Fish of the Week

by Steve Braunias

  A powerful religious awakening in Vancouver led Dallimore to set up a healing ministry. The family returned to New Zealand in 1927, and established the cracklingly named Revival Fire Mission. Two sons, John and Harry, were born. Together, the Dallimores outnumbered his first congregations—he once held a service in front of an audience of one. The fact it was a fourteen-year-old girl may be significant. Hyde describes Dallimore as ‘a rather good-looking man, with fine blue eyes in a clean-shaven face’; Laurie Guy, a lecturer at Auckland’s Carey Baptist College, notes in an Ecclesiastical History Society publication that Dallimore ‘received marked adulation, especially from women’. Was an erotic charisma at work? Guy quotes a letter sent by a woman to Dallimore: ‘A soft breath, with vibration as of electricity, went over the whole gathering.’

  Guy also places Dallimore in the social context of the Depression years, offering profound lures of hope and salvation through healing. Did he heal? Believers believed; non-believers, he said, were scum. He became a sensation. Extra train carriages were put on for North Island followers to attend his mass baptisms at Auckland’s Tepid Baths—thoughtfully, he requested the temperature be turned up for older zealots. He played the Crystal Palace Theatre, then the bigger St James Theatre, and then the biggest venue available, the Town Hall. Civic fathers tried to ban him from appearing; public outcry forced the council to overturn their decision.

  Although Dallimore denied he was Pentecostal—he viewed the noise and extravagance of that movement with distaste— he staged dramatic meetings. Ethel played the piano; Hyde mentions ‘a large though amateur orchestra’; and Guy records the astonishing fact that Dallimore’s band included a homemade electric guitar. An electric guitar, in the 1930s! Was he the father of rock ’n’ roll? There were faintings and exaltations, laying on of hands and talking in tongues. Hyde writes there was ‘burlesque and tragedy’. Also, there was the blessed handkerchief.

  Dallimore invited followers to post him their handkerchiefs. He would bless each one, anoint it with ‘sacred oil’ (Hyde reports it was olive oil), and post it back. Better than any medicine, he said. Enterprisingly, followers began applying it to a range of electrical goods. Testimonials flowed in that the blessed handkerchief fixed sewing machines, irons, clocks, and motorbikes.

  Its amazing healing properties also extended to animals. Sheep were cured. So were cows, horses and kittens. Most famously, a rooster was brought back from the dead. It inspired beautifully crafted scorn from Hyde, who later published five novels, committed suicide in 1939, and is now posthumously celebrated for her verse. ‘Dallimore’s resurrected chicken is a classic,’ she wrote. ‘People had quibbled at the idea of his cure; very well. To the Covenant Hall, his Thursday night trysting place, the unfortunate fowl travelled by suitcase from its home, and was proudly exhibited to the public. There it was, a hale and hearty rooster, sound in wind and limb.’

  Dallimore’s fabulous popularity gradually dwindled. By 1957, when he retired from the Revival Fire Mission, his congregation numbered less than forty. He died in 1970, aged ninety-six. Hundreds of mourners attended his funeral. He had touched countless lives, although Hyde, forever lame after she was hospitalised at eighteen for a knee operation, refused his help, preferring to place her trust in a quack invention called the Abrams machine. It was a wooden box fitted with electric wires and metal plates. She swore it made her feel better.

  [July 8]

  A Brief History of New Plymouth

  The sea was wide and flat and black. It was everywhere you looked in New Plymouth when you looked down—from the rise of Devon Street and Leach Street, from the top of Marsden Hill and its war memorials, from the cemetery at St Mary’s, where the gravestones remained firm about what had happened in Waitara in August 1860: Harris, ‘cruelly murdered by the rebel Maoris’, Crann, ‘killed by hostile Maoris’, Brown, ‘killed by natives’. In the trees, tui sucked at honey from red flowers. It was a cold winter’s day and the sky stayed dark. When you looked down, you saw the Tasman Sea rise up, the long line on the horizon as sharp as a blade.

  There are no windows in Courtroom No. 1 of the New Plymouth courthouse. The only view of anything on a recent Monday was of the exhibits wrapped in plastic and jammed up against a wall beside the press gallery. They included the jacket worn by German backpacker Birgit Brauer, 28. Her body was discovered at Lucy’s Gully in September 2005. The jacket was splashed with dried blood. There seemed to be a lot on one of the sleeves; it wasn’t something you really wanted to study when you stood in front of it for the first time.

  The exhibit that stood out was a long metal bar. Prosecution said it was the murder weapon used by Michael Scott Wallace, 46.

  Wallace was in court. If you didn’t know who he was, you might have wondered what the tall guy wearing red socks and a white jersey was doing there. He looked lost, in the wrong place. The arrangement of the courtroom had him sitting to the right of the jury in a kind of unoccupied zone; he seemed as though he might be a bystander. He was gaunt and clean-shaven and quiet.

  Wallace had entered a plea of not guilty. The defence maintained that police had got the wrong man. On the Monday of the third week of his trial, prosecution called witness number 76, a fingerprint officer who had analysed Brauer’s address book. Two prints belonged to the victim, on the pages listing phone numbers for Ackermann, Bormann, Bohme and Brauer. But a print on the spine of page 79, although it was ‘faint’, revealed a whorl pattern that matched the ridges on the right forefinger of Wallace. The fingerprint officer said, ‘I have no doubt it was made by the same person.’

  She was cross-examined. No, she had found no other prints belonging to Wallace, not on any of Brauer’s twenty-three other possessions, and no prints belonging to Brauer anywhere in the Toyota Hilux that police allege Wallace had driven on the day he picked up Brauer when she was hitchhiking, took her to Lucy’s Gully, and killed her. Nor were there any blood, hair or fibres that belonged to Brauer. There was just that one print of Wallace’s, the unique little complex uneven circles of a whorl pattern, left in sweat, put down by the prod of the right index finger, inside the German victim’s address book and next to the page that listed dates of festivals—‘Die beweglichen Feste’.

  The day in court, the familiar dividing times—short break at 11.30 a.m., lunch at 1 p.m., afternoon resuming at 2.15 p.m.— employed in all New Zealand trials. Outside, the streets black with rain, ugg boots for $30 at The Woolshed, playsuits marked down at T&T Children’s Wear, stuffed birds of the Taranaki coast (petrels, shags, penguins, herons) on display at the Puke Ariki Museum. New Plymouth on a Monday in winter, a fresh, prosperous, lucky city by the sea, phone Geoff for dead calf and lamb collections, colostrum wanted in Stratford and Eltham, the advertised threat of Brian Darth Funeral Services: ‘We will come to you 24 hours a day.’

  And inside Courtroom No. 1, the policeman who arrested Wallace. There had been a manhunt. Wallace was the prime suspect. He had worked as a firewood cutter; now he was ‘drifting’. His photo was all over television and the newspapers. He had stolen a Nissan Safari. Officers saw him driving north of Himatangi, put on the flashing sirens, and there was a car chase. Photos were shown of those flat long empty Manawatu roads, the farm driveway where Wallace lost control and crashed his car into a fence. He got out and legged it. The officer pulled out his Glock pistol and shouted at him to stop. After a while, he stopped. He put his hands up. And then he was placed face down on the ground and cuffed. He was walked to the back of the patrol car. They drove away. And then the officer asked him, ‘Are you okay?’ and Wallace said, ‘Yeah. You should of shot me.’

  More photos. They showed the contents of the Nissan. ‘He appeared,’ said a policeman, ‘to be living out of the car.’ There was a box of groceries, a sleeping bag, and a copy of Penthouse (Black Label edition; its cover read COUPLES) folded in half.

  At the St Mary’s cemetery, another kind of literature was in evidence. This was at the grave of Charles Armitage Brown. His gravestone
read: FRIEND OF KEATS. Brown had been a mentor to the great poet. He sailed from England to New Plymouth on the Oriental in 1841. He died the following year, ‘after a brief but outspoken residence in the new settlement’.

  [August 12]

  Mr Rivers

  Who is Gayle Rivers? Where is Gayle Rivers? And does he in fact exist? I have wondered about this character—he may be no more than that, someone made up, the figment of a cynical imagination—ever since finding a copy of his amazing book The Teheran Contract about six or seven years ago in a 50-cent sale at a public library. My curiosity is now further aroused by the recent sighting of another of his books, The Specialist: Revelations of a Counterterrorist, in an enormous pile of military books at an auction. They were part of the deceased estate of an old soldier. Perhaps he knew Rivers, fought with him, compared knives and discussed pistols, and kept their voices low…

  Gayle Rivers is a pseudonym. He declares this in The Teheran Contract, published in 1981 by New York firm Doubleday. He also states: ‘I had made a habit of looking out for myself since I was a kid in New Zealand, hunting alone in the mountains with a small-bore rifle. Early in the New Zealand involvement in Vietnam, I volunteered for the SAS. I was still a teenager when I survived my blooding in the jungles of Malaysia on operations against Communist insurgents … I did a tour and a half in Vietnam, leading Green Beret and US airborne forces on missions before walking into a minefield that blew half a dozen good men to pieces. It took a year and four hospitals to stitch my body together again, another year before the nightmares went away.’

  From ‘a kid in New Zealand’ to leading the Green Berets in Vietnam. Really? The only other autobiographical data Rivers allows is that he went to South Africa to work as a private pilot, performed ‘a few jobs’ in Rhodesia, and then set himself up as an arms dealer based in Europe. A few other clues emerge an office in Geneva, membership of the Royal Commonwealth Society Club just off London’s Trafalgar Square (that address checks out), a holiday in Malaga, Spain with ‘my lady’. As well, Rivers more than hints that he has survived many secret missions on foreign fields as a mercenary who killed not for justice or faith or adventure, but for good wages.

  How good? In The Teheran Contract, Rivers—and his coauthor, American journalist James Hudson, who must be responsible for the book’s staccato, tough-guy prose—reveals his incredible feat of rescuing a wealthy Jewish family from under the noses of Ayatollah Khomeini and his death squads in Iran, in May to June 1979. His fee: 70,000 pounds sterling. Well, I suppose that covers his tariff at the Royal Commonwealth Society Club, and a holiday in the Spanish sun with his lady. But it seems a paltry sum for the mission at hand, which Rivers and Hudson describe with a high sense of drama.

  It really is a great read. It was listed in a 2003 survey in the Listener—it may not be a coincidence that I was books editor at the time—as one of the fifty best New Zealand books ever written: ‘An exciting, loathsome account of one New Zealander’s unique OE.’ The death toll? I made a careful note. Rivers and his hired soldiers of fortune kill fifty-three Iranians, not counting bomb victims. (‘Bodies were tossed like dolls in the air.’) There is an armed raid on a jail and an epic drive across a desert, exploding oil pipes and Kurdish feasts, shoot-outs and hand-to-hand combat (‘I tore his throat open and severed his windpipe’)—every word of it true, according to Rivers.

  I looked for signs of his New Zealandness. Maybe there was our characteristic laconic humour when he hires a mercenary in London for the Iran mission, and tells him only this: ‘You’ll get sand in your boots.’ Maybe there was our characteristic dislike of shabby behaviour when he remarks: ‘I am not impressed with private detective agencies.’ And—I know this is getting increasingly desperate—maybe there was our characteristic prudishness when he writes: ‘I have a phobia about dying in my underwear.’

  Is he for real? The question occupies a lively discussion on a website devoted to special ops. Run out of Florida, it’s a tremendously serious paramilitary site that does not suffer fools gladly. Rivers’ credentials are given a sound thrashing by several members. Example: ‘I have a gut feeling the guy is totally full of it and maybe was a serious armchair adventurer.’ But one emailer claims Rivers was interviewed in person by a Japanese journalist in New York in 1985, and that his story stood up.

  Intriguingly, another correspondent says he has read Rivers claiming that ‘as a teenager, I rode in the Wellington chapter of Hell’s Angels’. From riding with Hell’s Angels in Wellington to killing at least fifty-three people in Iran … Perhaps the nightmares never went away.

  Is his story all a nonsense? Most of us probably hope so. Despite our relentless celebration of high achievers who leave these shores and make their mark, we’d rather think of Rivers as a fiction, something to sweep under the carpet, than embrace the possibility that one of us grew up to be a cold-blooded, coldhearted killer meddling in the Middle East. One day I hope to hear the truth about Gayle Rivers. If we take him at his word, he deserves recognition as a great coauthor, successful mercenary, and a remarkable and appalling New Zealander.

  [September 23]

  On the Lyttleton Ferry

  Today I will be clowning around in Mapua, that soft, watery glade in Tasman, on holiday with my family. ‘My family’—how novel, and what pleasure it is to be able to write that, and mean my fiancée and our daughter, an adorable little goose who is about to turn eight months old. Until now, family has always meant four brothers and one sister, in-laws, more nieces than nephews, the occasional aunt, a rare cousin, and, without whom etc, my parents. Family holidays meant a Cortina reversing out of a driveway in Mount Maunganui, away from the house, away from the garage where a sign above the doors declared, as though it were front-page news: ‘JOHN BRAUNIAS. PAINTER AND WALLPAPERER’. These were the first words I remember reading.

  Our last holiday was in the South Island. I don’t know the year or how old I was. We went to stay with my sister and her husband in Christchurch. It was August—winter; the ski-fields were open. There were sets of skis in the rafters in the garage. You could close the wooden doors of the garage, and the light was dim. There were windows, but they were low and small. It was a good darkness, like a secret. There were cans of paint. More reading—‘Enamel’, ‘Dulux’. There was a workbench, and clamped on to it was a vice, which provided hours of fun. I couldn’t reach the rafters. I didn’t mind. I considered that skiing was none of my business.

  We would have driven to Wellington, and taken the ferry to Lyttleton. I don’t know anything about that. But it was the first time I had travelled to the South Island. Usually, family holidays meant a camping ground in Awakeri, which I guessed was somewhere in the middle of the North Island. There were picnic tables, willows beside a river, a red tractor bolted into the ground for kids to play on. It’s still there. I saw it two summers ago. To my surprise, Awakeri is near Mount Maunganui.

  Christchurch was the Avon River, chimney smoke, something exotic called an arcade. We went to a sports store. It was owned by a man called Fergie McCormick. I was told he played for the All Blacks. He was huge, and very serious. He seemed too big for the shop. Why wasn’t he playing rugby? Why was he wearing long pants? I didn’t dare ask. The commanding presence of Fergie McCormick awed me into complete silence. My mother bought me a pair of socks—red and black, Canterbury colours. The socks were huge, and very serious.

  My father left to go skiing in the mountains. He was from Austria. I thought Austrians probably skied to school, to the letter box. Austria was white, all snow, and they ate salami. There was a black and white photograph of my father skiing. He had jumped. He was in mid-air. He held his poles out to the side— his body was a perfect T. Best of all, he was smoking a pipe.

  He was comical, but I didn’t really like him. My mother was lovely. She wore cardigans, and had curly hair. She drank Pimm’s, and cooked mutton, and looked after me. She had sisters—there was Auntie Connie, Auntie Marge, Auntie Winkie. I never questioned wh
y she was called Winkie. She was a wonderful person and lived around the corner. There was a wattle tree near her house, which dropped black seeds on to the pavement in summer. My father didn’t seem to have any family. He was foreign. He was like a visitor.

  He came back to Christchurch, and we caught the ferry from Lyttleton to Wellington. I know something about that. There was a revelation, a crisis. It was volatile. Life was about to change. And the sea crossing was awful; there was a storm, it was loud and pale, the ship tipped up and down, I was sick as a dog. It was an endless voyage.

  It did end, and it ended in farce. The ship docked; we climbed down stairs to get into the car, but we couldn’t find it. All the cars in the world were in the bottom of the ship, except our Cortina. We looked and looked and looked. We were lost. I was useless and afraid; the water made violent banging noises beneath our feet; the argument continued. It was an endless unhappiness. That continued even when we found the car. Everyone just wanted to get home, get away.

  It might not have happened like that. Probably I have it all wrong. I have no particular desire to recover the exact memories. We got home, and soon afterwards there was one less person living in the house. That was all right. I doubt I missed the experience of more family holidays.

  But this week will be my first holiday with my own family, and I’ve looked forward to it for months. Longingly, I’ve moved my finger down the calendar and counted the weeks. All for a few days away from work, away from the North Island house where there is a fig tree and a cot and my mother’s electric heater, to kiss my fiancée and our daughter in sunny Mapua in the South Island, in spring.

  [October 14]

  A Fernbird in Whakatane

  The colours of a salt marsh at this time of year are mustard and gold, orange and on fire. Those flames burn across the sixty hectares of the Nukuhou salt marsh near Whakatane—a strange flat expanse of reed and swamp sliced apart by creeks and a river. Planks are laid across water for access. It’s very quiet, perfectly still, except for birds, and stoats, and rats. Blackberry has been cut back, and the beginnings of a public boardwalk skirt the edges.