Tangimoana
Lament of the Ocean
You couldn’t hear yourself cough in Sanson. All the world and his wife gunned its engines through that dot on the map of the North Island at the intersection of State Highway One and State Highway Three. It was like a delta town, small and quivering on the banks where two great roaring rivers met, but there was nothing watery about it. The dry, biscuity flatlands of the Manawatū Plains stretched out as far as the eye could see. There wasn’t much to see. The only thing that rose above the line of the horizon was exhaust smoke burning from cars and rigs and horse floats about to pass through Sanson, pop. 450.
The motel’s striking colour scheme – white with red trim – gleamed in the bright summer light, and put you in mind of the Red Cross. A caravan park at the back of the property was a retirement home for John Field, 74, a big man with a big red nose and a body as brown as a chestnut. He sat outside his caravan wearing only a small pair of shorts. ‘The ex-missus is in Havelock North and I’ve got two children somewhere in London. So I’m happy.’
He had set up a portable TV on a picnic table and was watching Trackside. ‘I don’t gamble,’ he said, ‘but if I was I’d be making a lot of money.’ How much money? ‘Well, I predicted the winners of a quinella in Wairoa yesterday. Five dollars would’ve got me two hundred and twenty.’ Betting was a luxury. He stuck to the necessities. There was an eighteen-can carton of Double Brown at his feet, and a loaf of bread and a pair of pliers on the picnic table.
At the petrol station, Peter White from Bulls was inside paying for gas. His large beard looked as coarse as horsehair. He’d graffitied his own car. A theme had emerged: POLICE SUCKS. ACC SUCKS. RUTH SUCKS.
The headlines drew a crowd – me and a teenage kid. I observed, ‘A lot of things suck.’ The kid nodded, and said, ‘Apparently.’ I asked, ‘Why d’you think Ruth sucks?’ He said, ‘Be a girlfriend who dumped his arse. He’s all bitter and shit.’
The kid was wrong about the girlfriend and right about the psychological state. Ruth, Peter said, was Ruth Dyson, a former ACC minister. It was under her watch that the department had wronged him.
Peter ranted about his ancient grievances for a while and then drove away. Everyone drove away at Sanson. That was the point of the place. The few who remained gathered after dark at the Sanson Club, a private bar set up in a classroom of the former primary school. John at the caravan park claimed the school closed down because it was beneath the flight path of the nearby Ōhakea air base.
Sanson’s theme was noise. Automobile traffic, air traffic – such volume for a dot on the map. It inspired a quest for peace and quiet. Half an hour away, out west, was the peace and quiet of beach settlement Tangimoana.
The road to Tangimoana led past low fields of crops. It led past Ōhakea, where a black RNZAF helicopter fluttered and flapped like a lovely black moth, and indulged in a lengthy exercise that had something to do with lowering a rope. There was an amusing AA sign that claimed: OHAKEA DOMAIN. It pointed to an abandoned swimming pool painted eggshell blue. The fields glowed golden in the sun. There was the Clydesdale Memorial Hall, stucco and nailed shut. Everywhere, there were white cabbage butterflies, great clusters filling their boots and scoffing the light green roadside, falling as thick as snow.
And there, at the end of the line, was Tangimoana, pop. 290. It was sandy and there weren’t many streets. It smelled of pine needles and sea salt. A ginger cat stretched itself on a white windowsill; an old man stretched himself on a bicycle. There was one guest staying at the caravan park, an old divorcée with pleading eyes. There was one telephone box outside the town’s one store, the Country Shoppe, which had closed down.
A river-mouth town, a fishing village. The tide was unusually low that afternoon. It surprised the skipper of an aluminium boat tauntingly named No Worries. He’d got a good catch of gurnard, crossed the bar back into Tangimoana, but as the tide streamed out the motor wouldn’t catch, and the boat had to be roped and pulled back through mud to the boat ramp.
The light in the sky began to pale. The sand was sketched with driftwood, great crates of the stuff, lying white and sun-bleached, as smooth as bone. It was a classic west coast beach, with big rollers crashing on the shore and gouging out the dark sand. A family of three parked at the boat ramp. A little boy leaped out of the car, and immediately kicked and chased a rugby ball. His mother wore a T-shirt that read TWATZ UP DARTS. The surf’s muffled collapse, the warmth of the sun, No Worries… I drank in the sight of bar-tailed godwits legging it through the low tide and happily dozed off, resting my head on the sand.
A brief history of Tangimoana, part one:
March 15, 1965: A swordfish is washed ashore on the beach.
July 13, 1987: The decomposed body of a nineteen-year-old Massey University student is found in the dunes. It has been there for several weeks. ‘No suspicious circumstances,’ say police.
August 16, 1990: The decomposed body of a 30-year-old man from Bulls is found in the dunes. It has been there for four months. ‘No suspicious circumstances,’ say police.
October 25, 1993: Clothed in a bra, jeans and socks, the body of teenager Michelle Dermer is found in a Tangimoana swamp, eight weeks after she was last seen leaving a friend’s house to walk 100 metres to her home. ‘Suspicious circumstances,’ say police.
They interview several persons of interest, even her brother Jason, who is in prison serving a life sentence for killing a student and burying the body in a shallow grave in Lindis Pass. The cause of his sister’s death is ruled accidental.
January 13, 2010: A pilot whale is washed ashore on the beach.
The chronicle of death on the beach was courtesy of Ron Gardner, 81, the first person I talked to in Tangimoana. He was walking along the pavement. That sentence needs completing: he was walking along the pavement by himself. His wife Joan had died six months ago. ‘I’m just on my own now,’ he said. ‘The neighbours keep an eye on me. I got a pushbike. I try to keep fit.’
He was fit as a fiddle, slim, with a good straight back and working man’s hands, but he was lonely. In fact, his heart was broken. He lived life as a full-time widower. How was he coping? He said, ‘Not very good.’
We walked back around the corner to his house. ‘There’s Joan,’ he said. He pointed to a photo of her on the card prepared for her funeral. There were photos of Ron’s two brothers. ‘They’re both dead now. That one had his own fishing trawler. He picked up survivors off the Wahine in it.’
Ron and Joan had raised their family in Wellington. When Ron retired, he bought a caravan. ‘We went all over the place.’ Where to? ‘Well, we got as far as Foxton.’ He heard about a section further up the coast at Tangimoana and bought it that same day. There were two houses on it: a yellow stucco bach, which his son’s family sometimes stayed in, and his own modern home. He’d stacked firewood for winter. The contents of his fridge were milk, butter, eggs, three bottles of beer, and an enormous jar of mayonnaise.
He found Joan’s scrapbook of news clippings about Tangimoana. A friend had started it and later passed it on to Joan, who kept it up to date by snipping the few stories about Tangimoana from The Dominion and Manawatu Evening Standard. As well as reports about decomposing bodies, there were a lot of stories about the building that had made Tangimoana famous.
The US spy station had opened on August 18, 1982. Ron’s scrapbook contained numerous newspaper stories quoting government officials denying it was a US spy station. The denials kept coming, even after 1984, when peace campaigner Owen Wilkes revealed it was a US spy station. That same year Listener journalist David Young wrote, ‘It has a high-frequency, direction-finding (HF-DF) antenna array, which acts like a giant vacuum cleaner, identifying and sucking up radio communications traffic within 3,000 kilometres.’
No it hasn’t, responded government officials, somehow keeping a straight face. It was an X-file played out as pure farce. For years, the worst-kept secret in New Zealand was the existence and operation of a US
spy station, its sophisticated HF-DF antennae array on non-stop listening alert in the unlikely seaside village of Tangimoana.
The Americans had chosen the site in Tangimoana because of its obscure location on government land, and also because its iron-sand base offered a low ‘noise floor’. The spies could listen in on top-secret yap in perfectly silent conditions. They, too, had come to Tangimoana for the peace and quiet.
Good for them. Was it good for Tangimoana? Intelligence-gathering among the quiet iron sands, electronic interceptions as rabbits bred exactly like rabbits outside the tall barbed wire fence…
‘I was fortunate enough to speak to an old-timer who had a hand in rigging the antenna,’ wrote a correspondent to the website Mysterious New Zealand. ‘One particularly high-gain array (the curtain type – looks like a giant spider web) they were installing began throwing riggers around by zapping them with RF energy. This was being picked up from the HF transmitter site at Hīmatangi 30-odd kilometres away. …Talk about free power eh.’
But what else was released? What paranoias and manias were conducted through the fields of static? What psychic voltage moved in the air? What’s the frequency, Kenneth? It can’t have been any good. The point of the US spy station was harm. What did it do to Tangimoana, population allegedly 290?
There was a story missing from Ron and Joan’s scrapbook. ‘What’s that?’ he asked, smiling. I said, ‘The vigilantes.’ He said, ‘Oh. Them. Well. A bad business.’ He’d stopped smiling. ‘Leave me out of it.’ He put on the kettle for a cup of tea in the spotless kitchen. The radio played the Elton John and Kiki Dee duet ‘Don’t Go Breaking My Heart’.
She was in her garage in Tangimoana on Friday afternoon building a trailer. She looked like she knew what she was doing. She knew what she doing. ‘My background is building. I was with Fletchers. I did project management construction.’ She was 41, with bright sparkling eyes and short curly hair just beginning to grey, wearing work boots and an old pair of jeans loose around her slim hips, and her bare arms in her T-shirt were black with grease. She was the infamous Tracy Thomsen, up on charges of kidnapping and threatening to kill.
Tracy was with her husband Marcus, 37, an engineer and tractor driver up on the same charges. I interviewed them in the front yard and Tracy did most of the talking. Marcus bowed his head and seemed reluctant to be there.
Tracy said, ‘The whole thing stuffed us. Emotionally for me, I couldn’t handle it. Emotional fucking wreck.’
I said, ‘Did you go on medication?’
She said, ‘Nah, I went on alcohol – alcohol-induced comas sometimes. That’s the only way I knew how to cope with it and get to sleep so my mind wouldn’t be going all the time. I was a very angry, bitter person so I made it my mission to get that family out of town. Come hell or high water. And they ended up moving out of town. Yep. I thought, well, this isn’t going to be all in vain.’
I said, ‘How did you achieve that?’
She said, ‘They had all the windows in their house smashed in the middle of winter. They had no water. No vehicles – they had their motorbikes stolen from outside their house while they were in bed, and taken down the river and burned out. Just made sure their life here was hell. Yep.’
Her bitter little satisfaction didn’t seem to do her much good. ‘The whole thing blew my whole life apart,’ she said. ‘Lost my business. Police took away my liquor licence and firearms licence.’ Then she said in a quieter voice, ‘Me and Marcus split up for a few months.’ He’d returned only that day. Her face crumpled and she made a tremendous effort to fight back the tears. She lost the fight.
I turned to Marcus and said, ‘How does it sit with you that you now have a criminal record?’
He said, ‘Yeah, nah, it’s good. I’m not ashamed of what I done at all. It’s good to walk around and know that I done the right thing.’
‘What would you have changed?’
‘Not told anyone. I wouldn’t have told anyone and gone by myself so no one would have known.’
‘And done what?’
He laughed.
I said, ‘Beaten the shit out of him?’
‘Ahhh, yep. Probably. Yep.’
‘But you’d have been done for assault.’
‘No, because no one would of known. And no one would of been any the wiser.’
‘But he’d have probably reported it to the cops.’
‘Well,’ Marcus said, ‘he probably wouldn’t be here to report it.’
I really wasn’t sure whether ‘here’ meant Tangimoana or whether it meant alive. Marcus said, ‘If you were going to do it by yourself, then no one would know. If he’s just walking around in the middle of the night, and no one knows he’s there, and no one knows you’re there… But the way we did it was just… looking back at it, it was just stupid.’
A brief history of Tangimoana, part two:
Tracy and Marcus Thomsen, their close friend Kieran Grice, and two other men were arrested on September 2, 2007 for what they did that Sunday night in Tangimoana to 16-year-old Jonathan Blair. The police found him in a bruised and bloody mess, with his wrists and ankles bound by cable ties. The charges included kidnapping, assault, intent to injure, and threatening to kill. The accused were looking at prison. They pleaded not guilty. They said they acted on the advice of police when they restrained Blair.
Yes, they said, they wanted to run Blair out of town, because they believed he was the culprit behind a wave of petty crimes.
No, they said, they didn’t threaten that they were going to bury him in the forest.
Yes, they said, they used physical force to take him out of the house.
No, they said, they didn’t beat him up.
Their actions were reduced to one exciting word that looked so good on banner headlines: VIGILANTES.
The whole drama dragged through the courts for three years and three trials – two were declared mistrials – until some charges were dropped, Tracy, Marcus and Kieran pleaded guilty to other charges, and were each given sentences requiring them to perform community work.
It seemed like a light sentence, but they were adamant they shouldn’t have been up on anything in the first place. The court case had changed their lives for the worse. They felt victimised, sensationalised as ‘vigilantes’, and now they had to pay back crippling legal fees. They all said they’d never done anything wrong, that they’d tried to do the right thing.
What was the moral of the story? Marcus said, ‘Don’t get caught.’
Tracy said, ‘Don’t do what a police officer tells you to do.’
They took some satisfaction in the irony that only person in the whole drama who went to prison was Jonathan Blair. He was sentenced to eight months for a range of petty offences, including a burglary he had committed the night before he was due to give evidence against Tracy, Marcus and Kieran. He’d been caught in a derelict building intending to steal copper wire. After being granted bail, he had popped into another courtroom down the corridor, and taken the witness stand to tell his story of the night he was set on by vigilantes.
Tracy said, ‘The paper made it like these big strong adults beat the living shit out of this poor little kid.’
I said, ‘Wasn’t that the case?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I wish it was.’
‘What about threatening to kill him?’
‘Nah, fuck off. We wanted to run him out of town, definitely. We said, “You’ve got to leave town. Just stay away.” Definitely we said that.’
She described Blair as a big kid with peroxide hair and FUCK THE POLICE tattooed on his knuckles. He had come to live with his aunt and uncle in Tangimoana and suddenly there was a spate of crimes. ‘Lawnmowers getting taken, a couple of houses broken into. I heard a story that Ross down the road caught him taking whitebait out of an old guy’s whitebaiting bucket.’
Then, she said, her shop was broken into and burgled. What got taken? ‘Cigarettes and lollies.’ She suspected Blair. She went to see him at his aunt
and uncle’s house. ‘The only smokes they ever bought from me were Longbeach 40s because they’re the cheapest, but the uncle, the aunt and Jonathan were all smoking different kinds. One was John Brandon, one was Winfield Red. I forget what the other one was.’ I was impressed she remembered two of the brands. In any case, the family denied any wrongdoing. Tracy called the police, who came out to the shop several days after the burglary, said there wasn’t anything they could do, and left.
Around that time the shop was graffitied with the words BITCH, SLUT and WHORE. Then Tracy came across Blair and a teenage girl loitering outside the shop at one-thirty in the morning. Blair was carrying an iron bar. He took off. She called the police, who came out that night with a warrant for his arrest. They left empty-handed. Blair had moved out of his uncle’s house. People heard that the uncle had got drunk, given his nephew a thrashing, and thrown him out. No one knew where he was staying. He’d gone to ground in a river-mouth town with a population of 290.
Then, she said, ‘It all went out of control, really.’
So, Sunday night in Tangimoana, September 2, 2007: the crash of the Tasman Sea, mosquitoes breeding in the backwash of water behind the camping ground, creepy eavesdroppings at the American spy base hidden behind trees. Tracy, Marcus and their son drove to Palmerston North to watch The Simpsons Movie. It was Father’s Day. They drove home, and got to bed at eight-thirty.
‘So then,’ said Tracy, ‘we got woken up by Kieran. He’s in the volunteer fire brigade and they’d got put on standby because Jonathan Blair had threatened to burn down the shop and a house. He’d beaten up someone that day, a young guy at university, and been driving around town all day like a lunatic in a silver Honda, and he was still hiding from the police, and we got word he was hiding out at this girl’s place.’
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