Civilisation

by Steve Braunias

  To Emily and Minka

  Hicks Bay

  A Brief History of Meat

  There was an old man who lived at the edge of the world. ‘When I look back on my life,’ Lance Roberts said, ‘I’ve done a lot of killing.’

  I met him at his monstrous house. Someone had once written that they heard screams and bleats there on still nights. Outside, the long horizontal line of the blue Pacific looked sharp as a knife. The blade flashed in the bright sun. It cut the sky in half.

  ‘Good on you, boy,’ Lance said with real enthusiasm whenever I did something as incredible as pass the sugar. There were bones in the ashes of his woodstove. He lit the stove with chainsaw shavings and put on the kettle. It was late summer.

  Small, nimble, in gumboots and an oily jersey, he had approximately one yellow tooth left in his old bristled head, and his voice croaked from a swamp inside his throat. He was about to turn 85. When I first saw him he was sitting outside at the top of his wooden staircase and something like ten or eleven cats had formed an orderly queue to take food from his mouth. His hands were black. So was his neck. It was moot when he had last changed his clothes or showered, but Lance didn’t live in civilisation. The deserted shoreline, driftwood tipping out of the surf – you could buy a car for an ounce of dope in the East Coast village of Hicks Bay, where Lance lived in a kind of converted loft.

  Hicks Bay was a long line of sand beneath high green hills. It had a shop. Across the road there was a bus shelter and a stack of firewood. It had a road. There was a sign in front of a house that read NO TURNING ON THE FUCKING LAWN. Two other words had been painted over. ‘They were a lot worse,’ said the woman who lived next door. There was a two-litre plastic bottle filled with water on top of a fence post at the cemetery for visitors to wash their hands.

  A river beat a path through gorse and shingle; Lance’s peculiar home was on the other side of the riverbank. He boiled the kettle and recited terrible verse. ‘The clock of life is wound but once,’ he said. He’d committed the poem to memory. ‘And no man has the power to say just when the hands will stop.’

  The old and almost toothless head, the cup of tea and plate of Cameo Cremes – he wept when he talked about how his father had found relief work building a railroad in the Great Depression and secretly opened up a Post Office savings bank account in Lance’s name. ‘I always think of the past,’ he said. ‘As far back as I can remember my mother used to carry me on her back in her shawl. She’d go out looking for pūhā and watercress, and when she’d bend over to pick up this stuff I was that fearful of falling out of the shawl I used to cry me bloody head off.’

  And then he said, ‘I was about six when she died. I’m not too sure what happened. I think she ended up with pleurisy or something. She was always looking for mussels in cold bloody weather: that’s probably what done for her. Yeah.’

  The warmth of the fire, the gummy voice – he had a high yapping laugh and a big cut on the back of his head. He didn’t know how it’d got there. He searched a drawer for one of his most prized possessions, his knife. It had a wooden handle. The blade was sharp and clean. It looked good in his grip, the way it rested in his palm. I tried to imagine him using it. Later that afternoon, a man in a caravan would give him the opportunity.

  I went to Hicks Bay because no one went there. For three years, whenever I could, I went to places no one went to, drawn to their averageness, their nothingness, their banal and exhilarating New Zealandness. I went to the damp Wellington town of Wainuiomata, to the vigilant Otago town of Mosgiel, to Mercer, Greymouth, Collingwood and Tangimoana, to 20 places: small towns, unremarkable suburbs, frozen bases and equatorial outposts, in the country, in the cities, out of the country altogether, wherever there was any sign of New Zealand civilisation.

  I chose them at random. I’d look at a map and say out loud, ‘There.’ People said, ‘Where?’ The next question they asked was, ‘Why?’ They especially asked that in the places themselves. They couldn’t believe anyone would find where they lived of any interest.

  But I wanted to go and live in just about every one. I adored the qualities of silence, the sunlight on fence posts, the sound of river water on rock. I wanted to belong, to be part of the established order of the town clock and the menswear store, the main street deserted by six p.m., the cat curled up on the windowsill.

  I arrived without any exact purpose. I spoke to anyone who had the time. I asked about their everyday life and took note of everyday objects. I craved the normal but I seemed to spend a lot of time visiting people living in abodes as weird as caves. They were sometimes damaged people, often solitary, always resourceful. They hung on in there.

  New Zealand did the same. The country was broke. It drank at home and read Dan Brown. Its bum looked big: McDonald’s registered record sales. It filled the supermarket trolley with Home Brand and Pam’s. It bought Christmas presents at the $2 Shop, and put up the same signs over and over: SPACE TO LEASE; EVERYTHING MUST GO; WINZ QUOTES. There was a change of government and nothing changed. Ordinary people living in ordinary homes, bringing up the kids and bringing in the washing, getting on with the uncelebrated business of being New Zealanders in an economic slump.

  The recession haunted every place I went, even the end of the world – Scott Base, Antarctica. One day I saw a week-old copy of The Press lying on a table in the games room. The front-page headline read MORE JOBS TO GO.

  More jobs did go. That was very often decided in a head office across the Tasman; it was as though Australia had foreclosed on New Zealand. Australia, always Australia, constant and flush with confidence, wealth, warmer temperatures. New Zealanders left in their droves for an apparently better life – higher wages, less self-loathing. The two most important statistics in New Zealand life became the number of people who left for Australia every month, and the holiday road toll.

  For three years New Zealand toughed it out, switching off the lights to save power, waiting for better times. It sometimes felt as though it had gone missing. In limbo, it stuck its head in, passed the Home Brand salt and watched Fair Go. It said, ‘Whatevs.’

  The age of austerity suited the country, with its cherished notions of modesty and endurance. Author Jonathan Raban has written of his homeland: ‘Like all small islands, England has got into the singular habit of thinking itself enormous, continental.’ Not all small islands: New Zealand thinks itself smaller than it is, a buried treasure, X marks the spot. It constantly talks of being put on the map, as though waiting to be discovered and rediscovered.

  It constantly talks about itself. Oliver Duff, in his 1941 book New Zealand Now: ‘A land lying so far from the controlling centres of the world that no one but its own people take it seriously.’ Austin Mitchell, in his 1972 book The Half-Gallon Quarter-Acre Pavlova Paradise: ‘As a country, New Zealand has one major preoccupation: New Zealand.’

  The ancient studies have set the tone, created the foundation myth of New Zealanders as conformist, afraid of something, defensive and belligerent. ‘A queer, lost, eccentric people,’ John Mulgan wrote in his 1947 essay ‘Report on Experience’. Bill Pearson in his 1952 essay ‘Fretful Sleepers’ wondered ‘if it isn’t death the New Zealander waits for’. And: ‘Who is he trying to fool, to reassure,’ American visitor Robin Winks asked in his 1954 book These New Zealanders, ‘with his band-beating and horn-tooting?’

  Civic pride is easily offended. National pride is at stake every minute of the day. Personal reputations can be destroyed in a trice. In 2011 prime minister John Key gave this chilling assessment: ‘Everyone is accountable for everything they say.’ Someone is always listening, waiting for the chance to purse their lips in disapproval.

  Anything else? Yes. We drink too much, drive too fast, and let mad dogs off the leash.
Our national pastimes are golf, drowning, and child abuse. Also, we moan and bitch and complain about everything. Poor old New Zealand, driven mad by the voices in its head.

  I hit the road for those three years to get away from it all. I kept finding deep signs of happiness. Everyday life rose above the recession and the claims made for New Zealand’s apparent despair. As I wandered from no place special to no other place special I kept seeing an explicit New Zealand contentment, at lakeside and riverside, in the middle of arid plains, in the middle of polluted suburbs, in an ingeniously converted slaughterhouse loft.

  Lance used to work as a slaughterman at the freezing works along the coast at Tokomaru Bay. They issued him with three knives. One he later gave to a mate and never got back. Another he lost in a river. The knife he kept was as valuable as a historical document.

  A brief history of meat: One of the most profound dates in New Zealand civilisation is February 15, 1882, when a maiden voyage of frozen meat left Port Chalmers in Dunedin for England. The inventory included 2,226 sheep tongues – if only those tongues could talk. England soon clamoured for the various cuts of chop, brisket, rib and liver, leading to an industrial revolution in the new colony. By the time the freezing works at Hicks Bay opened in 1921, there were already four other massive slaughterhouses operating in Poverty Bay. Meat was red gold, a recipe for success, a major new export commodity in addition to wool and grain.

  ‘The new option radically changed the nature of farming in New Zealand,’ wrote historian Michael King. ‘Previously sheep farmers had been forced to slaughter animals – sometimes by simply driving them over cliffs. Now they could raise sheep for meat and wool … [It] would deliver to New Zealanders one of the highest living standards in the world.’

  Lance Roberts, 85 and fangy, survived as one of the architects of New Zealand. He was fifteen in 1941 when Oliver Duff wrote, ‘Have we a New Zealander? Is there one among us so typical of all that New Zealand comes and goes with him?’ Lance worked as a cowboy, station hand, fencer, farmer, shearer, killer. ‘I enjoyed it all. I was a fit bugger. I used to say to the young guys, “If I put my heart in your frame, it’d rattle it to pieces.”’ At Tokomaru Bay, slaughtermen had to account for 84 big sheep or 96 lambs in under seven and a half hours. What you needed to do, Lance explained, was kill with both hands.

  He looked back with pride on his 85 years. He’d broken the land, married three times, mastered the art of walking upright in New Zealand. He was its two races, its mixed blood. He said, ‘I’m not a full Pākehā, not a full Māori either. I’m a bit of each. That’s the best way to be.’

  His first horse was a chestnut pacer called Socks. He saw the great Australian aviator Charles Kingsford-Smith land his Southern Cross on the beach at Gisborne on a summer’s day in 1933 – he was across the road in a kind of orphanage, where he’d been placed after his mother died. His family of two sisters and two brothers were split up. His father taught him how to use explosives. Other men taught him plumbing, killing, shearing. ‘They were real good men. They looked after me.’ He wept at the memory, and said he thought about them in his bed every night.

  The past, mobilising in the dark, tapping his shoulder as he lay in bed – what was that about three wives? ‘I played up,’ he said. ‘If I couldn’t jump over the fence I’d crawl under it.’ There were dusty old black and white photos of him on the walls; he’d been a strapping young guy, with a barrel chest and a wide face. One big paw usually held an axe while the other curled around the shoulders of various lascivious broad-hipped women. I asked how many children he had. ‘I haven’t chased them through the gate to tally them,’ he said. ‘Oh hell, let me think. One, two, three … oooh hell … eight, nine…’ He wasn’t sure, but he thought there were fourteen.

  Memories of pūhā and watercress, women and children – his life was passing before him. It was a good life. He knew the East Coast like a room, knew its valleys and skies, knew how many miles of fence lines he’d dug with his bulldozer, how many sheep he’d sheared on the board. He knew who he was. He knew his facts. But it was news to him when I told him he occupied a unique place in New Zealand fiction. He lived in the ruins of the Hicks Bay freezing works, the setting of David Ballantyne’s 1968 novel Sydney Bridge Upside Down, a masterpiece right from its opening sentence: ‘There was an old man who lived on the edge of the world…’

  Travelling south on State Highway 35 on a Friday in late summer was lovely and empty, full of sea and sun. There was a chestnut mare in the playground of an abandoned school, a black bull in the shade of the only tree for miles, road signs advising WANDERING STOCK PHONE 0800 444449. A tattooed Māori man and his blonde 17-year-old girlfriend, who wore cut-off shorts and red nail polish, prepared to head for the hills, where they cultivated a dope plantation. Yellow cornfields peeled in the heat. Washing hung over fences.

  In Hicks Bay no one was around, except for a girl smoking in the doorway of the store. Pears from an overhanging tree lay scattered in long grass and wasps crawled inside the white mushy flesh. ‘I haven’t been there since 1978, when Dad & Mum & my little son drove down to Wgtn via Dad’s landmarks in my car,’ Stephen Ballantyne wrote to me. ‘Dad showed us the shack where he lived. Looked like a big chicken coop.’

  His dad David spent five years of his childhood in Hicks Bay, which he renamed and reimagined in Sydney Bridge Upside Down as Calliope Bay. It’s the only place name in the book: one of the small, crucial achievements of the novel is that there’s absolutely no reference to New Zealand. His book is set free, rids itself of New Zealand, and travels only in the mind of its protagonist, schoolboy Harry Baird, who tells of what happened at Calliope Bay one particular summer.

  Another narrative of Hicks Bay is played out in the Papers Past archive, which records that the two most important subjects in the town’s history are death and meat. Newspaper report, August 12, 1897: ‘A Māori woman named Kamiera committed suicide at Hicks Bay by hanging herself to a tree.’ July 23, 1921: ‘J Lamb, aged 60, whilst working at Hicks Bay, met with a fatal accident, a large boulder rolling on him.’ Headline, December 16, 1919: PROPOSED FREEZING WORKS AT HICKS BAY. August 27, 1920: ‘Considerable damage was caused to the construction of the Hicks Bay freezing works when a fierce hurricane lasting over an hour was experienced at midnight.’ October 14, 1921: ‘The first shipment of meat from the new freezing works at Hicks Bay is being made by the steamer Kumara.’

  All that red gold shining in the refrigerated holds, five slaughterhouses, an industrial revolution on the shores of the Pacific – all that promise and wealth to be delivered by meat. But the golden age was brief. Sheridan Gundry chronicles the rise and fall in Making a Killing: A history of the Gisborne–East Coast freezing works industry. She writes of the excitement and optimism as money was raised for the Hicks Bay meatworks; the problems with building a suitable wharf – the first attempt was battered by heavy seas and the pilings collapsed; the great Māori leader Āpirana Ngata naming the new wharf Hinemaurea after a great ancestress. The wharf had tram tracks, a locomotive. In the spirit of the times when New Zealanders gathered to celebrate the opening of an eyelid, it was opened ‘amid fanfare’ on April 14, 1925.

  The meatworks closed down the next year. The business was no longer feasible and perhaps never really had been. Access to Hicks Bay was difficult, and the price for New Zealand meat had begun to plummet in 1921, the year the works opened. As Lance put it, ‘The guts fell out of it.’

  The building was stripped of machinery, fittings, even the roof. It was already a ruin when David Ballantyne came to live in its shadow. The long summers of childhood, the crash of the ocean, the secret caves, the thrill and menace of the roofless crumbling meatworks – something took hold in his imagination, and was still there when he set to work on Sydney Bridge Upside Down, which he began writing in 1966 when he returned to New Zealand after working as a journalist in London.

  Ballantyne was a drunk – the first thing he did when he got back to New Zealand was go on
the piss – but he was also, for a time, in possession of genius. His friend Bryan Reid writes in his sympathetic biography After the Fireworks: ‘He was not yet so gripped by alcohol that his talent was impaired. … As he banged away on the typewriter, [his wife] Vivien could actually hear her husband singing at his work. He would have known he was producing something special.’

  Singing! Ballantyne himself said of Sydney Bridge Upside Down: ‘It was meant as a Gothic joke.’ Whatever that means. It’s a creepy, brooding, harrowing book, full of screams and scones, threat and sex. ‘Not a single thing in the novel is original,’ Patrick Evans marvels in The Penguin History of New Zealand Literature. ‘Least original of all is the novel’s sad, last-childhood-of-summer feeling, whose lamenting note sounds through so much New Zealand writing – but in Ballantyne’s hands everything is new and intense, made over as if being explored for the very first time.’

  It’s a summer of sensual childish delight – the passionfruit vines choking everything in their path, the pots of rich sticky plum jam, the precious bottles of home-made ginger beer. Harry and his friends play in caves and on the wharf. Things only appear innocent. Things are not right. Harry’s neighbour makes one of the most dazzling speeches in New Zealand literature:

  When people first came to Calliope Bay, what troubled them most was loneliness. I don’t mean the people in the very old days, the first one or two who farmed in the district before there was any sort of settlement. I mean those who came to build the works, then those who came because there were jobs for them at the works, then those … who came to help pull down the works. All these people were very lonely for a time. They seemed so far, far away from everything. No part of the country, of the world even, seems so far away as this. And when people are faraway and lonely they often behave curiously, this is well-known.