Civilisation

by Steve Braunias

  Allison King, 43, worked two days a week in the mall’s other supermarket, Countdown. ‘Fourteen dollars fourteen an hour. Plus I’m on the DPB.’ She was with her older sister Patsy. ‘There’re a lot of solo mums in Wainuiomata,’ she said. ‘We both are.’

  Patsy worked part-time for Armourguard. ‘I do the ATM machines. I’m destined to work with money and never have it.’ They were big women, and laughed and joked. They had come to the mall to buy Export Dry and to get their eyebrows done by ‘a lady at the back of the dairy’.

  Allison lived with Patsy and their brother and mum. ‘We pool our resources so we have a better life.’ Patsy said, ‘I always say a whānau house isn’t a whānau house if it doesn’t have whānau in it.’ They loved Wainuiomata, had never wanted to leave. ‘We know all the people,’ Patsy said. ‘We lead quite a sheltered life.’

  Sheltered from the outside world, sheltered by the hills on three sides – at the entrance to Wainuiomata a sign reads COAST ROAD 22KM. The road shoots through the valley, past swamp and big useless clumps of cabbage trees, past sheep resting on the muddy banks of the thin Wainuiomata River. It turns off one way to the cool shaded beauty of Rimutaka National Park, with its forest canopy and its swimming holes, and ends at Turakirae Head.

  Down on the beach the silvery sea collapsed in loud crashes, waves churning up the shingle shore. A seal colony carried on snizzing on rocks at the water’s edge. The tide turned back out to sea; the noise it made running through the shingle sounded like the cracking of bones.

  Bush and sea, and back in Wainuiomata Mall kids operated the Kiwicrane fun machine, rotating the metal arm in search of Twix chocolate bars. Children’s entertainment also included a carousel of jackasses with terrifying faces, and a coin-operated police car with sure-grip wheels. ‘When will our hearts be together?’ sang some Romeo on the intercom playing endless love songs.

  ‘Country music’s the most popular music here, because it’s a country town,’ said Kevin Shaw, manager of Wainuiomata’s amazing second-hand record store Wonderland. His stock contained 10,000 LPs. ‘The tried and true are always going to sell,’ he said, ‘Kenny Rogers, John Denver.’ Treasures included the complete works of Ted Nugent, and a rare copy of The Avengers Live at Ali Baba’s in Wellington on November 19, 1968. Kevin said, ‘I was there!’ A tired man walked in with his frisky skipping daughter and asked, ‘Do you have any Bryan Ferry on vinyl?’ Kevin tested the man’s selection on the shop record player. ‘Slave to love,’ sang the Romeo.

  ‘Reggae and hip hop are really strong in Wainuiomata,’ said Jason Fox, 30 and funky, the manager of 4 Elements Urban Clothing. He was playing them in his shop. That night he was going to see eight-piece reggae band 1814.

  ‘It’s a sell-out. That’s the thing about Wainuiomata – bands know to come here because we’re the only small town that consistently sells out.’ Veteran R & B act Ardijah sold out; seven-piece reggae band House of Shem sold out.

  Jason said he’d never leave Wainuiomata. He said he knew it was regarded as a hole ‘but there’s way poorer suburbs. It’s just that there’s always been a stigma about Wainuiomata ’cos, you know, it’s separated by the hill. It sets us aside. It’s kind of Wainuiomata versus the world, you know? It’s always been like that.’

  The republic of Wainuiomata. Town, suburb, whatever, it was a bright jewel, glowing like the emerald hills that surrounded it, a place of happiness and music. Reggae, endless love songs, country, Pantera – music swirled all around Wainuiomata, over the rooftops, in the whisper of the trees.

  Maromaku Valley

  The Ballad of Stan

  It looked as though long years had passed since anyone had set foot in the abandoned shack on the side of a dusty unsealed road that curled through a valley in the Far North. It was a little house on a prairie, a worker’s cottage in a state of picturesque disrepair, peeling and fading, with sparrows rustling leaves in the gutters. There were three orange kitchen chairs on the front porch. One had fallen on its side. It felt within reason to fancy that the other two chairs invited passers-by to stop and sit a while. I stopped and sat a while. It was early afternoon on a Friday in spring.

  The front door was nailed shut. The two front windows were dirty but unsmashed. Inside there was a glass kerosene lamp on top of a coal range, and the frame of a single bed in a front room on the right. Beside the bed were two empty tuna cans, a rusted Jensen clock radio, and an instruction manual for an electric blanket. The bed suggested a child but the shack lacked tenderness. A woman’s touch clings to a house and so does the presence of children. No matter how long the cottage had been abandoned, a trace or a sense would have remained of a family, but nothing hovered above the hard bare floorboards.

  A woman appeared: she had walked up the road from her nearby house. She was dark-haired and her accent was a mystery. It gave a lovely unfamiliar music to her voice. Her name was Jacqui Kehoe and she was forty-eight. She said, ‘I’m Chilean. I’ve lived here 28 years. I call myself a Chiwi.’

  A stiff spring wind raked the grass. Jacqui hugged herself in her zip-up jacket. She wore a pair of dark glasses that covered her face and she didn’t take them off. We stood and looked at the empty cottage. She said, ‘There was a lonely old fella who lived here.’ These were the first words I heard spoken about the ghost of Maromaku Valley.

  ‘We would visit him and make sure he was all right,’ Jacqui continued. ‘I always feared I’d come over and find him lying on the floor, dead. And then someone did find him lying on the floor, dead.’

  She couldn’t remember his name. ‘He had no family but a lady came to visit him. Not in that way. She was the only person he had who was anywhere close to being family.’

  When had he died? Jacqui couldn’t remember exactly; maybe last year, or early this year. But the cottage looked as though it had been empty for longer than a few months. There were cobwebs nearly as thick as ropes. She said it had looked even worse when the man lived there. ‘The house was so filthy. A complete mess. It was full of empty cans of salmon and tuna, which he fed to feral cats. And he smelled. I don’t think he ever had a bath. But he was a nice old fella. It was very sad when he died. He was lying down as though he’d tripped and fallen and hit his head. When I think of him lying on the floor, dead…’

  She shivered. I turned away from the dead man’s cottage, and changed the subject by asking about a house to the east, a striking example of modernist architecture. The entire front of it was glass. Jacqui said, ‘Have you heard of Sid Going?’ ‘Yes,’ I said, surprised to be asked about a legendary All Black half-back by a Chiwi on a country road. ‘It’s his daughter’s house. And that one’s his son’s house.’

  I thought back to photos of Going, a small, mobile, audacious player, and then remembered he was a Mormon. Jacqui said, ‘That house over there – Mormon. That one – Mormon. That one – Mormon.’ She continued pointing, moving her finger in an arc across Maromaku Valley. ‘Mormon. Mormon. Mormon. Mormon.’

  She had identified every house we could see except her own, so I pointed to it and said, ‘What about that house?’ She said, ‘Mormon.’ She was born a Catholic. ‘But they have missionaries, you see, and they teach you about the church. They taught our whole family.’

  Her parents had moved from Chile to Melbourne when she was a little girl. They were obviously considered ripe for an English-speaking God. ‘The Jehovah’s Witnesses came to our house first. They were nice people but I didn’t feel anything with them.

  ‘Then the missionaries came. They knocked on our door on a Saturday. My brothers and sisters and I, we were really angry. We wanted to go to the beach. It was just after lunch when they came. Three hours later they were still talking. We were spewing. Then, when they were leaving, they said, “We’ll come back next week.” We said, “Oh, great. Another wasted Saturday!” It was summertime and I was fifteen, sixteen.

  ‘But when they came back the next week, there was a moment. There were things that touched deep.’ Her hand wen
t to her dark glasses and she trembled. A spring afternoon in the Far North, and a Chiwi Mormon in tears at the memory of a crucial moment in her life, now standing outside an abandoned house where a nameless man had maybe last year or this year tripped, hit his head, and lain on the floor, dead.

  She brightened, and continued her story. Her entire family converted. She met John Kehoe of Maromaku Valley. ‘He was over there on his mission.’ He married her, brought her home to his dairy farm. ‘It’s been hard the past couple of years,’ she said. ‘There was so much rain last winter that the paddocks got all pugged up. Then we had a drought. But we survived it.’

  I was thinking how much I liked the faraway Chilean music of her voice when she had said that flat New Zealand sentence, ‘The paddocks got all pugged up.’ And then she said, ‘His name – it was Stan. He died in February.’

  Three years of appearing at homes as strange as Lance Roberts’ converted slaughterhouse loft in Hicks Bay, Jim Dennan’s dusty whare in Whakarewarewa, the igloo at Scott Base, the fales of Apia, Graeme Ingils’ wretched hovel in Winton, and it had come to this, nosing around outside a dead man’s abandoned shack in a valley of Mormons and kingfishers.

  I drew a pencil sketch of the two feijoa trees on the property. Both trees were hunched over; their branches nearly touching the ground. I made an inventory of the cans of cat food rusting beneath the tree. Once again, as ever, I was trying to fix the scene in my memory.

  Dusk falling above the desert in Waiōuru, bright sunlight on the dazzling white shell bank at Miranda. Overheard at a party in Tangimoana: ‘Remember Uncle Vic? He fell into a sawmill.’ Fred Nyberg, the cheerful hermit of Notown, among the Māori hens and the black beech: ‘I’ve had two daughters and two grandsons die. Sad. That’s the way life is, isn’t it?’

  On a Friday at 10.30 a.m. in Morrinsville, three little girls in pyjamas and slippers walked into the Pioneer Bakery; on a Saturday morning in Cromwell, near St Bathans, nine migrant fruit pickers from Vanuatu waited for the Salvation Army op shop to open – when it did they bought sheets, pillowcases, shirts, socks, and a weed eater to send home.

  Three years of itemising civilisation in the last settled country on Earth, wandering from one republic to the next. So many of the towns drew into themselves, asserted a kind of independence. It was there on the peninsula of Collingwood, a long way over Tākaka Hill; it was there in the swamp of Wainuiomata, minutes over the hill from Seaview. Distance was the point of each town’s existence. In the spaces in between, in the regional qualities of silence, something was missing. Even in the age of infill housing and noise control officers, much of New Zealand seemed to be on close terms with abstraction. Was this where country music stepped in and gave it shape?

  The novelist David Foster Wallace once shared an epiphany about country music: ‘What if you imagined that this absent lover they’re singing to is just a metaphor? And what they’re really singing is to themselves, or to God? “Since you left I’m so empty, my life has no meaning.” That … they’re incredibly existential songs. All the pathos and heart that comes out of them is they’re singing about something much more elemental being missing, and their being incomplete without it.’

  New Zealand, the lonely country, gothic and troubled, but that wasn’t the half of it. Much more than half of it was cheerful and inventive, waiting for the tide, filling its face with fresh food, knocking about on the porch with a beer and a burnt sausage. Tremendous friendliness shimmered in the air. Great fun was to be had in the pub in Waiōuru on Friday night, in the pub in Greymouth on Saturday night, in the pub in Mosgiel on Sunday afternoon. There was even fun to be had without alcohol. Every town was welcoming, hospitable.

  Three years of reading the local paper in the tearooms and the Subways. The headlines were enough: you could read them for directions. They mapped things out. FARMER CRUSHED BY COW. PITBULL STRANGLED IN DOMESTIC ROW. ACCUSED DRUNK IN DOCK. DESERT ROAD CLOSED. TRAMPER LOST. APPLICANTS QUEUE FOR 20 JOBS AT NEW KFC. MĀORI LEADER WANTS TO TAKE TROUT ‘AS A RIGHT’. WOMAN TASERED IN MOSGIEL. Three years of writing my own hieroglyphics in the Warwick 3B1 notebooks I took from town to town.

  There had been the pleasure and privilege of entering the lives of strangers. I was constantly reminded of the ringing endorsement that the historian Michael King gave New Zealanders in his famous closing passage of The Penguin History of New Zealand. It was one of the last things he ever wrote. King, lively, eminently sane, died in a freak road accident only a few months after the book was published in 2003. It was an instant best-seller.

  It has a happy ending. ‘Most New Zealanders, whatever their cultural backgrounds,’ King wrote, ‘are good-hearted, practical, commonsensical and tolerant. … They are as sound a basis as any for optimism about the country’s future.’

  So long as New Zealand actually had New Zealanders in it, but about a thousand were jumping across the Tasman every week. The great migration to Australia sometimes made it feel you belonged to a minority – the people left behind, the last remaining Māori and Pākehā, hemmed in by tides of Pacific Islanders and Asians and refugees from Africa, the Middle East and Hollywood. Look, there’s James Cameron! The director of Titanic and Avatar has New Zealand residency. He visits Mondays and Thursdays.

  I never came across anyone remotely famous. The farmers and shearers, the carpenters and carpet-layers, the birders and alcoholics, the New Zealanders, went about their business in a land of Lotto and kapa haka, Harvey Norman and Dick Smith, Sky Sports and the widening gap between rich and poor.

  Three years of motels. There was an afternoon in the Gibson Court Motel in Rotorua when I did nothing more than watch motes of dust in the sunlight. Unable to sleep in the Sunset Motel in Greymouth, I got up at two a.m. and walked across the Cobden Bridge, my face as cold as the fast, black Grey River that rushed to the sea.

  I wanted to see where other people lived, but every chapter is an unwritten record of loneliness. I was homesick for the house where I lived with my girlfriend and our daughter, who turned two, then three, then four years old. They came to the airport to pick me up after I got back from Antarctica. After those white days and white nights, seeing the two of them was like coming back to life in full colour.

  My daughter laughed to hear the names of places I visited. Greymouth. Mosgiel.

  ‘What was it like, dad?’ she always asked.

  I always told her, ‘You’d love it.’

  Maromaku Valley veers off the State Highway just past Towai Tavern. The road leads north, winding through farmland, forest, bush, scrub and wetland, and 30 or 40 minutes later joins the highway again at the hard-case, hard-done-by town of Moerewa. It just about passes as a scenic detour. It’s dense and damp. There are rushes and flax and manuka, and heavily bearded cabbage trees. Azolla rubra, New Zealand’s native floating fern, covers swamps in blankets of scarlet. The water attracts a tremendous population of kingfishers, which you would expect, although I also made seventeen sightings of that bright Australian parrot, the eastern rosella.

  But its strangest feature is the Maromaku Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It may be the loveliest, most bucolic setting for a Mormon temple anywhere in the world. White and gleaming on an immaculate lawn and beside four magnificent California palm trees, the building presented itself as a tribute to the two great forces in the valley: God and the Goings. Percy Going built the first Mormon chapel in Maromaku. His son Cyril had six children with his first wife, but she got breast cancer. A young Māori woman, Mary, nursed her. After his wife died, Cyril married Mary and had another six children, including Sid. Mary is now 103. She doesn’t need glasses to read.

  The condensed family history lesson was courtesy of Karen Horsford. Karen and her friend Pauline Pokoina were at the church on Friday afternoon, making props for a music festival that night at the ‘stake’ – Mormon vernacular for church – in nearby Kaikohe.

  ‘Most of us are related to each other in the valley,’ Pauline said. ‘Karen’s husband is
my second cousin. Did you say you met Jacqui? I’m her husband John’s sister.’

  ‘Then you have situations where two Tucker boys married two Going sisters, and two Rouse brothers married two other Going girls,’ Karen said. ‘A lot of that goes on. I suppose it’s because you always go everywhere with your brothers and sisters when you’re young.’

  They talked about their own families. ‘My sweetheart is the stake president,’ Karen said about her husband. ‘His name’s Maxwell but everyone calls him Butch.’

  Pauline and her family moved back to Maromaku from Auckland three years ago. ‘My eldest son Quincy, who’s eighteen, was seeing a girl in Auckland whom I wasn’t too happy about. When my brother asked if we’d like to come and work on the farm, I snapped at it. But actually she would’ve been a better influence than the girlfriend he’s got here. That’s the irony of it.’

  She sighed. He’d left the church, she said. ‘He’s bucking the system. He says he believes in the church and one day he’ll be back, but right now he’s not comfortable with it.’ She said, ‘It’s very disruptive.’ Then she said, ‘It hurts.’

  I changed the subject. Yes, Pauline and Karen said, of course they were both related to the Going family. They merrily explained which cousin was whose sister who had an aunt who married which Going. They could account for everyone in the valley that way, but there was an odd man out: the ghost of Maromaku, who had lived by himself in the valley for about 25 years. ‘His name was Stan Stuart,’ Karen said, ‘and he died in March.’

  Pauline said, ‘His cottage was – bizarre’s a good word. He had piles of chocolate biscuit wrappers, margarine containers, Weet-Bix packets, ginger kisses wrappers, boxes of empty beer cans. He’d made tracks between the piles. It was very orderly rubbish. He’d cleared room on his one table for a stack of library receipts going back to the first book he’d ever taken out.’