The recruits said ‘Go hard’ and ‘Sir’. They had straight backs and were learning about service, tradition, self-respect. Also, they were having the time of their lives. ‘Today,’ said Steve Devantier, ‘I got to go out and throw some grenades.’
Was he encouraged to join by his father? ‘I haven’t seen him since I was ten or something. Dunno where he is.’ Teahu Peters, 18, said, ‘I joined up just to change my life and that.’ When asked for his name, he gave his full name, complete with three middle names. It was as though he were giving an interview to the police. He said, ‘I had a bit of a record.’ What offences? It was as though he were reading from a charge sheet: ‘Unlawfully taking a motor vehicle.’ He was very serious, very alert. Lieutenant Macpherson said, ‘He’s one of my star pupils.’
Boys from broken homes, boys who had been ‘wayward’ – were these the typical recruits the army took in and sorted out? Who else in New Zealand would volunteer for army life? ‘I was a Honda consultant,’ Oosa Tuala said.
Everything about Oosa was surprising. For a start, he was twenty-nine. He said, ‘I’ve always wanted to serve New Zealand.’ He had nearly applied to join the army in 2000 but decided against it because he had a young family. He had three children: two daughters, aged five and seven, and a son aged fourteen. ‘Yes, fourteen,’ he said. ‘I was a fourth-form dad.’ He had left school at the end of that year and found work at KFC. ‘I worked as many shifts as I could to raise my family.’ He got other, better jobs. He was responsible, mature, level-headed, warm; also, he was articulate, spoke intelligently and well. He gave credit to his teachers at St Mary’s Catholic Primary School in Papakura. And then he said, ‘You can tell where a person is from by their slang. There’s North Shore slang, Māngere slang, Ōtara slang. I’ve never talked in slang. I’m glad I don’t.’
It was approaching 1730 hours: time for dinner. The recruits’ menu was a choice of sirloin steak or braised sausages with roast potatoes, peas, cauliflower and carrots, and a hot pudding. The tables were set with cartons of Primo. Up on the seventh-floor dining room of the nearly deserted officers’ mess, conversation was as stiff and carefully folded as the red napkins. Life, loud and beery, was outside the camp, at the Oasis pub, where there was a fire in the wood burner and country music on the jukebox. As the night wore on and the good times rolled, Hector the eel seemed to smile behind his glass case.
Don McLaren, a small, neatly dressed carpenter, explained how he had fished up in Waiōuru. He was living in Central Otago when he saw an advertisement in The Dominion for contract work. He put in a tender and won. He phoned up the employer. ‘I said, “Well, whereabouts in Wellington is the job? Is it the Hutt Valley or in town?” Because what was I supposed to think? The advertisement’s in a Wellington paper, for Christ’s sake. The employer said, “It’s in Waiōuru.” I got the shock of my life when I ended up here.’ And when was that? ‘Eleven years ago.’
Friday night in Waiōuru, in the middle of winter, and the wind didn’t whistle – it wailed, the loudest ghost you ever heard, haunting the small dark frontier town. I looked at my watch. It was midnight at the Oasis. Seven drinkers were still on their feet. They ordered jugs, smoked on the front step, gossiped and laughed. They talked about snow, how appealing it was for visitors and how unappealing it was to live with it. They talked about how cold it got. The water mains constantly froze – one time, concrete in the mixer turned black. They talked about firewood and coal and chimney-sweeping. From the brochure for new residents: ‘Fire ashes are collected in winter on Tuesday mornings. Ash will only be collected if in a metal container with handles, e.g. an ammunition box.’
They had to drive to Palmerston North or Taupō for groceries. They always missed Waiōuru whenever they left. Always wanted to get back. It had a hold on them. They said, ‘The mountain.’ What mountain? I took their word for it. Nothing was visible in the dark night or the grey murky day.
The next morning, the sky once again grey and murky, Don made big hot steaming mugs of instant coffee in the house he shared with his mate Bill Cupples, a house-painter from Ireland. The two codgers – Don was 54, Bill 66 – lived on a street of ghosts: 300 houses, considered surplus to army requirements, had been put up for tender and taken away by truck. The driveways had been grassed over. In the 1970s, when it operated at its peak, Waiōuru had a population of 7,000; now it felt as reduced as the restaurant in the officers’ mess.
Don and Bill were showing me around their ghost street when the cloud lifted. ‘Look,’ said Don. ‘Aha,’ said Bill. There it was, magnificent and brazen, creamy. With its sides of luscious white snow, the mountain looked as if it were glowing. It was like a power source, energising the town, giving some of its power to the army. It burned in the sky and blossomed out of the ground: Mount Ruapehu, the desert rose.
St Bathans
Wind
Everywhere, wind. Not whistling, not howling, no music or drama to it at all, just something always pushing and shoving, lunging. It got up early. It stayed up late. It carved trees, it herded clouds, it did whatever its brute force felt like during an autumn weekend on the Maniototo Plain.
Highway 85 is one of New Zealand’s great drives, nothing to look at but sky, hawk, rock, creek, tussock, and thistle and wildflower, and sunlight and shadow running their hands over the beautiful mountain ranges. It was a Central Otago pastoral, yellowish and empty, smooth and short-haired, good for sheep and bicycles. Driving was a waste of gas. All you needed was a sail on the roof. You could have cut the engine and merely steered off 85 to navigate the side road that leads to St Bathans.
The permanent residential population of St Bathans is seven. More than half the town had dinner together on a Saturday night when Grahame Sydney and his very young wife Heidi acted as hosts to Graye and Wendy Shattky, who walked from their house armed with a bottle of wine and a torch.
Jay and Jewell Cassells were also in attendance. They lived in Queens-town. Well, someone had to. Poet and golf caddy Brian Turner completed the line-up. He had thought he’d be busy caddying for Peter ‘Chookie’ Fowler at the New Zealand PGA at Clearwater. He said, ‘Chookie failed to make the cut.’ He had tucked his shirt into his pants. Jay said, ‘It looks as though you ironed that shirt.’ Brian said, ‘No, I drip-dried it.’
Heidi walked into the kitchen with a basket of vegetables from her garden. Grahame grappled with a champagne cork. There was a card on the bookshelf. It read: ‘Bryan Brown and Sam Neill invite you to partake in a beautiful, bewildering and astonishing event.’ The art on the walls included two of Grahame’s pencil drawings; the closest you could get to his celebrated landscape paintings of Central Otago was to look out the window at the wonderful view. ‘I’ve had to sell all my own paintings just to survive,’ he said. The cork popped open.
He moved into the house in 2003. ‘When I first came into Grahame’s life,’ Heidi said, ‘all his books were just lying on the floor.’ She argued for a bookcase; he wanted to keep the walls for art; she won. One entire shelf was stocked with books about the South Pole. Grahame has twice visited the white continent, is besotted with its look and shape and light and shadow – Central Otago is an Antarctica with vegetables in it, and marginally less wind.
Drinks were poured. Grahame got to work on his homemade pâté and Heidi prepared a toasted bread snack topped with grated zucchini, garlic, basil and lemon zest. ‘It’s out of an Annabel Langbein book,’ she said. It was early evening. The sky had softened, paled.
Heidi laid the table. The centrepiece was red roses and rowanberries. The drinks included a bottle of San Pellegrino sparkling water. Grahame said, ‘Where did that come from?’ Heidi said, ‘The fridge.’
The dinner party served a serious purpose: it was the gathering of the tribe. All were united by a common cause. All were devoted to a subject of consuming interest. They knew they had gained a reputation as dreadful bores, that friends were sometimes too afraid to phone for fear of an earbashing.
I took Jay and Gra
ye aside and said, ‘So.’
‘Right,’ said Jay.
‘Okay,’ said Graye.
The tribe operated as Save Central Otago, a pressure group opposed to Meridian Energy’s two-billion-dollar Project Hayes scheme to vandalise the Lammermoor Ranges in the Maniototo with a wind farm. A very big wind farm: 176 turbines, white and whopping, chopping at the air to generate what Meridian claimed would be 630 megawatts of electricity, more than the Clyde Dam.
Jay said, ‘We’re fighting world-class spin. It’s formidably good. I give Meridian credit for that. They’ll tell you that wind turbines are green, use renewable energy, don’t burn fuel. And all that’s true. But what about the carbon footprint of producing these damned things and getting them there?’
Graye said, ‘You have to ask how this came about in the first place. The answer’s simple: Helen wanted it. Helen Clark, when she was prime minister, wanted to show that New Zealand led the world in renewable energy. Meridian said, ‘Well, Helen wants it; let’s do it.’ Then they told the public that wind farms would help solve the energy crisis, that they’d be efficient, and cheap. We’ve raised significant doubts about those claims.’
Jay said, ‘Our case has always only been about the landscape. That puts us in tree-hugging territory, doesn’t it? But we’ve always just stuck to explaining how valuable the landscape is.’
Graye said, ‘If this wind farm goes ahead, the landscape will be destroyed.’
Jay said, ‘Irreversibly. A wind farm – that’s such a bullshit term. Spin. Call it what it is. It’s an industrial estate.’
Heidi said, ‘Here’s another one. It’s turbine-ised.’
Grahame said, ‘That’s right, turbine-ised.’
Jay picked up a ukulele and plucked at it. Graye said, ‘Jay has provided us with strategic direction. We’ve been lucky to draw on his expertise as a former environmental lawyer.’ The group had also been able to draw on Graye’s expertise as a former SAS troop commander. He’d served in Vietnam, later gone private, and was now director of a security firm providing protection for oil companies and other multinational corporates in Iraq, Nigeria and Yugoslavia. Fit, alert, tidy in manner and dress, he gave only one hint of his military background. He asked, ‘What’s the latest information?’ The subject in question concerned what Heidi was cooking for dinner.
The tribe had taken their fight against Meridian to the Environment Court. They estimated that legal fees would be at least $150,000.
Graye said, ‘We didn’t bank on it being this expensive.’
Jay said, ‘I did. I knew from the start. It’s big, big litigation.’
From the kitchen, where she was washing prawns under a cold tap, Heidi said, ‘Grahame has lost six months’ income by devoting his time to this. It’s the same for all of us.’
‘Until we agree that the natural world is a community to which we belong, and stop seeing everything as a commodity for us to use and exploit as we see fit,’ Brian Turner once wrote, ‘we’re fucked.’ But Meridian’s wind farm had a lot of support. Graye said it had wrecked the community. ‘There’s been violence. People have sold up and gone, just to get away.’ Then he added, ‘There’s a dartboard at a farmhouse that has a photo of Grahame in the bullseye.’
I asked whether this was a rural legend. ‘No, no. These friends of ours went fishing for trout at the Loganburn. One of them was – should I say who, Jay?’
Jay shook his head. Graye said, ‘Well, let’s just say he was a significant player in our enterprise. The others thought they should do the right thing and go the farmhouse and ask the farmer if it was okay to use his land. The farmer invited them in for a cup of tea. They glanced around and saw the dartboard with Grahame’s photo – and next to it a photo of the guy who I’m not going to name. They went outside and told him to lie low in the back of the car.’
Heidi said, ‘That’s how personal it’s got.’
Graye said, ‘That bitterness persists right now.’
Grahame said, ‘I’d go so far as to say they’ve been bought off.’
The first course arrived. It was a green salad with feta, stilton and pears. Heidi said, ‘You’re welcome to have some, Brian.’ The significant player in the Save Central Otago enterprise said, ‘No, thanks. I ate on the road. Cooked up half a tin of peas and a poached egg.’
There is an amusing, mistaken notion that Turner is a curmudgeon, an incurable pessimist, a grouch muttering into his beard, but he told long funny yarns and sometimes couldn’t talk for laughing. There were stories about rabbiting as a young man with his uncle Jack. Jack shot anything that moved. Once that included a car that wouldn’t let him pass – he drew level, fired a round from his side-by-side over the roof, and roared, ‘That’ll cramp your fucking style!’
The good old days. As a poet, and also as New Zealand’s best nature essayist, Turner has written firm lyrical lines about his love of the timeless land and his loathing of glibly defined progress. He said, ‘When I was a boy…’ He talked of wide open spaces, now despoiled. The 176 turbines would be 176 blots on the landscape, 176 obscenities, 176 insults that too many New Zealanders (‘peasants!’) took without flinching.
‘We have a duty to look after nature,’ he said. ‘This talk that Meridian’s scheme is in the “national interest” – I hate that term. I hate that cringing acquiescence people have to the “national interest”. What really pisses me off is that the attempt to sacrifice nature is beyond any so-called benefits.’
Dinner was served – a French-Vietnamese seafood bouillabaisse – with French and Central Otago wines. The conversation turned to the Blue Lake in St Bathans. Grahame said, ‘I tried to stop it from being motorised. Keep it quiet. Feel the serenity. I loathe jet skis. But I lost that fight.’
Then he talked about plans to dam the Clutha, and how they had to be opposed.
Graye said, ‘That’s not my fight.’
Grahame said, ‘How can you lie down and let that happen?’
And then he clenched his fists and seethed about his failed campaign to stop the introduction of a street light in St Bathans.
He was a strange fellow. His paintings and photography strongly suggested he possessed genius. Nothing in his art was ever out of place. The clipped voice with well-rounded vowels, the straight face, the deliberate movements – he was more military in his bearing than Graye. He spoke with such intense dogmatic fervour; he followed a path of moral certainties. Environmentalism seemed the least of his passions. It was as though he was ruled by fury. He’d once said that nuclear power was preferable to wind farms. Equally, though, there was nothing equivocal about his generosity. He was the kind of man who would think nothing of giving you the world.
The world was outside his front door – Rough Ridge, Old Woman Range, Hawkdun Range, Dunstan Peak. Above all, the highest peak, was Mount St Bathans, where ‘the wind shakes the sparse grasses / water runs, stones rattle unexpectedly / and the land speaks’, to borrow from Brian Turner in ‘Under Mt St Bathans’, a poem included in his collection of essays Into the Wider World. The book features his address to the Otago District Council in June 2007, when he presented his case against ‘Meridian’s application to build a giant windwhatever’. The speech is his magnum opus, ringing and defiant, tempered with grace notes: ‘Our economy should be required to serve the natural world, not the other way round. … This landscape, raw in winter, expansive, golden and rhythmic in summer … Our finest natural glories can’t take any more major assaults. … The tyranny of apathy … When I was a youngster in the 1950s…’
The wine flowed, and so did the Pernod. Dessert was a choice of chocolate gâteau or stewed stonefruit. Brian said, ‘I’ll have both.’ The table experienced a rare silence as dessertspoons were put to work.
Jewel said, ‘Beautiful, Heidi.’ Grahame liked the sound of that. He decided to improve it by getting rid of the comma. ‘Beautiful Heidi,’ he said. ‘That’s you. That’s what you are, my love. Beautiful Heidi.’
The next day
I ran into Graye and we drove to the home he was building on the other side of Dunstan Creek. It was to be off the grid and rely on solar power, with a back-up generator. It had nice stone features made from rocks he and Wendy had pulled out of the creek. ‘And this room,’ he said, ‘will be for when the grandkids visit.’ The thought made him very happy.
He and Wendy were house-sitting a cottage in St Bathans owned by their friend and Save Central co-conspirator, All Black legend Anton Oliver. Even given that Oliver is widely known as a gentle soul and a conscientious, intelligent man studying environmental policy at Oxford University, it seemed an unlikely house for a hulking former All Black prop. It was small, quite dark, almost feminine; there were fruit trees in the little garden and bees in the lavender outside the front door.
Wendy put on the jug, rustled up a plate of crackers and spread. She said that when Graye left on his first tour of Vietnam in 1968, she was left at home in Papakura with their first child, aged six months. Graye talked a bit about Vietnam, the SAS, and his private security work. But the story I liked most was what happened when he and Wendy decided to sail around the world.
They bought a yacht. It was called Supremacy. What an awful name, I said. Yes, they said, but it’s bad luck to change the name of a boat. Their luck could hardly have been worse. They planned to sail to Tahiti, then follow the trade winds north to Alaska. They didn’t get very far. The steering broke. They couldn’t move; the yacht was taking on water. They radioed for help. They were a thousand miles from land, marooned and at serious risk.
Civilisation Page 4