyond memory and possession. Unequivocal facts are elusive. As Whanganui Inlet becomes a place where respect for nature means withdrawal, it becomes a place of contested values. It attracts my senses with its primeval, land-before-people meeting of forest and water—yet amiably unhidden, as though last century was yesterday, is the abundant sign of its human history.
Nevertheless, you wouldn’t see an environment like this in Europe. Even in New Zealand, for such a large tidal inlet to have sneaked through the 19th and 20th centuries completely un-urbanised is an aberration. That’s why so much of Te Whanganui has been designated a marine reserve. Assuming some moral duty to minimise human presence, the government that has more often got behind the campaign against nature has brought logging to a standstill and reserved the last forests, and is now doing the same to the inlet itself. That has upset those who had grown used to ‘backblocks’ subsidies like the 1930s Depression labour that carved the Dry Road around the inlet, and used to ‘the Haven’ as their unfettered domain, who have known it as a place whose hills have smouldered in the search for gold and coal and the creation of pasture—or, as the urge took someone once, just to rid the place of wasps. They know well of the endless succession of flax, timber and cattle that has gone down the inlet to sailing barques, scows and steamers. Now they are being told this is one of New Zealand’s very few estuaries still in its natural state. Soon after the talk about a marine reserve started, they put a sign up beside the Dry Road:
WESTHAVEN HUMAN RESERVE
No
BIRDS, D. O. C. OR BIRD BRAINS
They are being overtaken by the growing passion for nature that is drawing more and more urbanites like me to seek the last traces of the original land. With nature now more novelty than nuisance, an out-of-the-way territory for quiet exploitation has become sudden wilderness. Curiosities in its primeval shadow, the tramway rotting into the mudflats and the shell heaps of the vanished people who called it a sacred coast, seem less important to those grappling with the prospect of a sustainable future than the notion of an unpolluted, native estuary.
(1995)
Chris Orsman, ‘Ornamental Gorse’
It’s ornamental where it’s been
self-sown across the hogback,
obsequious and buttery,
cocking a snook at scars,
yellowing our quaint history
of occupation and reprise.
The spiny tangential crotch,
gullied and decorative,
I love from a distance,
a panorama over water
from lakeside to peninsula
where it’s delicate in hollows,
or a topiary under heavens
cropped by the south wind.
I offer this crown of thorns,
for the pity of my countrymen
unconvinced of the beauty
of their reluctant emblem: this
burnt, hacked, blitzed
exotic.
(1994)
Magical Realisms
Gregory O’Brien, from Diesel Mystic
He had no childhood. So he had to borrow one from a down-at-heel family in the town of Ruatoria. He was taken into the warm embrace of their twelve warm embraces—a mother and father and ten children under ten years of age under one roof. It was not much of a childhood but it was better than no childhood.
His father was a diesel mechanic from Ruatoria, a town renowned for its diesel mechanics. Every man, woman, and child in the town was a diesel mechanic.
He spent years underneath lorries, poking away at chassis with a spanner and rusty screwdriver to his heart’s content. But his heart was not content. He started work in a pair of blue overalls with small black oil stains on them but, by the end of each day, they were a pair of black overalls w
ith small blue stains.
His father was a strong man. He did not last long. His mother was not much longer for this world. And with his inheritance the diesel mechanic went to a pawn shop and bought a beat-up guitar after beating the proprietor down to fifteen dollars (with a spare high-E string).
He began learning the guitar in the evenings. He did not have a teacher but learnt what the guitar taught him. Then he started playing in the early mornings and lunch breaks. Until eventually being a diesel mechanic was squeezed out and he found himself living in Madrid studying Spanish guitar with Paco Pena—this diesel mechanic from Ruatoria, his hands racing (like fierce horses up a mountain pass) up the neck of the guitar.
As it happened, the guitar the diesel mechanic bought from Ruatoria Traders was a distant relative of Paco Pena’s guitar and had spent most of its life among inspired melodies in Toledo. No one knew how it ended up in Ruatoria, just the same as no one knew how the diesel mechanic found himself one morning in Spain. Where ten years of study passed like a breath of inspiration. Every time, in Madrid, he played ‘Andalucia’ by Lecuona, his smallest sister, in Ruatoria, would cry.
Returning to New Zealand, he busked for a season outside a Self Help Store to amass wealth around him in the form of lettuces and old shoes tossed into his guitar-case. By this time a wife and family had gathered themselves to him and he was forced to become a diesel mechanic again.
At this point in his life, things started to go a little strange. While working under lorries, their sump oil dripping into his eyes, he began to attain understanding of the world. His guitar playing and his being a diesel mechanic began to merge. It was as if Lecuona had written a score for a dismantled truck. He began to feel weightless and discovered that between his hands rushing up the guitar neck and some fierce horses galloping up a mountain pass, there lay the answer to the question all these things are. Somewhere between sump oil and pure water.
He is weightless and can float off the ground in the tradition of the best, most accomplished mystics. But he is also an ideal father and, accordingly, his wife and children accompany him skywards on these excursions.
I hear he loves his wife. And if there is anything he is married to more than any other thing about her, it is the way her eyebrows move up and down—an orchestra of violin bows in unison—depending upon the wind. Or just depending.
I have never met this man but I have heard about him. One day my dreams of him will rush to meet him.
(1989)
Elizabeth Knox, from The Vintner’s Luck
Aurora returned to the neighbourhood five days later. She stopped first at Clos Jodeau to restore Agnès to her family, and was told that Sobran was away. She had begun to miss him. Her wrath and grief had run their course. But Sobran was in Autun, not handy to her softened attitude.
The day after her return Aurora decided that, in his absence, she might go and see what Sobran had done with the soldiers’ gallery.
Mid-morning she made her way from the château’s new (hundred-year-old) west wing, where she lived, past the ancient keep and old ‘new’ wing (it had been called ‘new’ for two hundred years, till the newer new was built) to the sprawl of outbuildings devoted to livestock (the cuverie and cellars were all in the west). These comprised a dovecot, kennel, dairy, stable, saddlery, tack room, grooms’ quarters, coach house and the rooms above these last that had housed Vully’s cavalrymen until the old Comte gave the remainder of them, and funds for their commissions, to the Emperor Napoléon.
As she walked, looking about her to see if she was watched, Aurora could hear the mother superior of her convent education holding forth on the curiosity and cupidity of ‘the daughters of Eve’. Aurora replied to the remembered voice that it was better she took an interest in her friend’s affairs than forgot him entirely and failed to forgive him.
In the heat the gravel of the walk seemed to swarm, as if each stone was hatching.
At the perimeter of the kitchen garden nearest the stables Aurora found that the vegetables had all wilted, almost melted, as though someone had watered them with boiling water. She would look into the matter later. She opened the gate, crossed the yard, then noticed a cat stretched out in the shadow of a horse-trough. She went closer, believing it dead. It lifted its head and looked at her then, exhausted, lay flat again. The cat had one kitten, Aurora saw, perhaps two weeks old, eyes already open, its tail a fluffy wedge. The kitten was asleep with its mouth to a nipple. Aurora recognised the cat as Léon’s, knew Sobran had kept it at Vully since his brother’s death. She squatted to pet the cat, then went on towards the coach house—and walked into a drift of leaves, neither yellow nor brown, but a parched green. Aurora looked up at the trees, their thinning crowns. The withered foliage and vegetables together were too oddly alike. Aurora looked about her, at weeds and moss in the shady crooks of the stone walls—all were limp and dull.
She hurried into the gloomy interior of the coach house, found the stone staircase up to the soldiers’ gallery, then stopped with her foot on the first stair. Three kittens, two tortoiseshell like their mother and one black, lay huddled and still at the bottom of the stairs. The small peaks of fur on the backs of the necks of each showed where their mother had held them in her mouth to carry them downstairs and out of danger. All three were dead.
Aurora ran up the stairs. The door was barred. She was thinking of poison. She hammered on the door and called out, ‘Sobran!’ Then, remembering the wilted garden and trees, she stopped her hammering. For what kind of poison killed both plants and animals?
She put her ear to the door. Heard nothing but, after a moment, felt the door quiver as the bolt was drawn. When she pushed, the door gave.
Sobran stood several feet away, clothed but barefoot, his jaw dark with stubble.
Aurora stepped into the room, seized her friend’s hands and took stock of him. Sobran’s skin was yellowish, his eyes circled, and his breath rank—the wild onion smell of self-starvation. She looked around him and noticed first that the light shining through the open double doors, and whitely on the old oak floor, showed up a litter of—at first she thought—leaves. She saw that it was the bodies of insects—cicadas and bees, flies and moths. In the breeze that blew through the room and swept a clear, swerving path from the window to the hearth, the insect bodies tumbled and hissed.
It was the angel, on the bed, the cause of all the death and depletion. Aurora understood immediately.
She went closer to the bed to get a better look.
He was as beautiful as daylight. His beauty was somehow legitimate; it made the many human lovelinesses Aurora had seen seem like tricks of the light. The angel was as strong as daylight too—inexorable—the sun that drains silks of their lustre.
She asked, ‘How long has he been like this?’
Sobran took his time answering and spoke like one who hadn’t expected ever to use his voice again. ‘He bled to death.’
‘How long ago?’
‘A week.’
Aurora looked at her friend. ‘I don’t know that he’s dead, Sobran.’
‘I saw him die. But he won’t decay.’ Sobran sounded exultant and horrified at once.
Aurora took a step nearer the bed. ‘Everything is dying. I think because he isn’t dead.’ She mustered her courage, put out a finger and touched the angel’s smooth shoulder. ‘He’s still warm.’
‘I’ve been holding him.’
Aurora didn’t try to disguise her fear, or any other feeling. ‘You must not any more, my dear, I think it will kill you to stay here.’
She darted at Sobran, caught him by the shoulders—for he had moved towards the bed—and held him back. ‘Please, Sobran, tell me. Or don’t tell me—everything or nothing—I don’t care. Just come out of here with me. He isn’t dead—he’s deadly—Léon’s cat carried her litter out, too late, and there are three dead kittens at the foot of the stairs. He is killing everything near him. He is killing you!’ She put her hands on his cheeks, rough slack skin, and
turned his face down to her—but his gaze stayed on the angel.
For a moment she thought of hanging on his neck, considered tears, but she saw how he looked mad, or resolved, or both, and simply let him go.
Sobran returned to the bed, lay down and embraced the angel.
Aurora stood over them for perhaps half an hour and emptied out her store of intimacies. She talked about her illness, how fear of it made her flirt with death. She spoke about the morning she walked into the river, sought death without ever experiencing despair. She knew despair when she saw it—but Sobran should remember his loving family, and what Léon’s suicide had done to them when Léon was nowhere near as loved and necessary as he.
She put her trembling fingertips into his hair, ran its glassy white strands through her hand. She touched his forearm, stroked its pelt of sun-bleached brassy hair. Although she didn’t respect his desire to be on his deathbed, Aurora couldn’t bring herself to rouse Sobran by repeating what Céleste had told her at the spa. It would only sound like malice. Yet Sobran seemed beyond provocation, didn’t look at her or seem to hear her. After a time Aurora stopped speaking and simply regarded them, her friend and that being—who, to preserve its toxic beauty, was using the vitality of others.
Then Aurora thought of a course of action.
The Baroness went to find her shepherd. She went out in her barouche to the sheepfold and came back with two ewes trussed by her feet. She had her footmen fit each with a collar and leash—asked very blithely for a few nannies and kids—oh, and could they please be washed? Let them think she was playing at shepherdess, as Marie Antoinette and the ladies of her court had.
The Auckland University Press Anthology of New Zealand Literature Page 117