Fish of the Week

by Steve Braunias

  I recently headed towards the RSA’s eastern shores. On a Friday night in Te Aroha, the RSA was only slightly less silent than the grave. A notice on the wall listed members who were ailing in hospitals or nursing homes. But there was a vibrant display case of memorabilia, including the menu for a slap-up dinner in 1918 given to servicemen who had returned from the killing fields. Te Aroha and the surrounding Piako district suffered badly in that war. A graceful Aleppo pine—grown from a cone at Lone Pine hill in Gallipoli—stands in the town’s domain as a souvenir of what happened in 1915.

  Gallipoli gave birth the following year to the RSA; this year marks the organisation’s ninetieth anniversary. It’s also the Year of the Veteran, although so few remain. The last New Zealander to fight in World War I died in November—farewell, Victor Rudd, 104, boot repairer of Greymouth. Every issue of the RSA journal runs two or three pages listing the names of the recently dead under its lugubrious headline LAST POST. But membership is almost 130,000, towards its all-time high of 136,119 in 1947. Yes, an RSA acts—and ought to act—as a quiet waiting room for old soldiers; it also attracts anyone wanting warmth. It hosts debutante balls. It has snooker tables, gambling machines, bands. It matches past with present. Like a marae, a brothel, and Work and Income offices, the RSA is a vital bastion of every modern New Zealand community.

  It sometimes also offers superb views. In Waihi, the RSA is a piece of prime real estate basking in all-day sun, looming high on a hill above the sea. It has the smug feel of a vineyard—on a Saturday afternoon, it was full of the provincial nouveau riche— but traditional values remain. Above the bar was a notice about dentures. The RSA spends two million dollars a year on welfare services, towards such requirements as new teeth and new spectacles. But there are other, more disturbing needs. In 2005 there were 1,932 psychiatric referrals, and the RSA recently reported a high rate of suicide among its veterans.

  Homicidal urges, too, might be on the rise, thanks to the government’s decision to ban smoking. How has the RSA responded? You might think that Mount Maunganui—which boasts the highest membership in New Zealand—would siphon off some its handsome profits by creating a splendid garden bar. Instead, it has hammered up something outside the front door in the size and shape of a bus stop. Poor show. This mean little gesture is out of keeping with the club’s generosity of spirit, and its keen sense of fun, which is one way of describing the bar staff ’s startling uniform of tropical shirts.

  The fourth RSA on my tour was in Waiapu, near Tikitiki. Blink and you’ll miss it? You could miss it if you came armed with binoculars and a bloodhound. But when I stumbled across this hidden treasure, I was in like a shot—or like a muffled shot, because I got wrapped up in the thick strips of plastic that serve as the front door. Inside was a deep calm, and a cheerful barman. An alcove next to the bar served light meals. It was Thursday afternoon. School kids came in and bought ice-blocks; sipping on her tea, an elderly European woman chatted in te reo to an elderly Maori man who quaffed a beer; a portrait of the Queen hung next to a portrait of Apirana Ngata. It was a tuckshop, a tea room, a pub. Like all RSAs, it was also a museum.

  I hate the aggressive bluster that attaches itself to Anzac Day. There is something about it that glories in war, that carries the stink of what is happening right now in Iraq. There is something else about it, though, something good and true; it will come this Tuesday, when the lights are dimmed in RSAs up and down the country, as they are every night, usually at 6 p.m., from Kaitaia to Bluff, possibly even in quiet Waiapu, and an official reads the Ode, and all present answer with the murmured response: ‘We will remember them.’

  [April 23]

  Beef and Liberty VI

  Tomorrow is judgment day. Tomorrow, the nation turns its gaze to Palmerston North, where a high court of judges will sit at a high table, tuck in their bibs, and tuck into sixteen sirloins to decide who produces New Zealand’s best steak. I am one of the judges. I am ready. I am hungry. Hungry, too, for the success of others; tomorrow’s Steak of Origin awards is the premier event in the meat industry, bringing unrivalled prestige to the winners —and carrying with it the hopes and appetites of ordinary New Zealanders, who have every right to expect prime succulent beef on their plates.

  First thing tomorrow morning I fly to Palmerston North—cattle class, I presume—and will make sure to look east, towards the holy pastures of Pahiatua, where legendary Angus breeders Joe and Lea Fouhy will be hoping to achieve a stunning third consecutive triumph at the Steak of Origin awards. I will make my way immediately to the Arena Manawatu stadium grand stand. For the next three days, the stadium will host the annual Beef Expo—sales, on-the-hoof competitions, all the usual fun of an animal fair. It’s also a chance to come face to face with the famous Angus and Hereford breeds, as well as the docile Shorthorn, the hardy Simmental and the majestic South Devon, before I sit down to eat them.

  I am acutely aware of the grave responsibility. Over the past few months, a furious debate about the quality of New Zealand steak has bellowed on this page. Five columns have addressed the subject. Where are the best steakhouses in New Zealand? Is it a myth that we export our best beef? Is our steak anywhere as good as the steak produced in Argentina, Scotland, Australia and the United States? Is it, perhaps, the best in the world? Is it, as some heretics claim, the worst in the world? Does the meat industry put more emphasis on quantity than quality? Have good butchers been replaced by rip-off delicatessens? Does your supermarket supply cuts of Angus Prime and Hereford Pure? Why are those New Zealand Beef and Lamb Marketing Bureau television commercials starring Sarah Ulmer so lame?

  Readers have asked, answered and argued these and other questions with such ferocity that it can leave no doubt about the importance of steak in our daily lives. It’s a matter of pride, a matter of heritage. We look out on this green and pleasant land at so many handsome beasts, in Northland, Southland, Taranaki, the West Coast, the Manawatu, all over the shop—I recently talked to a cattle breeder who lives on lonely d’Urville Island. We gargle on so many barbecued steaks during summer. The rest of the year, we baste, we marinade, we pan-fry, we oven-roast; I recently bought an electric vertical grill for only ten dollars in Te Kauwhata.

  It’s this kind of commitment, and the evidence of five columns devoted to steak, that led organisers to invite me to judge the awards. As such, I was annoyed to read a recent newspaper article claiming I had ‘manoeuvred myself into the job’. There was also the utter nonsense of the next sentence: ‘Mr Braunias thought he would be as suitable for the job as last year’s judges, the Evers-Swindell twins.’ They brought their row boat. I bring only my greed.

  Now in its fourth year, the Steak of Origin awards has received over 220 entries; about sixty were chosen as semi-finalists after they were measured by a Lincoln University tenderometer, calibrated to a person’s bite. But there is more to a steak than tenderness. A semi-final panel of judges, including that cheerful glutton, chef Jo Seagar, decided on the top sixteen. These are the sirloins I will take great pleasure in devouring.

  I have been in training. Chided by reader John Simpson for what he saw as my apparent ignorance of South Island steak, I nearly wept tears of joy recently while scoffing a Hereford steak at the Punakaiki Resort, and a week later I was rendered speechless by the Angus rib-eye on the bone served at that magnificent Christchurch steakhouse, Mu.

  Tomorrow, the menu is clean-cut—sirloins, cooked in oil, served medium rare. The judges convene at the Novotel hotel at five sharp. Tasting commences at 5.30 p.m. My fellow judges are chef Greg Heffernan and former rugby league coach Graham Lowe. According to the programme, we have an hour and fifteen minutes to chow down on the sixteen sirloins, then compare notes and decide on the winners of four categories—best of British, best of European, best of cross-breed and best of commercial brand—as well as judge the supreme award. And then dinner is served. Dinner? Is that steak number seventeen? And then Lowe makes a speech. And then dessert is served, which may or may not inclu
de a morsel of steak.

  Finally, the announcements are made at 9.45 p.m. The moment of truth made public. Good luck to all who have entered. A nation holds its breath; one of the chief pleasures of living in New Zealand is our food. One of the chief pleasures of our food is steak.

  [May 21]

  News, 1865

  One of the strangest buildings in all of New Zealand is in Church Street, Opotiki. Earlier this year I stayed around the corner— everything in Opotiki is around the corner—at a camping ground. Two very tall, very thin Washington palms rose and swayed like poles at the entrance. Late afternoon sun caught the silver backs of mullet leaping out of the Motu River. I wished the dirty great rock I threw had caught the dirty great rat racing along the riverbank. A sign outside a Maori carving studio advised: NO WOMEN. Blokes relaxed after work with a drink in their hand on the pavement outside the Stag and Boar. The bridge was painted green and white—all the bridges around the East Cape were painted green and white. It was a quiet Monday; the town’s elegant war memorial was lit up after dark, and glowed like a lamp; some clown had smashed in the glass windows of a phone box.

  I came to visit the Hiona St Stephen’s Anglican Church. A guidebook advises you to ask at the museum for the key to the front door. I asked an old boy behind the counter. He didn’t know anything about it. But a woman came to his rescue, and produced a heavy metal key.

  ‘The story of this church,’ write the authors of a church booklet which I bought for five dollars, ‘includes happenings that have occurred in few other churches.’ It’s a handsome church, not beautiful, rather stiff, formal, in good nick. Knowledge of those ‘happenings’ makes it a terrifying place to look at, gave me the creeps, made me tread gently. It was built in 1863. The timber was pit-sawn from the Otara and Waioweka valleys. Governor Grey coughed up a hundred quid. Those hopelessly maligned colonists, the Church Missionary Society, appointed German immigrant Reverend Carl Völkner as the parish priest in 1859. The church was named Hiona, the Maori word for Zion.

  Völkner was killed on March 1, 1865. He was taken prisoner by followers of the Pai Marire prophet Te Ua Haumene, led to a willow tree near the church, and hanged: his body hoisted up while he continued shaking hands with his murderers. They took him down an hour later and drank his blood. Then his head got cut off. It was taken into the church. And then? ‘No one can be sure what happened on that tragic day,’ mutters the church booklet. Actually, it’s an established historical fact that Völkner’s eyes were gouged out by a man called Kereopa Te Rau, who described one eye as the British parliament, the other as the Queen, before he dropped them into a chalice and swallowed them, probably whole.

  The chalice is behind a glass case in the church. I looked at it for a long time. Völkner’s remains are buried in front of the pulpit. The marble reads: ‘He suffered martyrdom.’

  He suffered something. But the notion that Völkner was a New Zealand martyr has changed, utterly. Völkner’s death started as a settler myth—a man of God slaughtered by heathen savages. Five men, including the Te Whakatohea chief Mokomoko, were charged with murder. The trial lasted a day. The men were hanged in Mount Eden Prison. As a further reprisal, Grey confiscated vast tracts of Maori land. Its return is subject to the Waitangi Tribunal. In New Zealand, the past is never another country: it’s a place that always gets updated.

  In 1875 the church was renamed the Church of St Stephen the Martyr. ‘In hindsight this reason was incorrect,’ according to the church booklet, ‘because the definition of a martyr is someone who dies for his or her faith.’ Völkner was a government spy.

  His death has become another kind of story, another way of telling history. It used to be an imperial history. In 1946, A.H. Reed published a document that he claimed was Makao Karatima’s eyewitness account of the killing: ‘They held the head over the smoke of a fire to dry the blood … The head was wrapped up in Mr Völkner’s own shirt. The eyes were taken out just outside the church before they took it in … Kereopa then said everyone must bite Völkner’s neck. The people in the church were now in such a frenzy of madness that I became frightened and crawled away.’

  Yes, quite sensational, and it serves a purpose: Christian outrage. But was it an actual account? And what does it leave out? Reed’s acceptance of Völkner as a martyr is without reference to spying, or the wider context of government land deals and Maori rebellion. The modern telling of Völkner’s death is bicultural history. James Belich, in his book The New Zealand Wars, more or less shrugs that Völkner got what he deserved. The prim church booklet is also rather lacking in compassion: ‘He made decisions that were to bring about his death.’

  In 1995 the church was renamed again, as Hiona St Stephen, ‘to recognise the pain and sorrow … and continue the healing process’. The first thing I saw when I entered was a framed pardon issued by the governor-general in 1993 to the men executed for Völkner’s death. Every year on March 2, the church has a commemorative service for both Völkner and Mokomoko as ‘symbols of reconciliation’. What I will always remember from my visit to Hiona St Stephen’s Anglican Church is the chalice.

  [June 4]

  The Town that Disappeared

  The old always seem to be up and about early, so I phoned Bill Gidley, eighty-eight, at his home in Christchurch just after nine. We talked about another winter’s morning. He said, ‘I can remember the date. July the seventeenth, 1951, I think it was.’ And then he said: ‘Is that right, mum?’ Bill was asking his wife, Reece, who came out to New Zealand from Cornwall when she was three years old. They met when she was sixteen. ‘We went together for five years before we got married. And we’re still married. Coming up to sixty-three years.’ They have a son, Grahame, who now lives in Albury. He used to live in Perth, where he had gone into what might be called the family business: mining. The mineral he chased was iron ore. The mineral Bill chased was gold, in Waiuta, the West Coast town that disappeared on July 17, 1951.

  Diana Calvert wrote to me about Waiuta. Her grandfather, Tasman Hogg, was the mine manager. He worked with a man called Jos Divis, who probably knew my father—they both had the rare privilege of being cooped up as enemy aliens on Somes Island in Wellington harbour during World War II. My father was Austrian. I’ve always thought that was exotic, but Divis came from Morovia, a Slavic nation so exotic that it doesn’t exist anymore. A 1952 newspaper article describes his ‘courtly manners’. It also lists his mining injuries—a limp, a fractured skull, and what was known as the Waiuta Sign, a missing finger: ‘Many Waiuta miners have mutilated hands where fingers, crushed by falling stones, have been amputated.’ When the story was published, Divis was a veteran of two places that no longer existed.

  He told the reporter: ‘I want to be the last man to leave this hill.’ Waiuta is between Greymouth and Reefton, hidden high in a fold of hills, thick with manuka, soaked to the skin—it might qualify as the damp capital of the Wet Coast. Diana gave me the phone number for Bill Gidley. He remembered a year when it rained for 200 days. Of course he remembered Diana’s grandfather. ‘Tas Hogg, he was a Maori. Only one in Waiuta. No, hang on. There were two.’

  And of course he remembered Jos Divis: ‘A very prim and proper man.’ But he said the Morovian was taken away from the hill and finished up in Reefton hospital. Bill found work in the bush, cutting silver pine; he was still in Waiuta during the 1954 general election. ‘I got a job as the … what do you call it … the votes … Mum? … Oh, yes. I was the electoral officer. I counted the votes. And do you know how many there were? I’ll tell you. There were ten votes.’ And then he said: ‘They were ten Labour votes.’ But National won the election that year. It was the age of the boss.

  A town with an adult population of ten, but Waiuta, founded in 1907, was once home to 500, a gold-mining town that sunk the deepest shaft in New Zealand, and by 1939 was producing thirteen percent of the nation’s gold. It had the essentials: school, pub, post office, police station, two butcher shops, hospital, cemetery. Single men lived in red h
uts. Everyone had coconut matting and outside toilets and wood ranges. Bill had a good garden—scarlet runner beans, carrots, parsnips, silver beet— ‘but you could never get tomatoes to ripen. Not enough sunlight.’ Crime? ‘Nothing. No child molestation, or anything like that.’ Booze? ‘I suppose the pub was the best gold mine in town.’

  The rain and the gold, and the aroma of coal burning day and night. Miners went underground with their crib—sandwiches and a billy of tea—and chipped at the quartz. But the money was in England: most of Waiuta was owned by Blackwater Mines, a company with its head office in Broad Street, London. In isolated Waiuta, on the night of July 9, 1951, No 2 shaft caved in, 350 feet below the ground, sealing off ventilation. Blackwater Mines were told how much it would cost to repair.

  On the morning of July 17, six men, including the inspector of mines, were wound down in the cage. That was Bill’s job: ‘I wasn’t keen working in the ground. Didn’t think it was healthy.’ The six men wanted to look at the twelfth level underground. At the sixth level, they knocked four times, the signal for Bill to bring them back to the surface.

  ‘I drove the cage up, and said to them, “Did you forget something?” They said their candles had gone out. There wasn’t any oxygen. So then the inspector said, “Gather the men around. I’m going to make a big announcement.” And he said to us, “The mine’s closed.” The cage never went down again.’

  And that was that. Effective immediately. The town vanished, became a ghost. ‘It was a sorry thing,’ said Bill. ‘It shut down overnight. A whole township. And then—nothing.’ There was an enormous party at the pub, and then the pub burned down. Everything closed, everyone left. Bill stayed until just after the 1954 election. He went back this Easter for a Waiuta reunion that attracted 150 people. He found the chimney of his house lying in scrub, and marked the way by tying yellow ribbons around the trees.