Civilisation

by Steve Braunias

  I took my glass out on to the Last Post’s smoking deck. Dennis Dunbar lit up. His hair had turned white and his face bright pink. He said he had come to Mercer twelve years earlier. He’d been living in Pukekohe, on a lifestyle block he’d agreed to buy from a friend. The friend’s marriage broke up and the man’s lawyer kept phoning to demand he settle the deal. The lawyer was a woman. ‘I told her, “Listen. I only deal with men.” She had a right go at me. I thought, fuck this. I’m off.’ I saw a house for sale in Mercer. Drove up and couldn’t see a fucking thing, the mist was so thick, but it had a two-car garage, big enough for my Indie racing car, and I thought, right. The day I moved in the sun was shining and I could see straight out to the Coromandel ranges, the Waikato Heads and Mount Pirongia. No, true! Best views in New Zealand! And what I always remember is I looked over and saw this hawk. It fucking winked at me. Winked, the bugger. I could not believe it. I was set.’

  Hawks circled, and possibly winked, over Mercer all that wet Friday. On Sunday, the place surrendered to something else Dennis had mentioned. Amazing white Waikato fog rolled down the river, sat low on the swamps, and rubbed up against pine trees in the hills. It disappeared at the touch of rain, waited until the rain cleared, and then rolled back in. Strange to think of it descending through the ages, before the Māori and then after Mercer was settled, the town named after Captain Henry Mercer, shot through the head and killed at the battle of Rangiriri in 1863, descending when the railway line from Auckland reached Mercer in 1875, and in the winter of 1970, when Harvey and Jeanette Crewe were murdered.

  Mist descended on Sunday morning, when Des Thomas was asked for his age and replied with a startling kind of arithmetic: ‘I was eighteen when Arthur was arrested, so that makes me fifty-eight.’ The younger brother of Arthur Allan Thomas, he lives across the river in Pukekawa, on the road where the Crewes were killed in their home.

  He was in his work shed in 1979 when the phone rang with the news that Arthur had been granted a pardon. ‘It was Dad. He said, “Muldoon’s going to release Arthur today.” My wife Kay – my wife at the time – was getting the mail. I ran down to tell her.’ That night, Arthur spent his first night of freedom at Des’s house after nine years of prison but couldn’t sleep. ‘He came screaming in here,’ said Des, sitting at the kitchen table. ‘Kay had made him up a bed with flannelette sheets. He just couldn’t believe how soft they felt.’

  Talk of that night made the house feel like a kind of heritage site. The narrow hallway, the kitchen window looking out on to a field of onions – Des’s house acted as the culmination of a story that began the night of June 17, 1970, a night about which only minor facts remain established. Jeanette Crewe had cooked peas and flounder for dinner. She’d bought the fish earlier that week in nearby Meremere. She dusted it in flour and pan-fried it. She and her husband Harvey watched TV – Peyton Place played at 9.37 p.m. Harvey sat in an armchair. Jeanette knitted. Their brains were blown out by a .22. Five days later police were called to the house. The Crewes’ daughter Rochelle, eighteen months old, was found standing up in her cot. She had soiled nappies. Her parents were missing. Justice Robert Taylor would later set the scene in his introduction to the 1980 report of the Royal Commission: ‘A bizarre story of a bloodstained house, empty but for a weeping infant.’

  The Crewe murders remain the most famous in New Zealand history, and the most resonant. Something about them continues to touch a New Zealand nerve. Strangely, it’s not because of the people. No one ever talks about Harvey or Jeanette Crewe. There’s sympathy for Rochelle, the ‘weeping infant’, who has grown up not knowing who killed her parents. There’s sympathy, too, for neighbouring farmer Arthur Allan Thomas, who was stitched up by the cops and sentenced to life imprisonment.

  More than the cast, though, the murders have stayed in the national consciousness because of their setting: a double killing, at night, in rain and wind in the middle of winter, on a farm near Pukekawa, population 600. On the day he was murdered Harvey Crewe worked on the drains on his farm, went to a stock sale in Bombay, and inspected a bull in Glen Murray. Thomas’s alibi was cow no. 4 – it was crook, in a sling in a tractor shed, and Thomas was busy calving it. There were ten sheep in the Crewes’ paddock. A wheelbarrow was a kind of getaway vehicle: police believed it was used to transport Harvey Crewe’s body out of the house – across the thick carpet, past the china cabinet, the tea wagon, the writing bureau.

  The search for the bodies was carried out in heavy Mercer fog. They were found a month apart in the Waikato River. Both had surfaced only because of freak flooding and a tidal surge. Jeanette was discovered by whitebaiters in an area known as Devil’s Elbow. She was wrapped in bedclothes that were tied with wire. ‘I’m convinced in my own mind that she was raped,’ police inspector Bruce Hutton told the author David Yallop. She had been shot in the side of her head; it seemed to have happened when she was lying on the carpet with the left side of her face to the floor. There was an untouched flounder on the round dining table. There were blood drag marks. Jeanette had dropped seven stitches of her knitting. One of the needles was bent. There was blood in a saucepan in the sink.

  Arthur Allan Thomas came from a family of ten, was a country music fan, and especially liked Johnny Cash. His motive, police said, was sexual jealousy. They flushed out niggling irrelevant details. At a farewell party for a colleague in a topdressing firm in Dargaville, Thomas had bought someone’s ‘prized collection’ of pubic hairs. He had entertained fellow workers by playing secretly taped ‘love talk’ that had taken place with a girlfriend in his car one night in Maramarua. Then the police got relevant: according to the Royal Commission, they planted evidence.

  In his book Beyond Reasonable Doubt Yallop writes of Thomas: ‘His state of mind on hearing announced a verdict he knew to be wrong must have been one of unspeakable anguish.’ His family campaigned for his release. In memory of his jailed son, Arthur’s father created a weird sculpture by his letterbox on Mercer Ferry Road, using car axles and other replicas of court evidence. Investigative journalist Pat Booth got interested; later, so did Yallop, who wrote to the prime minister, Rob Muldoon, asking for Thomas to be pardoned.

  Thomas had been arrested on November 11, 1970; he was released on December 17, 1979. To evade journalists, he slipped into Des’s house.

  Justice Taylor ordered compensation of $1,096,450.35. The sum included a payment to Des of $5,420 for expenses. But it never actually ended for Des on that night when Arthur arrived at his front door a free man. He continued to badger the police and ask who killed the Crewes. He said, ‘I’ve been pointing the finger at this joker here whom I think did it.’ It was strange to hear him say the man’s name out loud. It was like being told a terrible secret.

  He brought out a document he’d typed up. It was a criminal profile of his suspect, who still lived in the district. Des had an archive of documents. They included an unanswered letter to Rochelle Crewe and a letter to Ross Meurant, a former policeman who had worked on the Thomas case. Des wrote, ‘Jeanette had teeth smashed out of her jaw, they were both shot in their own house, bundled up, weighted, and thrown into the Waikato River like farm animals.’

  It was 40 years after the killings, 30 years since Justice Taylor’s report – the case had become Des’s life’s work. ‘People say, “Oh, it’s wonderful you’re doing this for your brother.” It’s nothing to do with my brother. I’m talking about an unsolved double murder.’ Sir Bob Jones, who urged Muldoon to consider the Thomas case, attended the retrial and thought the charges were a travesty. His verdict on Arthur was, ‘A prize bunny.’

  Des Thomas, though, was quick-witted and watchful. He had led a life on the edges of his obsession. He drank at the Last Post most Thursday nights. He delivered natural bore water from his property (‘I’ve just had a real busy three months because of the drought’) and sold firewood. He had a gorgeous girlfriend, whom he introduced as Blondie. She said, ‘I’ve had to live with it. It’s Des’s thing. My feeling is the k
iller is someone no one has ever thought of.’

  Mercer was the love song of Caesar Roose. When Roose founded a shipping company he became the town’s chief employer and benevolent tsar. Everyone owed something to him. In 1921 he transported Princess Te Puea and her people from Mangatāwhiri to the new Tūrangawaewae Marae. A young Arthur Allan Thomas worked as a boilermaker in his shipyards.

  Roose followed the river, building cargo vessels and luxury launches, and dredges to tickle treasure from the riverbed: the finest sand in New Zealand was Mercer sand. He bought trucks and trailers. He owned a timber mill, a quarry, a coal mine. For about 40 years Mercer was in its pomp. Roose sold the business – the new owners soon gave up on shipping – and died in 1967. His name lives on: the bridge from Mercer to Pukekawa is called the Caesar Roose.

  ‘Look what I’ve found,’ Caesar Roose’s daughter Jeanette Thomas said at her marvellous home in Pukekawa. She presented a pair of mounted silver scissors, their jaws wide open. She had snipped the ribbon with them to open the bridge in 1972. She said, ‘Te Puea’s second husband told me once, “Your father kept Mercer from slipping into the water.”’ At 76, Jeanette was the curator of her father’s achievements; she spoke of nothing else at ‘Rio Vista’, the house she shared with her husband Bill. Earlier that day Des Thomas had said, ‘Say hi to Uncle Bill and Auntie Jeanette when you see them.’

  Bill sat in an armchair with a rug over his knees. A big, rangy man, he got up to give a guided tour of the house – the lovely cedar panelling, the balcony that looked over the river. Out the front was a giant cactus. We stood in darkness on the balcony and I asked about the terrible years when Arthur Thomas was in prison. He said that his brother, Arthur’s father, had never stopped fighting. ‘Strongest man I ever knew.’ Then he talked about breaking in the farm. ‘Two drums of 2,4,5-T every year to spray the gorse.’ There were gunshots in the dusk. Wise’s New Zealand Index, 1945 edition, said of Mercer, ‘Good duck and swan shooting.’ Jeanette on Mercer: ‘It was always known as the three Rs: river, railroad and Roose.’

  A very jolly and beautifully spoken woman, she had driven from St Heliers in Auckland, where she was helping look after her grandchildren, for the interview. There was a vast oil painting of her family on the wall – Bill and Jeanette and their six healthy and wealthy children, posed on hay bales. The walls also included heroic photos of the Roose shipyards and the Roose fleet. She brought out a photo of the kauri house on Tuoro Island in Mercer, where her father was born. Willows and silt have since covered the channel, and the island is now part of the west bank of the Waikato River. The house was destroyed by fire in the 1960s.

  The house in the picture bore a striking resemblance to one in a deceased estate advertised for sale opposite the Mercer Cheese Shop. Jeanette flung her hands up to her face in horror. ‘Oh!’ she said. ‘The cheek of those people! It’s not the same house at all, of course, but they used a photo of Dad’s home to advertise it. I went straight down there to hear an apology. I thought, I can’t have this. The whole thing was that he was born on an island and needed to do everything by boat. That’s why he knew so much about the river. To have people think his house was in town! I was so furious I decided to buy it.’ She bought the house? ‘Well, you see, they’d started the auction when I got there.’

  She made a vague reference to turning the house into a Caesar Roose museum. But two fabulous exhibits have been open to the public for the past 30 years: the old rusted and beached dredge and old rusted and beached launch on the banks of the river between Mercer and Meremere. Both had belonged to her father. Both are familiar to motorists and train passengers travelling beside the river. Both are reminders of that fond subject: What Mercer used to be.

  Now, disassembled by the motorway and bullied by the service centre, the town was a vacuum. Inevitably something had rushed to fill it in the distinctive shape of Joe Heta. Joe lived on the former Mercer reserve beside the river. It looked as though he had set up a commune – there were three buildings on the bare unfenced property, including the old Mercer Town Hall, raised and trucked to this forlorn spot – but apart from several dogs, including two white bichon frisé, he was alone on that Sunday afternoon in the mist, a lithe, nimble man of uncertain age, wearing a poncho, a hunting belt, a warm pair of pants, and boots. He had lightly tattooed hands, a nose ring and approximately four teeth.

  He was infamous for his protest in December 2008 against the launch of a 1.5-million-dollar tourist houseboat, Discovery 1, at Mercer. He said the owners had failed to consult his iwi, Ngāti Naho. Joe and ‘several accomplices’, according to the Waikato Times, pitched a tent on the riverbank directly in front of the boat’s path. This caused great embarrassment to Tainui elders, who were on hand to bless the boat. The owners waited until the tent was packed up, and launched Discovery 1 a few days later.

  Drinkers at the Last Post said, ‘Watch him. He’s full of bullshit.’ But he had charm, humour, eloquence, and possibly even a point. On the tremendously pompous website of the Ngāti Naho Iwi Development Trust Board, where he is referred to as ‘hereditary chief, by right of whakapapa and forum votes’, he lists the trust’s aims and objectives. They include honourable intentions – ‘To assist whānau in hardship … To encourage education’ – but also: ‘To apply for funds … To seek, accept and receive any donations.’ Joe refused to be interviewed or photographed. His visitors, he said, needed to have a complete understanding of Māori history in Mercer, or Te Paina, as Māori called the place. He said he had come from a tangi and needed silence to restore his soul. His soul seemed to be flexible, because he then said he would talk for money.

  About 30 or 40 minutes passed in this manner. He was good company, but it was so cold standing outside on his peculiar estate, even though the fog had rolled away. He said, ‘What’s the time?’ It was getting on to two. He said, ‘The fog’ll come back at half-past four.’ He was right. It was so thick that the only way of seeing the river was to stand at its edge. As soon as you took a step backwards, it had gone.

  Winton

  The Goodness of Swedes

  Graeme Ingils advertised himself as the strangest man in the Southland town of Winton, pop. 2,700. He had painted enormous and very angry signs on the front and side of his battered wooden house. They made for interesting reading in the otherwise perfectly normal country town. Here, near the bottom of New Zealand, a 20-minute drive to the last petrol station in the South Seas, was anarchy and a lot of paint. I walked across the road from my room in the Paramount Motel to speak to the author.

  A head poked around the corner of his house and shouted, ‘Shut up!’ His two lanky English pointers barked at the high metal front gate. The head disappeared, the dogs kept barking, and then Graeme emerged from the front door. He was small and hairy and his eyes weren’t right. I shouted, ‘I’m interested in the signs!’ A smile showed through his close grey beard.

  He opened the door of one of seven car wrecks that didn’t keep down the weeds in his yard, and ordered the dogs inside. They lay down on the back seat. He said, ‘Shut up!’ They stopped barking. He approached the gate, folded his arms and said, ‘Well, I had a head injury in 1986.’ This signalled the beginning of an ancient mariner’s tale. Before he got any further I said, ‘Are we going to stand here and talk at the gate, or do you think I could come in?’ He apologised for his manners and opened the gate. It was tied together with rope. Graeme had the look of a man who was falling apart at the seams.

  The wealth of Winton gloated beyond the front and back of his rotting house. His hopelessly overgrown backyard looked over the yards of the town’s biggest employer, the sawmill, which smoked day and night, while the greatest prosperity sailed past his front gates – Fonterra milk tankers, their precious cargo sloshing back and forth, pouring money all over Southland.

  Graeme had nothing. He was on a sickness benefit. We sat down by the front steps. ‘I can’t invite you inside,’ he said. ‘It’s filthy.’ The front steps were filthy. Graeme was
filthy. Two dead motor mowers, one on top of the other, were heaped in a corner of the filthy porch.

  The city of Invercargill was only 30 kilometres south on State Highway 96. Guests at the Paramount Motel were just across the road, reading terrible novels and smoking in the sunshine outside their rooms. It all felt a long way away; it was like looking back at childhood.

  I was in shadows. Graeme relented and said, ‘Okay, come inside.’ I wished I hadn’t insisted.

  The air was fresh and clean at Winton’s most famous addition to New Zealand history, the cemetery, where a headstone marks the death of Minnie Dean. The only woman to be hanged in New Zealand lived at ‘The Larches’ at the north end of town. The bodies of two children and a child’s skeleton were discovered on her 22-acre property after police dug up a freshly laid flower bed. Dean, the so-called ‘baby farmer’ who took in illegitimate children for a fee, was hanged on the morning of Monday, August 12, 1895, at Invercargill gaol. She had woken at four and requested her last meal: a nice hot cup of tea.

  The Press Association reported: ‘Hundreds of people assembled outside the gaol, and stopped three hours without breakfast. … During the execution, a boy fell from the roof of a building on to the ground, a distance of 30 feet, fracturing his skull.’ Dean was hanged at eight. Her body travelled by train to Winton. Her husband Charles – ‘feckless and dull of intellect’ a typically balanced report described him – picked her up on his horse and dray. On the way home he stopped in at Top Pub for a drink.

  It was only 40 years earlier that axemen had hacked Winton out of the bush and the town had attracted its first settlers – from Limerick in Ireland, and from Edinburgh, Ballantrae, and somewhere called Portchullen in Scotland. A turn-of-the-century photo on the wall at Winton’s Middle Pub – the other two pubs are Top Pub and Bottom Pub – shows the dirt track of the main street and a lot of tree stumps. It looks depressing. In reality it was probably even more depressing. Headline 1908: OLD AGE PENSIONER BURNED TO DEATH. ‘The Larches’ had burned down, unnoticed, in the night. The next morning the charred remains of Charles Dean’s body were raked from the – as a misprint had it – ‘smocking ruins’.