The speech is a warning. Calliope Bay is falling apart. There is a mysterious house without windows, also a broken-down windmill. Most potently and savagely, there are the ruins of the meatworks. Ballantyne sent the book in drafts to Frank Sargeson, who loved it, noting, ‘It’s a very brilliant idea using the meatworks ruin as a kind of Mrs Radcliffe’s castle.’
The meatworks is the star of the book, its metaphor of death. Harry plays in it and says, ‘You can imagine all the big killers busy with their knives. … Even now, when you walk across those concrete floors, you can imagine stains, and some days I’ve heard squeals and groans below me and I’ve thought this is not the wind I can hear.’
Death and sex and loneliness, distance, madness, cruelty, the slowly drained cargo of ginger beer – the whole book is an electrifying New Zealand classic, timeless. It doesn’t matter when it was written. When it was published in 1968, it sank like a rock. It was reissued in 2010 and sank like a rock all over again.
‘First I’ve heard of it,’ said Lance, the tenant of a metaphor. I wandered inside the ruins for those three days, happy and delighted to be there, a pilgrim on a literary pilgrimage. I wasn’t the first. Stephen Ballantyne told me, ‘James Ashcroft, artistic director of Taki Rua, went to Hicks Bay for his honeymoon last year for the same reason.’
Calliope Bay, Hicks Bay – it was all the same. There was the wharf, which appeared to have bullet holes in a sign reading HAZARDOUS AREA. WHARF COLLAPSE COULD ENDANGER USERS. VISITORS USE AT THEIR OWN RISK. The pilings looked as weak as twigs. I walked out to the edge, over the deep water where boats had once been filled with meat bound for England. Shags roosted in a tree hanging on to a cliff, and dived in the sea. A thunderstorm was approaching; violent waves pushed and jostled each other as they attacked the shore.
There were the remains of the tram tracks, and a long dark cave, possibly the one Ballantyne had Harry Baird play in. I crawled inside the dank cobwebby hole, touched the ferns that grew on the floor, and listened to the sea boom low and deep.
There was the bridge stained with blackberries, and the Wharekāhika River, which ran past the meatworks, took its blood out to sea.
And there, more than anything, looming over everything, were the ruins of the meatworks. They were immense. It was impossible to know what you were even looking at because there was so much going on – big fat black pigs snorting at your feet, chickens and roosters scratching in the dirt, a trailer full of pumpkins, and the sheer size of the ruins. Timber and machinery took up the ground floor. Lance had fashioned a kind of apartment on the first floor. It used to be the sorting room: he slept where the offal was stacked, bathed where the livers were separated, cooked where the lungs had stopped breathing.
There were rough strips of carpet on the concrete floor in the kitchen. The rooms went on and on – there were a couple of empty fridges and one with a flounder in it. Everywhere there were thick columns of reinforced concrete. The pillars and arches and high roof made the place feel like a castle, or some kind of demonic cathedral. But it was just Lance’s home.
He bought it in 1984 for $25,000. He’d been farming nearby on a 21-year lease from Māori Affairs. ‘I had to go somewhere when the lease ran out. I certainly wasn’t going into town. Luckily I heard about this place. I had a mate tell me about it. I thought, this’ll do me.
‘There’s 69 acres. I own the lot, right down to the beach. I cut it all up into seven paddocks, planted all the trees you can see. It was a total bloody shambles when I come here, but it didn’t worry me. I had all the know-how and gear to bloody knock it into shape. The other buggers that had it before me, they never done a thing to it. Hopeless bloody cases. Lawyers. There was blackberry and woolly nightshade and every bloody thing you can put a name to.’
We were drinking tea in the kitchen. Lance said, ‘I bet you’d like to go up on the roof, wouldn’t you, boy.’ Boy, 51, followed him to a wall where he’d stacked chairs, cupboards and various other pieces of furniture to form a ladder. At the top a manhole led to the top floor of the meatworks; just the walls were left, and gaping holes where the windows had been.
‘There was so much bloody rubbish growing up here,’ he said. ‘Trees growing out of the bloody roof! And bloody cannabis. It took me a bloody week to clear all this bloody stuff off. I brought a wheelbarrow and a shovel up here, filled it with load after load, and then I dug a big hole with the excavator and buried the lot.’
There were lids on the chutes where the big killers with knives used to dispose of offal. There were runnels for blood. Lance had put in a chimney, and a tank for his spring water. ‘Here,’ he said, and passed the hose over. It was possibly the best water in New Zealand. ‘You might be right about that, boy,’ he said, ‘and it’s been flowing like that since the day I put it in. Seven hundred and fifty bloody gallons in 24 hours, just from that constant trickle.’ He pointed to the spur of rock across the road. ‘That’s where the spring is. I dug the pipe two feet deep. Did it all with a bloody pick and spade.’
There was the river, the beach, the wharf. We looked out over the paddocks. ‘All that was bloody swamp and bog. The bloody mosquitoes would carry you out of bed, that’s how bad it was. But I’ll tell you something, boy. I’m not frightened of work. I worked like a dog on every place. I worked like a dog on the shearing boards. I worked like a dog in the freezing works.’
The sun was high and warm as we stood together in the open air. Lance pointed to the ground we were standing on and said, ‘Here’s where the killing was done.’
Lance asked if I’d ever gone inside a meatworks. I told him about the time I went to the grassy Taranaki town of Eltham. The great warrior Tītokowaru passed through Eltham in 1869 and boasted, ‘I have begun to eat the flesh of the white man. I have eaten him like the flesh of the cow.’ It wouldn’t have tasted half as good as the flesh of the cattle slaughtered at the Riverlands freezing works, which produces top-quality export beef.
I arrived on a morning in autumn. There were stretched cowhides on the walls in reception. Trucks and trailers pulled up in the yard; cattle were led out and hosed down. Inside the works, among the staff of 540 in white overalls and gumboots that had begun the day spotless but were now more red than white, I watched a cattle beast released into a narrow pen. A metal clamp seized its head. An electric plate rose up and delivered a short sharp volt. The beast collapsed; a door opened; the beast rolled through on its side and a halal slaughterman from Morocco slit its throat.
First to go were its front hooves. A giant pair of scissors broke through the bone. A hook then hoisted the two-footed corpse in the air from its hind hoof. The skin was pulled off its face and the entire hide stripped – Riverlands has a contract to supply Air New Zealand with leather for seats in business class. The head was cut off.
The foreman charged on with his tour. He’d seen it a thousand times before, and that was only yesterday: Riverlands had the capacity to butcher 1,250 cattle per day. ‘There’s our lung room,’ the foreman said. And: ‘This is the large intestine turned inside out. It goes to Korea.’ Also: ‘This is what we call the jawbreaker. He takes the jaw out, and makes it easier to get meat out of the head.’
There were tables piled high with tongues, kidneys and hearts. There were red offal and green offal. There were the cattle beast’s four stomachs – the third is called the bible, because its flesh ripples like the pages of a book. And there, too, were first-class and delicious steaks, which I ate for lunch in the Riverlands’ boardroom.
It was a memorable day. But it was even more vivid standing on top of the ruins at Hicks Bay and watching Lance re-enact where the killing was done. ‘There was a ramp just there,’ he said, pointing to the edge of the killing floor. ‘They’d bring the sheep up it. So what happens is, when you catch your sheep you dump it down against the pole there, and you grab its bloody head and pull it back and cut his throat with your bloody knee down on his head.
‘As soon as you’ve done that one, you get the next one, and put it up har
d against the first sheep you’ve killed. But you can cut the head clean off if you pull the knife too hard. That’s a bugger. You want the head on so you can put the boot down on it and pull out the brisket. That’s one of the tricks of the trade, you see.
‘So after you’ve cut its throat you leg it up. You take the trotters off and hang it up on the hook and you pelt it off, and after you pelt it off you gut it out, and there’s the finished product…’
All the while he was moving along the rooftop, a small and nimble old buzzard in his gumboots and ripped jersey and black neck, miming the slit of a throat and the pulling out of a brisket – he was bringing the dead back to life and killing them all over again. He was dragging New Zealand history out into the open.
And then he snapped back to the present. A man called in on him on Saturday afternoon. ‘Got a goat for you, Lance,’ he said. His name was Rick and he’d parked up by the beach in his caravan. He said he’d been watching a fishing show on TV when he saw a flash of white in the bush. He grabbed his gun, rushed outside and shot the goat in the head. He hoped Lance could butcher it.
We went out to the yard. There was the dead goat. Big flies had settled on its bloodied head. Lance got to work with his knife.
‘You shot him in the right place, Rick. Good stuff, boy.’
He took off the pelt.
‘He’ll cook up well, that bloody goat.’
He tied the goat’s insides into a knot.
‘That’s so when you take the guts out, the liquid won’t run into the rib cage.’
He cut the head off.
‘Now I’ll do the bloody brisket.’
He cut its legs off at the knee.
‘It’s a bugger of a joint to find.’
He hung it up on a hook, and got to work on the guts.
‘Look at the bloody stomach bloat.’
Rick said, ‘Sorry. Couldn’t get it to you any sooner, mate.’
Lance said, ‘No, she’s right, Rick, she’s bang on. Just what the doctor ordered.’
He took out three grey stomachs, and inspected his handiwork.
‘Oh, that’s as rough as guts, Lance,’ he said to himself. ‘You’ll get the boot, boy. You’ll get the bloody boot.’
Rick crouched at Lance’s feet, inspecting and admiring the work of the master. The pigs and cats snuffled closer as blood and bits of goat flesh fell from the hook into the grass; the butchery had taken place by the wing of the meatworks where Lance had been working on the engine of his beloved Komatsu bulldozer, which he’d bought in 1967 and still took out now and then to cut tracks for neighbours in return for firewood.
The sun was sinking; there were long shadows, and the light in the sky was golden. It buttered the ruins, crept into Lance’s bedroom. He slept on a single mattress. The blankets were old and rough. He’d pinned photos of his past beside the bed. When night fell, he’d think about the men who looked after him when he left school at fourteen and went out into the world. He had been motherless almost his entire life.
The shadows lengthened. The castle of the meatworks looked as dark as a tomb. Hicks Bay, Calliope Bay: like young Harry Baird, Lance hoarded a cargo of home-made ginger beer. He’d poured the precious fizz into about a dozen empty Sprite lemonade bottles and written the bottling date on each. They were on the floor of his bedroom. Outside, he completed his dismembering of the goat. The sharp knife doing its work, the goat in pieces on the grass, dinner ready to store in the fridge and freezer – I could have watched him all day.
Pegasus
Newest Zealand
They damned it at the Saturday morning flea market in horsey Rangiora, where the stink of horsehair clung to jigsaw puzzles and alarm clocks and books about horses. They mocked it, insulted it, wished a pox on it. Most damagingly of all, they pitied it. They said: Poor bastards. They got specific. They said: It’s too windy, the summer easterly’ll dry up the grass, and the whole place’ll look like a desert. They said: It’s too damp, the mould’ll be halfway up the ceiling before you know it. They said: It’s too cold, the winter westerly’ll blow off the beach and make life miserable.
Such scorn, so many heads shaking from side to side, during a weekend in spring when I visited the Canterbury Plains and asked about Pegasus, New Zealand’s newest town, out in the open in the middle of flat featureless nowhere on 400 hectares of virgin swamp, 25 kilometres north of Christchurch.
They damned it on Sunday afternoon at Kairaki Beach, where black dogs sniffed the driftwood, a little boy played with a black toy gorilla in the sand, and whitebaiters sifted for creatures in the black lagoon. ‘Caught half a dozen,’ said one baiter. He scowled. He had been at his spot since six in the morning. The subject of Pegasus appealed to his sour mood. He rubbished it, predicted nothing but woe, and concluded, ‘I wouldn’t give you two bob for it.’
The town, dreamed up by property developers Infinity Group, was yet to be built but a lot of it had already sold: it had set a New Zealand record when $122 million worth of sections sold at auction in one day. It was strange walking around. The whole place felt odd, obnoxious, soulless. It didn’t feel like New Zealand.
The population of Pegasus was sometimes projected as 5,000, other times as 7,000. When I visited, the population was precisely two. I walked around the empty streets and stared at the empty sections. Pegasus was under construction, a work in progress. The signs read PEGASUS SCHOOL COMING SOON and PEGASUS TOWN CENTRE COMING SOON.
On the corner of Tutaipatu and Waireka Streets there were four park benches on which no bum had yet to rest. The only restaurant was the Grub Hub takeaway van for onsite workers. With its new streets driven on only by vehicles marked NORTH CANTERBURY CONCRETE CUTTING and PETROTEC 24-HOUR EMERGENCY RESPONSE UNIT, its rubbish bins as clean as whistles, its rows of bare spindly scarlet oaks and American sweet gums, its weeds of red, white and blue electrical cables sprouting out of the ground, Pegasus was perfectly lifeless.
What to make of this town of the future, this barely formed blot on the landscape? I should have damned it, too. I wanted to. I tried my best. I scoffed at the homeowners’ covenants: clotheslines and letterboxes had to be of good quality, garden statues and fountains had to be approved, no caravans or tents were allowed, and no more than two cats or two dogs per household.
I attended a sales meeting in Auckland. The reps said, ‘It’ll be like Noosa.’ Their fantasies grew more intense: ‘Some people say it’s the perfect town.’ And even more intense: ‘It’ll get kids away from their PlayStations.’
I interviewed Bob Robertson, CEO of Infinity and, I suppose, the town father of Pegasus. He wore black from head to toe, set his watch fifteen minutes ahead, and tried to interview himself.
‘Is it about money? No,’ he said.
I hadn’t asked, but seeing as he brought it up I interrupted him and said, ‘It is so.’
He said, ‘Sorry?’
I said, ‘It is so about money.’
‘Yes, it is so,’ he said. ‘It is so, to a level. But sometimes you pass that level.’
He got back to interviewing himself. ‘What am I going to do with the money? What am I going to do with it? Okay, there’s inheritance for the kids and money for my staff. But if it was about money I wouldn’t be doing it. For Pegasus, I’m acutely keen to create what I would like to consider would be as close as possible to an ideal town.
‘My vision of Pegasus is based on the perception of what I would want – and I treat myself as a guinea pig – if I was going to live there.’
But Robertson lived on the shores of picturesque Lake Wānaka.
Sometime later I saw Pegasus on TV. Current affairs show Campbell Live lingered on images of red, white and blue electrical cables sprouting out of the ground. The signs read PEGASUS SCHOOL COMING SOON and PEGASUS TOWN CENTRE COMING SOON.
Reporter Natasha Utting trudged back and forth across the footbridge over the artificial lake. The bridge and lake were new but I recognised the special ambience of Pegasus in an instant –
an ambience of dreariness, of purgatory. It looked miserable and hopeless. No one was around. It looked as though no one would ever be around.
In fact the population had reached about three hundred. A café had opened, and a general store. But where was the school and where was the town shopping centre? Infinity put it this way: ‘The effects of the global financial crisis have necessitated a carefully managed approach to the staging of the town’s development.’ Resident Steve Fleet told The New Zealand Herald, ‘We moved here thinking there was going to be a whole new town and we wouldn’t have to keep going into Rangiora or Christchurch.’ He didn’t sound too fussed. ‘The kids love it. They just wander around and do their own thing. … It is quite nice with it being quiet.’
Silence in New Zealand has regional qualities. I thought back to the kind of silence that spring weekend when I mooched around north Canterbury, with the wind in the willows and the shadows of poplars falling in long thin stripes across country lanes. It was silent as a grave in Tuahiwi, where the clumps of wild daffodils were beginning to fade and fray in the graveyard. There was only the shushing of the surf at Leithfield Beach, where the burger van was open from five to seven, Thursday through Sunday. There was not much more than the snip of scissors at Woodend, where the scrapbooking club met every Thursday over chocolate muffins.
I lingered on the footpath outside the Woodend bakery and waited for Karl Mason to emerge. I had seen him pull up in a fabulous 1974 Camaro painted canary yellow. A builder from Christchurch, he belonged to the Garden City Rodders Club and was taking the Camaro up to Kaikōura ‘for a hot-rod run’. That, and ‘to perve at the waves’.
He said, ‘Pegasus? You couldn’t pay me to live there.’ The town was the least of his worries and he didn’t appear to have a worry in the world. He was in great spirits, a lean lithe surfer whose haircut was narrowly avoiding the onset of a mullet. He was travelling with Karen Lewis. She said, ‘Show them your baby.’ Karl took out his mobile phone and proudly brought up a photo of a black 1952 Ford F1 pickup truck.
Civilisation Page 2