There was P. J. Wallace, 60, who stood out as a Māori with a shaved head in a wheelchair. ‘I lost my leg a year ago,’ he said. ‘Diabetes. Flared up so I took it off.’ He had toured the world as a musician with Prince Tui Teka’s show band and wore an enormous crucifix. He said, ‘My ancestors were all psychics. They gave me the cross for protection. I don’t know what from.’
Afternoon tea was served. A guest from South Auckland had murmured, ‘I hear they’re quite frugal’, but there were three tables of scones, pikelets, cakes, sausage rolls, and spaghetti sandwiches on white bread. It looked like a very generous spread. There was a great deal of elbowing and snatching, and in 20 minutes the tables were picked clean.
And then there was more music, New Zealand music, an expression of good times and struggle on the back roads, in the small towns. I sat back, tapped my foot, clapped, enjoyed the show, soaked up the happy ending of my travels in the flatlands.
But the memory and the sound of something else ran beneath the entire afternoon, and into the evening, and the days that followed: small, hurt Jean Smith, strapped into her childhood guitar, perched on the couch in her Te Aroha home, very nearly making a comeback into public life, her lovely voice caressing every true word as she raised the dead and sang ‘Dust on Mother’s Old Bible’.
Miranda
Birdland
There is a field of maize on the side of the road in the sunny croplands of Mangatangi Valley near Thames, where a flock of twenty Australian galahs – gorgeous on the eye with their rose-pink breasts – arrive for a feast when the maize is harvested. The parrots are probably escaped cage birds, like the sulphur-crested cockatoos that also make cameo appearances, although both species may have originally flown across the Tasman. No one knows for sure. All birds are a mystery. They never give up all their secrets, despite the attention and close scrutiny they receive from birdwatchers.
On a summer morning filled with bright light, I travelled through Mangatangi to Miranda, where thirteen birdwatchers trudged towards the sea with telescopes and tripods hoisted over their shoulders. They had come to the white-shell shoreline to identify Arctic wading birds.
They were led by Keith Woodley, who manages the world-famous Miranda Shorebird Centre. A handsome man camouflaged behind a beard and glasses, his tall long-limbed presence confirmed the first law of ornithology: there are few short birdwatchers. He confirmed the second law, too: ornithology demands acute vision and hearing, and an alert response. Keith was deceptively slow, even languid, but he could move fast. There was a bolt of beard and leg as he darted along the line of his thirteen students to train their telescopes on the sudden arrival of a red-necked stint. It’s a small bird. It has short legs, and a short black bill pointing out of its fat brown face. It doesn’t look as if it could cross a road, but it came to New Zealand from its breeding grounds in Siberia.
‘It’s the smallest long-distance migratory bird,’ claimed Christopher Moses, twelve years old. He had signed up for the wader identification course with his mother, Joanne. They had recently returned to New Zealand after living for seven years in Tanzania. Christopher’s father was a United Nations lawyer. Joanne said, ‘He went from working on South Auckland murders to prosecuting the Rwandan genocide.’
Christopher said, ‘Tanzania’s great for birds. I’ve probably counted over 400 species. I marked down only the ones I could definitely identify. There were a few species of duck I wasn’t sure about.’ He talked about the day he spotted the rare Beesley’s lark in short grass. Yes, but seven years in Tanzania – what was it like returning home? He was an amazing boy, possibly the future of New Zealand ornithology. He said, ‘It’s been hard. I mean, you’ve got some good birds, but you have to drive for an hour to see them. In Tanzania, you have to walk only ten minutes. It’s cool coming here though. I’ve seen some waders today that I’ve seen on the Tanzanian coast – whimbrels, black-tailed godwits…’
Keith alerted his class to a sharp-tailed sandpiper ‘just to the left of that stick’. There were quite a few sticks out on the shell bank, and over four thousand birds. The high tide pushed them closer to the shore, to the birdwatchers who peered through their telescopes and then sat down to consult the field guide.
There was a pathologist from Rotorua, and a brisk elderly woman from Papakura who said, ‘I’ve seen things today I never thought I’d see.’ Christoph and Tamara Wehrmueller were on holiday from Basel in Switzerland. ‘Owls,’ Christoph said. ‘We get a lot of owls. Raptors – eagles, vultures. Crows, and ten species of raven.’ It was their third visit to New Zealand. ‘Birds,’ Tamara said, ‘are always the theme of our trip.’ Back home, they stay in touch with New Zealand by subscribing to the centre’s newsletter. ‘We read everything and keep every copy.’ The newsletters are filed by Christoph, who works as a university librarian.
As manager at the centre’s office, Keith keeps a tidy ship. There wasn’t a crumb anywhere in the vicinity of the six-slice Woodson toaster. The centre also has dormitory rooms and a library. There are guides to the birds of Britain, Japan, the West Indies. There are seven volumes of the Oxford Handbook of Australian, New Zealand and Antarctic Birds (Volume five: Tyrant-flycatchers to Chats). Naturally, there are copies of the 1966 A Field Guide to the Birds of New Zealand, co-authored by Dick Sibson, whom everyone knew as Sib. A tall well-built man with an urbane manner, he taught classics at King’s College. He would read a line by Virgil about swans alighting on a lake and ask, ‘Now, what species of swan did Virgil have in mind? There are three possibilities…’
Sib first saw Miranda in 1941, first saw the amazing sight of bar-tailed godwits, wrybills, oystercatchers and other waders parading on the shell bank. He bicycled from Auckland. Later trips were made with Ross McKenzie, who drove despite losing a leg in the First World War and suffering badly from shell shock. The author note in McKenzie’s 1972 book In Search of Birds in New Zealand reads: ‘After graduating from the bird-nesting of his early years, Ross McKenzie did a little game-bird shooting before going to France in 1916 in search of bigger game. He barely survived.’
Together, Sib and Ross inspired a generation of birders. One was Beth Brown, the first person to raise the notion of building some kind of lodge at Miranda. Stuart Chambers, in The Story of the Miranda Naturalists’ Trust, writes that the idea came to her on a summer’s day in 1973 ‘with an immense tide which brought in the birds and held them for ages’.
The idea spread. A trust was formed, funds raised. Richard Adams, the British author of the best-selling novel Watership Down, donated the proceeds of a public lecture; his book had been based on the research findings of trust member Ronald Lockley, related in his not-at-all-best-selling publication The Private Life of the Rabbit. The trust made good money from Adams’ talk. When the novelist returned a few years later they repeated the exercise but it was a flop – door takings were only $93, minus $27.50 for expenses.
Efforts continued. The centre was finally opened in September 1990. It is now firmly established as a mecca for local and international birders. The birds ignore it all and just keep arriving. Thousands of Arctic waders return from Alaska and Siberia every spring. Knots, turnstones, plovers, sandpipers and, most famously, the bar-tailed godwits romp through the mudflats alongside less-travelled birds such as black-billed gulls, dotterels, wrybills and royal spoonbills. It’s one of New Zealand’s greatest sights.
The pleasure is all Keith Woodley’s, day in, day out. ‘I’ve succumbed to the passion that besets people who spend too much time around shorebirds,’ he said. ‘It just grabs hold of you and won’t let go.’
It irks him that the local council has put up a road sign that reads SEABIRD COAST. He went with a colleague to ask them to change it to SHOREBIRD COAST. Keith, who has an abiding interest in military history, said, ‘We were repulsed with heavy losses.’ He added, ‘They thought we were being pedantic, of all things.’
He has lived for the past 16 years in a cottage beside the centre, a kind of artist in
residence. On a table in the cottage he paints gentle, careful watercolours of birds. He won’t have a TV in the house. His CD collection includes Bob Dylan and Townes Van Zandt – he had arranged a lift to Auckland that week to see Steve Earle in concert. He was born in Invercargill, studied politics and history at Victoria. He said, ‘I may have reached the northern limit of my range.’
Actually, he travelled north of almost no north in 2008, when he flew to Alaska and camped out for twelve weeks to study the same bar-tailed godwits that roost at Miranda every spring and summer. His book about the epic migration is called Godwits: Long-haul Champions.
I visited him at the cottage on a Friday night. We ate fish and chips, and he talked about camping out on the Alaskan tundra and seeing the first godwit arrive on May 6. ‘A single male came in at about five-thirty in the evening. That was a big moment for me – watching a godwit arrive over its breeding ground, having come all the way probably from New Zealand.’ Winter snow and ice gradually cleared and countless flocks of birds began arriving. Keith talked about the flattened tundra landscape, its mosaic of lichens and cranberries, its sedge meadows, the huge swathes of bleached logs carried down the Yukon River.
Sooner or later all birdwatchers catch hold of a sentence that sounds as if they’re talking in their sleep. When Keith spoke of a research trip he took to Europe on the way home from Alaska, he said, ‘I went to Vienna specifically to see a godwit that had been dead for 204 years.’
The bright light, the shell banks as glaring as snow, the pale misty view of the Coromandel ranges over the water, the wide estuarine tide mooching in and out over the mud… Were any creatures moving, apart from birds? Kingfishers perched on flame trees surrounding the cemetery. Miranda holds the promise of a long life: Betty Wills died at 91, Una Harris at 92, Janet Frederick at 93, Sylvia Graham at 94. There was another suggestion that Miranda existed as a kind of wonderland: one gravestone was marked LEWIS CARROLL.
Miranda used to have a post office, a school and a cheese factory. It still has hot pools and a holiday park. There is a stall in front of an organic orchard. ‘This place used to be littered with orchards,’ Annie Wilson said. ‘I’m the last one.’ She talked about returning to New Zealand after living in Seattle for fifteen years. ‘It was a terrific culture shock,’ she said. ‘My work in this world is to convert all the dairy farmers in New Zealand to organics before they completely destroy the soil and the rivers. It’s dirty dairying around here, I’m afraid. I hate to say it but it’s phenomenal greed. They can’t squeeze any more out of the ground. They’ll go to the wall, most of them.’
Her speech was interrupted by a neighbour who dropped in for a cup of green tea. ‘This is Ben,’ Annie said. ‘He built the loo.’ I shook hands with a merry Dutchman. Ben Beemsterboer asked if I would like to look at his loo. We walked around the back of the section. He’d built it with bricks. I was carrying a glass of Annie’s delicious organic apple and grapefruit juice. I took a long drink and looked at Ben. He said, ‘Do you get it? It’s a brick shithouse.’
It was time to leave. The closest village was Kaiaua, which had a fish and chip shop and a pub. In the early 1990s a nutcase shot and killed the publican. A man at the door said, ‘What the hell did you do that for?’ He was shot and killed too. The nutcase was murdered a year later in Pāremoremo Prison.
This story was told by Jack Hema in his motorhome called ON THE MOOVE. ‘Come on in,’ he said. ON THE MOOVE was parked alongside 27 other motorhomes on a reserve known as Ray’s Rest. The collection looked like a travelling circus. Keith Woodley once counted 93 motorhomes during a Queen’s Birthday Weekend, a record. The parking fee: nothing.
Who were these migrant waders? With their fold-up dining tables, their awnings, their solar panels, their Freeview TV boxes, pot plants and terrible novels, they represented middle New Zealand on the fringes, fantastically social, fanatically house-proud, wading in leisure.
They were also public enemies. The line-up of motorhomes was my first encounter with the species who would become known as freedom campers. Their fame and notoriety increased during my travels. They cropped up everywhere, attracting headlines and statistics. Motorhome users doubled in the past decade to 110,000 international visitors and 40,000 New Zealanders, but they said they weren’t the same as freedom campers. The issue was shit, and how it was stored. Motorhome users shat in their own nest. Freedom campers drove vans and shat on the side of the road. Motorhome owners, said the president of the New Zealand Motor Caravan Association, were responsible Kiwis. Freedom campers ‘should be shot’. Being burnt alive was another option: in Nelson a man tried to set a campervan on fire while a couple slept inside it.
Motorhome owners didn’t want to be lumped in with freedom campers. They just wanted to be lumped in with each other, as closely as possible, going by the way they parked up at Ray’s Rest. I stepped inside ON THE MOOVE and talked to Jack Hema. He said he’d been on the road for two years. ‘Was in Little Waihī recently. You been there? Pipis there. Flounders there. Good place.’ His opinion of Kaiaua: ‘Good. Heaps of snapper.’ His plans for the following year? ‘I’ve done the whole of the South Island but I didn’t see everything so I’m going again. Westport. It’s good, that Westport.’ I expected him to mention fish. He said, ‘There’re wekas there. You seen ’em? Awesome bird.’
Manu Taitoko and Bev Ross said, ‘Come on in.’ They were in their motorhome, Dolph Inn. Also, they were in love. They had met at Paeroa police station – Bev worked in the watch-house, Manu served as an officer for 24 years. They quit, sold up, and had been on the road for four years.
Manu recalled the day Dolph Inn came into their lives. ‘It was at a motorhome sale. We just went to have a nosy – nothing else to do on a Sunday afternoon. By the time we came home we knew exactly what we were going to be doing.’
‘It was weird,’ Bev said. The moment I hopped on I thought: This feels like home. It wasn’t the fanciest bus, but… yeah. Strange, eh.’
Manu went outside to check on his kitset gazebo. He had lashed it down with big hulking ropes; it looked as if it would survive a tsunami. He looked along the line of other motorhomes and said, ‘We’ll take a chair and walk along a bit later. You always find someone to have a drink with. Friendly people everywhere.’
Percy and Dale Edwards were in Rusty Snail. ‘Come on in,’ they said. They were from Whanganui and had worked in the catering business. They quit, sold up, and had been on the road for twelve months. ‘Best decision we ever made,’ Dale said. She writes updates of their travels on a group email called The Rusty Report. The report is relentlessly enthusiastic.
Sitting in the front of Rusty Snail, Percy and Dale laughed and talked about the jobs they’d had in the past year – planting grapes, staffing fairground stalls at the A & P show in Gisborne, working the night shift at the freezing works in Paeroa, where Dale was on the slaughter floor. ‘I do the offal, the guts. Nothing goes to waste.’ Percy said, ‘My job is to cut out the diseases – pleurisy, things like that.’ Where to next? ‘Whichever way the bus is pointed,’ Percy said. ‘Sometimes we flip a coin: north or south?’
Dale said, ‘So many people, other motorhome owners, have said their only regret is not doing this before.’ Percy said, ‘Yeah, it’s a skins holiday.’ What? ‘Spend the Kids’ Inheritance Now.’
Outside, five white-faced herons poked for food in the mudflats. You could hear skylarks and oystercatchers, and inevitably there was a pair of spur-winged plovers. They were fighting off an Australasian harrier in the air – it was probably circling over a nest. ‘The closest interest I’d had in birds was KFC and muttonbirds,’ Dale said, ‘but since coming to Miranda and seeing the godwits – oh, man. I’m absolutely intrigued. Do you know how far those birds come? It’s amazing.’
A fine sea-spray mist smudged the view of the Coromandel. It felt as though the bright light in the sky and on the water would never go out. An immense tide brought in the birds and held them. Everywhere, birds. Around late
March the godwits would leave Miranda for Alaska.
Scott Base
Smoking in Antarctica
The first sign of life I encountered when I got inside the low long tunnel of Scott Base was a mohawk. It was attached to a Scotsman. It took me a while to put the two together.
Outside was the frozen white nightmare of Antarctica, with all its incredible geologies and absolute detachment from civilisation. On the day I arrived it was minus five degrees, which the natives considered benign. The sky was entirely blue. The sun glared on two mountains. There was Erebus – in Greek mythology, the god of Darkness and son of Chaos. The other, smaller mountain went by the less threatening name of Terror.
New Zealand clings to Scott Base as its presence in Antarctica, and Scott Base clings to the hard black edge of Ross Island. The base operates as a fridge in reverse: the cold is trapped on the other side of the door. Once inside, you feel as though you are in an underground tunnel. It feels subversive and exciting, but after a while the walls seem to close in. I estimated it took about seventeen seconds.
Fortunately, I located the door that led to the smoking deck. It offered a view of the frozen sea. Currents form a pressure ridge close to the shore, forcing up the ice in spectacular and mesmerising shapes, as though a surf wave is about to crash with a hiss and a roar but remains suspended. The sea under a thick lid of ice, the wind and the cold and the silence – awe is compulsory, but I opted out. The standard line about Antarctica is that it’s beautiful. I have no idea how that standard line came about. Antarctica was as awesome as death. Antarctica looks as though it’s in a state of shock. It looks like Hell has frozen over. Day after day, it looks like a cold day in Hell. In short, it’s hell.
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