by Josie Dew
‘The motorcamp down the road,’ he said.
‘I mean what country are you from?’ asked the woman.
‘Why d’yer wanna know that for, lady?’ he asked.
‘Because we’re doing a survey,’ replied the woman politely.
‘What d’yer do with the survey?’
‘We’re not sure yet. We’re just accumulating data.’
‘So why d’yer wanna know where I’m from?’
‘Knowing where our visitors are from is of great interest to us.’
‘Well, I sure think it would be a good idea to work out what you’re gonna do with the data before you trouble your visitors for the information.’
This uneasy exchange went on for a few more moments. I thought the woman, who was beginning to look more and more harried, was about to call for security. Instead she took a deep breath before attempting one more time to ask which country her difficult customer was from.
‘Jeez! I’m from the USA, ma’am. So, are you gonna sell me a ticket or arrest me?’
Outside in the museum grounds stood Matakohe’s simple ‘pioneer school’ – a one-room wooden building built in 1889, full of old wooden desks and a blackboard on the wall at the front. The room was barred off, but in the entrance hung a framed list of ‘RULES FOR TEACHERS – 1915’, which sounded more like punishment before you’d even started:
1. You will not marry during the term of your contract.
2. You are NOT to keep company with men.
3. You MUST be home between the hours of 8 p.m. and 6 a.m. unless attending a school function.
4. You MAY NOT loiter downtown in icecream stores.
5. You MAY NOT travel beyond the city limits without the permission of the chairman of the board.
6. You MAY NOT ride in a carriage or automobile with any man unless he is your father or brother.
7. You MAY NOT smoke cigarettes.
8. You may not dress in bright colours.
9. You may UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES dye your hair.
10. You must wear AT LEAST two petticoats.
11. Your dresses must NOT be any shorter than two inches above the ankle.
12. To keep the schoolroom clean you must:
• Sweep the floor at least once daily
• Scrub the floor with hot soapy water, at least once a week
• Clean the blackboard at least once a day
• Start the fire at 7 a.m. so that the room will be warm by 8 a.m.
Talking of schools and length of dresses, I spotted a small piece in the New Zealand Herald headlined: ‘SKIRTING DISASTER’. It was all about a school back home, Kesgrave High, near Ipswich, which had banned girls from wearing skirts and ordered them to switch to uniforms with long trousers. Two years ago the school had asked parents to ensure that their girls’ skirts were just above the knee. But it seems that since that time the hemlines had crept up to ‘inappropriate’ levels. ‘We simply do not want our girls going outside with a “come-hither look”,’ said the governor, Margaret Young. The school had 1600 pupils, a large number of whom cycled in every day. This was apparently upsetting Madge because she said that the short skirts looked ‘dreadful’ on girls who cycled.
All this reminded me of the hoo-ha that occurred back in my own school days. The direct route to school was a return cycle of twenty miles. Because I was keen on cycling, I would often go the indirect route to boost my daily mileage to nearly half a century – as I believe they call it in the trade. Trouble was, I was the only pupil who cycled to school and the school didn’t take kindly to this. They thought it was unladylike behaviour, especially as I refused to wear the school uniform skirt while cycling. But then I like to think I had a point: short skirts are not the most practical kit to be sporting on a bike, particularly on icy winter mornings when plummeting down 1:4 hills – a procedure that would turn my legs purple with cold from ankle to upper thigh. So I wore my elder brother’s ripped jeans instead. And because I wasn’t arriving at school in school uniform I was punished. So I began to cycle almost all the way to school in jeans, and then at the last moment would leap over a wooden five-bar gate into a nearby field and change into my skirt behind a hedge. All went well for a while until, apparently, one of the male teachers spotted me doing this (what, I’d like to ask, was he doing peeping at me anyway?) so I was punished again. Didn’t stop me from cycling, though.
Dargaville, 29 June
Oh no! What’s this? Not more capitals! This one is Dargaville, ‘Kumara Capital of the World’. Dargaville was once a thriving kauri timber port, reached after a difficult journey across the treacherous Kaipara Bar and 64 km up the winding and strongly tidal Wairoa River. Today the kumara (a sweet potato) is grown extensively in the area. The Maori have always had a soft spot for kumara, being a staple Polynesian food. It was brought to New Zealand by the migratory canoes of the Maori from their Polynesian home, Hawaiki. In bygone days, they used to eat it raw but, according to Maori legend, when Rongo-maui (who seems to have been an early day type of TV chef) returned from the heavens and informed all his viewers (so to speak) about the joys of cooking, he instructed that kumara should be baked in underground ovens, otherwise ‘men would have lived like birds, insects, animals and other tribes of people who eat their food raw’.
Kumara weren’t only cooked underground. They were also baked in the embers of the fire, steeped in seawater or dried in the sun, or stone boiled in a huahua – whereby food was cooked by dropping hot stones into containers holding the food and water. Cooked kumara were served in flax (phormium) baskets with garnishings on top of dried shark, boiled fish or any savoury morsels that could be rustled up. The whole kumara plant, roots and all, was boiled in a gourd and the liquid was applied to pimples and skin eruptions, or drunk to assist feverish conditions.
*
I’m almost feeling a need to get my hands on a gourd myself and feeding the boiled kumara liquid to Gary, who is on his sick bed suffering from feverish conditions. I think it may be an allergy to cycling. It’s come as a bit of a bitter blow to me to discover he’s not as keen as me on cycling almost continually uphill through almost continuous rain. Heaven knows why. I find it quite a splendid pastime, myself. Especially when you haven’t got anything better to be doing with yourself.
That’s why tonight is going to be our fifth night in Dargarville: to try to get Gary into some sort of functioning order again. I must admit that Gary being ill is really quite amusing. You know what men are – a simple cold becomes man flu, and man flu becomes a terminal death-bed scenario. I’ve been acting as Florence Nightingdew to my patient, mopping his brow with a cool cloth while he mumbles away deliriously.
Last night I said with urgent tone, ‘Do you think you’ll survive until morning?’
‘Only if the good Lord permits my passage through the night!’ groaned Gary, with such dramatic effect that I couldn’t stop laughing for the next half an hour. In fact, Lords permitting passages through the night have now become a holiday stock phrase along with ‘Good as’, ‘Sweet as’ and ‘Yiis! Fin-tis-tic!’
For the last few nights the sanatorium (soon morgue) has been an old insulated railway goods wagon that a century ago was used for transporting meat, fruit and dairy products. The owner of the grand-sounding Dargarville Holiday Park (for which read ‘car park in the middle of town in midst of mass building construction’) has a thing for old goods wagons and, by cramming inside them a couple of bunk beds and a micro toilet and shower, has converted them into liveable cabins. Saying that, we’ve been doing most of our living (or in Gary’s case, semi-living) on the wooden veranda that juts out in front of the wagon. Our vista is quite marvellous: along with a busy side street lined with warehouses and auto-shops, we look out on to the rears of two beaten-up flat-bed trucks belonging to the Maori road-building team dwelling in the wagon opposite.
Dargaville has long been known as a cow-town and is now trying hard to shake off that image. But I think it could have a battle on its hands;
it’s a mostly remarkably unremarkable service town for the region’s farmers. Dargarville’s saving grace is the wide Wairoa (‘when you can take the bridge’) River. Even the local radio station is called Big River FM (radio catchphrase: ‘From the banks of the River to the mouth of the Big Stuff’).
My patient and I have spent many hours sitting on a bench by the riverbank watching small private planes heading inland up river only to crash into a nearby hillside. At least, that’s what it looks like they are all doing from where we are sitting. Our exaggerated intakes of breaths and urgent rising to feet, coupled with a desperate smack of hand to the forehead, whenever we spot another potential air disaster has drawn quite a crowd of onlookers. We manage to fool them for a while before they wander away looking rather baffled. It’s all most amusing.
Here’s a selection of Dargarville’s main street shops: Just Jewellery; Molly’s Fashions with Peter Rabbit Children’s Wear; Lynleys Lingerie and Linen; Mags n’ More; Dargaville Sports Hunting and Fishing – which, I might add, has ‘HUNTING SEASON’ painted in large letters across the front window. Beneath this, written in bright eye-catching paint, are this hunting season’s offers: ESCORT AUTOS $799; 5 SHOT PUMP GUNS $499; DECOYS $79.95; AMMO $99. At first I thought they were advertising old Ford Escorts for sale and was about to suggest to Gary that maybe he could buy it – would save all this messing around on bikes in the rain business – when I realised the Escort Auto was actually a ferocious killing machine. Which on reflection, I suppose is not that much different than a car. Anyway, it was in Mags ’n’ More that Gary picked up a magazine called Outdoor. On first glimpse, I presumed it was a sort of travel–tramping–camping mag – the ‘mag’ I refer to here being of course the magazine of a periodic paperback publication containing topical articles etc. nature, and not the metal case holding several cartridges used in some automatic firearms. But then I saw that under the title it said, ‘NUMBER 1 FOR BIG GAME HUNTING’, and tried to woo potential buyers by advertising across the cover: ‘WIN YOURSELF A REMINGTON MODEL SEVEN SHORT ACTION 7MM ULTRA MAG’. Inside was a double-page spread devoted to children hooked on hunting. Beneath the title ‘KILWELL KIDS PHOTO MIX’ (I’m not sure whether this is a take on kids killing well or whether there is an actual place called Kilwell) were rows of photos of children, one as young as four, triumphantly holding aloft a rifle in one hand and the severed head of a boar or pig or goat or deer in the other. They looked like mini Rambos, dressed in combat camouflage and grinning with a murderous look of evil triumph in their eyes. All quite scary. Don’t they have Sindy Dolls around these parts?
In the shoot-to-kill Outdoor magazine there was also plenty about ‘Bow Hunting’. Looked quite savage. Think I’m going to invest in a flak jacket before I next venture into the bush for a pee behind a ponga fern. And I’ll keep my cycling helmet on for good measure. All in the name of life preservation. Anyway, I certainly feel for any four-legged creatures up here in this neck of the woods. They don’t stand a chance. Not when the Kiwi hunter’s motto is: ‘If it’s brown, it’s down.’ Just this morning I saw a ute (the Kiwi name for a ‘utility vehicle’ or pick-up) with a bumper sticker that said, ‘DON’T BE A BOAR: GO SHOOT A PIG’.
The benefit of all this rain has been a surplus of rainbows – whole ones, fat ones, double-decker ones. And if you want a rainbow, you’ve got to put up with the rain, as I believe Dolly Parton once put it. When it’s been raining too hard to sit beside the river watching planes crash and causing general crowd chaos, we’ve planted ourselves in the Blah, Blah, Blah Cafe and Bar where my sickly patient has worked hard at taking his medication – copious quantities of grandé mocha coffee and vast slabs of chocolate and passion-fruit cheesecake. It was over one such Blah, Blah, Blah session that Gary told me his granddad used to weigh crisp packets and if they were underweight he sent them off with a letter of complaint to the manufacturers, who in return sent him a boxful back. The things you learn when you sit around convalescing.
Kaihu, 30 June
Every morning at 7 a.m. on the noddle, we’ve been awoken by the shattering alarm of an air raid siren. This was not the Third World War breaking out but the Dargaville fire brigade. Our goods wagon motorcamp owner man said that for years the fire brigade had tested their alarms at 7 a.m. without fail. But when the firemen were issued with pagers they put a stop to the practice. The silent mornings didn’t last long, though. There was a public outcry by local residents complaining that they used the siren as an alarm to leap out of bed and that when it stopped they were subsequently late for work. So the fire brigade restarted the daily wailings and everyone was happy again.
I forgot to tell you that when cycling to Dargaville a few days ago, we passed a high fenced-off area with a sign stuck on the front saying ‘GOLDEN MILE OSTRICH FARM’. Funny ostriches, if you ask me, because this variety came with coats of fluffy white wool and four legs. There’s been no sign of any ostreep this morning, but in the little cafe at Kaihu I did spot an advert in the window saying:
INDIAN OR TAMWORTH BOER WANTED FOR MATING FOR RENT OR WILL BUY
I thought that sort of thing was supposed to be illegal these days. But then I suppose we are out in the sticks where you can probably get away with anything once tucked out of sight behind a thicket of mamaku ferns.
Have I mentioned the rain in New Zealand yet? Well, this morning it swept up from the sea, covering the whole land in its methodical advance. I don’t mind torrential rain because once I’ve got acclimatised to its ridiculous ferocity it can be quite stupidly fun. But not only was this rain torrential, it was also numbingly cold. And although this quiet (save for the odd logging, aggregate and cattle trucks) road had its hilly moments, it wasn’t hilly enough to get any internal core temperatures hot enough to warm up the frozen extremities. Sometimes the rain enhances the countryside far more than the sun, and up here the greenness of the land and the dripping woods and filigrees of mist suspended over the hills was startlingly beautiful. Being winter, many of the trees are bare now, clawing grey-fingered at cold wet winds.
During our aqueous ride we came across Kaihu Farm Hostel, stuck out in the middle of nowhere. It advertised itself as ‘perfect for cyclists’. The hostel, maybe, but not the hill that led down to it, which was as steep as a mineshaft. I’m not looking forward to the ride out in the morning.
So here we are now, in the hostel, trying to dry out. Appropriately there’s an anonymous poem stuck to the wall in the kitchen that says:
It rained and rained
The average fall was well maintained
And when the tracks were simply bogs
It started raining cats and dogs
After a drought of half an hour
We had a most refreshing shower
And then the most curious thing of all
A gentle rain began to fall
Next day also was fairly dry
Save from a deluge from the sky
Which wetted the party to the skin
And after that the rain set in.
Omapere, 30 June
I was nearly mown down by an excitable herd of stampeding cattle today. They came en masse, hurtling down the road towards me with cow-dogs and farmers on quads and trail bikes in hot pursuit. I think they were making a break for freedom.
The weather has been wild and wet for most of the day. On exposed ridges and hills the punching wind slammed into us with such force that it was impossible to cycle without being thrown off the road or under the wheels of a logging truck. Even pushing the bike along the road at a forty-five degree angle took immense effort because of the thumping wind gusts smashing into us from the side. At one point I was blown clean over like a pack of cards, my heavy body-squashing bike landing squarely on top of me.
Despite the weather, Waipoua ( Maori for ‘water that comes from night rain’) Kauri Forest was wonderful. Dense dripping bush as green and impenetrable as a jungle enveloped the quiet and narrow twisting hilly road. On several occasions we stopped to walk i
nto the kauri forest and stand insignificantly beneath the likes of the mighty Tane Mahuta and Te Matua Ngahere, or what the Maori call the Lord of the Forest and the Father of the Forest. These vast, ancient, serene entities – Tane Mahuta is the country’s largest living kauri with a height of 51 metres (168 feet) and a girth of 14 metres (46 feet), its first branch is 12 metres (39 feet) off the ground – have been on earth almost as long as Christianity and were mature well before the first humans arrived in New Zealand.
Among the kauri forests lives the kauri snail, a type of large carnivorous snail that can make short work of worms – sucking them in like a strand of spaghetti. Kauri snails are found only in New Zealand (but with relatives in Tasmania and Victoria) and their shell is a dark green flattened spiral around 8–10 cm in diameter. These snails, which can live for up to forty years and have the ability to climb kauri trees and travel hundreds of metres while foraging for worms at night, have phenomenal radulae – rasp-like structures of tiny teeth used for scraping food particles off a surface and drawing them into the mouth. Each radula comprises between 150 and 200 rows of teeth, with up to 700 teeth per row. The teeth at the front are worn down or dislodged at a rate of three to five rows per day. The whole radula moves around, bringing fresh teeth into play while replacements are formed at the back. This, in effect, makes kauri snails like the slow-moving chainsaws of the forest.