Warkworth the Kowhai Town gave a brief history, some account of the pleasures and pastimes of its citizens and, in its preface deplored describing a place with facts and no flesh, asserting that more need be said than that the farms are dairy, sheep and fruit, that there is a magistrate’s court, a library, every sort of shop and a dairy factory. Then it summed up with an alphabet which began
Ambulance Accountants and Airfield
Banks Builders and Bobby calf pool
and went on
Post Office Police Station and Play Centre
Quiet Places for Tired People
U should be here for Summer
Xmas tree Celebrations
and finished
Zephyr Breezes.
I crossed the road to see if there were any zephyr breezes down by the river. A scow was pulling out from the wharf, her broad beam briskly churning the muddy water. A knot of people were watching what is a remarkable sight today, although the Warkworth wharf without a scow tied up would have been much more remarkable once. During this summer, an attempt was being made with the Owhiti to revive coastal transport. She was built at the Mahurangi about forty years ago by Davy Darroch and she is one of the last survivors in the long procession of trading vessels launched on the coast.
The tide was on the turn and running fast and under engine, not sail, Owhiti disappeared round the bend of the river, only the white tip of the mast showing above the trees.
Warkworth has no swimming pool. It has the beaches and the river; some children were swimming under the bridge, sliding over little waterfalls, porpoise-diving in and out of an old tyre tube and mounted on a log went paddling under the bridge where the locust trees and the willows and kowhais flopped down to the water. Stinging little clouds of sandflies eddied over the mud and drove me back to the hotel where a message waited from Mr Keys who wrote the history and the Kowhai Town booklet as well. He would call, the message said, at 7.30.
Every town should have a Jack Keys. He was not born here but came to Warkworth about thirty years ago to teach school. He completed the history of the Mahurangi for the centennial in 1953 and, since he retired from teaching, does general reporting and editorial writing for the Otamatea Times and serves as president for the Agricultural and Pastoral Society. His view of history is affectionate, exact and leavened with a taste for the human oddities that give it life.
“Hop in” he said, “and give the door a good bang — it sticks.”
He briskly outlined his plan; down to the cement works first, to his house and then to the Moores, who were getting out diaries and family papers for me to see.
“The cement works look their best by moonlight, but that can’t be helped, it’s only in the first quarter,” Mr Keys continued as we joggled down a little road towards the river. The cement works which closed down in 1924 were started by a shoemaker called Nathaniel Wilson, who had been advised to live in the country because of his health which was soon restored by the eighteen-mile tramps he took from farm to farm soliciting orders for boots. In 1866 he began to make lime from deposits of local stone, then in 1883 he set about making Portland cement and, after much trial and error, he succeeded. When the works were going, the river was banked with steamers and schooners which brought the coal from Whangarei to fire the kilns and then went off again loaded with cement.
Not many pages back I had regretted our scarcity of ruins but there must be something in our air that produces those we have more quickly than in other lands. We came to the bottom of the road and there were the roofless halls, the gaunt chimneys, the hoppers on the banks reflected in the dark waters of the lagoon and looking very ancient ruins indeed.
As local historians, I imagined the Keys would live in a restored farmhouse of as much antiquity as Warkworth can muster. Instead, their house was modern, the walls panelled in beautiful local woods. It burst with books and was set on one hillside looking across the river and the town to another.
Mrs Keys is a potter and an amateur geologist.
“I have a great hunk of greenstone coming up from the South Island” she told me and showed me some opals found on the Coromandel, a heavy lump of rock discovered further north near Kaiwaka, with the leaves and spores of a fossilised fern pressed on it like a shadow, and some of her excellent pots in which she has experimented with the colours and textures to be had in local clays.
We talked about a town like Warkworth and the diversity of what its inhabitants do in their spare time. There are sixteen sports clubs ranging from athletics to judo and underwater diving. You could belong to a Rotary Club, the Royal Antediluvian Order of Buffaloes, the R.S.A. and a branch of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. Warkworth has a band, a Playreading Society and you could fly, box, dance and not go very far from the town limits.
The Stan Moores lived up the road. Mr Moore’s father was Town Clerk of Warkworth for twelve years, librarian for thirty and Mrs Moore belongs to one of the Nova Scotian boat-building families.
“My great grandfather” she said, “was James Strange Meiklejohn. He was born at Leith in 1807. He married a girl called Catherine Mustard and he had a shipbuilding yard on Prince Edward Island.”
James and Catherine had seven sons and in 1856 when the family was almost grown, they set off on board their brigantine, the Union, on a two year voyage of the world which ended in the Mahurangi. The logbooks describe attacks by pirates in Cathay and give manifests of cargoes listing “a tarce of beef, a keg of coal and 70 pipes of wine”.
On Christmas Day 1856 they were anchored in Rio.
“Being Christmas Day, did no more work than was necessary for the preservation of the sails in loosing and unfurling.” Then, disabled by festive observance of the day, the writing goes from bad to illegible until “moderate breeeeeeeeeez” slips from the bottom of the page, as the pen must have done from his hand.
The log gives only the bare bones of the long journey, of a dolphin caught, of flat calms and great storms. “Ship labouring awfully. Was obliged to take in the mainsail, the ship being completely buried in water.”
Mrs Moore filled out the account in the log. “During this storm, the boys were battened down below, but Catherine refused to stay with them. ‘What is good enough for you is good enough for me’ she told her husband, so he lashed her to the mast and himself to the wheel and they faced the storm together.”
The Meiklejohns sold the Union in Sydney and came the rest of the way in a barque called the Sybil, having resolved if New Zealand was not to their liking they would build another ship and sail away.
They took up a thousand acres in the Mahurangi and started their shipyards at Omaha where they launched a fleet of scows and schooners, which were famous in their day, with names like Bluebell, Day Dawn, the Zior, Twilight and the Argo.
There was a grocer’s account book dated 1860 which listed the few things people had money to buy. Most trade was done by barter.
A pair of Lancashire clogs 10/-
Moleskin trousers 9/-
Meerschaum pipe 3/-
A screw of lollies 2d.
Shag tobacco 1/3
A Jew’s harp 6d.
A newspaper clipping of 1869 reported “a soirée at Mahurangi Heads, when after tea and the devotional exercises of prayer and praise, the magic lantern was demonstrated.”
An entertainment given by the Warkworth Improvement Society gave the farce Bombastes Furioso. Dancing was kept up until close on midnight, “when the well-known voice of Captain Kasper called ‘Auckland Ahoy! The Annie Millbank leaves at 12.30 sharp’, which she did punctually and with a full load of passengers.”
My mind spun with the names of ships and shipbuilders. There were Darrochs and Darrachs; George Darroch was the first and built a twenty-ton cutter in 1852 called the Eagle.
But did Thomas Scott build the Duke of Edinburgh in ’52 or ’53? Was it Duncan Matheson or Angus who built the Coquette and a schooner called the Three Cheers?
We sent ships down to sea like toy
boats on a pond.
The Nova Scotians raised large families. Most of their travels ended on the Mahurangi coast and, as they were Scots, they built churches and schools. But if posterity has saved them too saintly a niche, they made whisky as well as schooners and many a still was tucked in a valley and a sharp watch kept for the revenue cutter.
Warkworth formed an Agricultural and Pastoral Society in 1867 and I happened to be in town the day before the 98th Annual Show. The showgrounds, a big paddock with clumps of gums and three or four hut-like buildings, showed a moderate buzz of activity.
“Do you want to meet people first, or shall I do some work?” asked Mr Keys, as questions and requests and problems came in from all sides.
I said I might just look around.
“Good” said he, and hurried away to his presidential tasks.
Someone was putting up the brushwood jumps for the ponies; three or four trucks were backed into the stockyards and pigs were making uneasy trips down little planks at the back.
The Mobile Unit of the New Zealand Navy were setting up their recruitment caravan. A gallery of photographs showed cheerful sailors on leave in Hong Kong, cheerful petty officers greeting new recruits, whom the caption described as cheerful too, and a cheerful nursing Wren popped a thermometer into the mouth of a sick but still cheerful sailor.
The two live sailors in charge of the exhibit were more the serious sort.
I went and looked at the pigs. An enchanting family of piglets, united at breakfast, were sucking luxuriously on their vast, drowsy mother. They were called Large Whites, though more accurately they were Large Pinks. A farmer shepherded a mean-looking Tamworth boar down the ramp. “Looks a bit thin, doesn’t he?” he anxiously asked a friend. “The drive in might have upset him.” The boar, which was the size of a sofa, prepared with monumental calm to sleep.
The merry-go-round man bolted the painted panels of his carousel together, the hoopla man unpacked his prizes from straw and newspaper and spat on and polished the spaniels and alsatians, the little whistling barefoot boys and a mermaid with rather rude touching up on her round pink breasts.
“Want a practice throw, dear?”
I had one and missed.
“Come and have tea” shouted Mr Keys and we sat down at a trestle table laden with steaming pots of strong brown tea, plates of lamingtons and fly cemeteries.
The judge of the Flower Show was Mrs Tait whose daughter, Pamela, was the pretty dental nurse in the film I made on Great Barrier Island; we agreed on the smallness of the world.
A great black cloud appeared like magic and someone resignedly asked how many shows have been rained out at Warkworth.
The man who was worried about his fading pig was persuaded to have a cup of tea before he went back to the Tamworth’s side.
We all had another cup of tea.
“I think we ought to have a picture up of Mr Churchill,” someone remarked. It was the week of his death.
“There must be one or two in town.”
“What happened to all the ones we had in the War? Everyone had a picture of him then with bits from the speeches underneath.”
A man remembered that the council office had a framed picture and volunteered to borrow it.
“Funny,” said somebody else, “people never call him anything but ‘Mr Churchill’. No one bothered with the ‘Sir’. He didn’t seem to need it.”
“Oh well, this won’t get the Show started” and everyone picked up his cup.
“Got your shipbuilders sorted out?” enquired Mr Keys.
As I started back, I saw the merry-go-round man had all his horses and aeroplanes hooked on and he was giving his music box a turn or two and the wheezy little tune floated across the paddock in a one-fingered curtain raiser to the 98th A. & P. Show.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Further East
The East Coast roads amble round the hills like a handspread of fingers, south to the Mahurangi beaches and the Heads, north to Matakana and the fishing port of Leigh. I sat in the bus to Leigh as it bounced over the ruts. In my pocket I had a lump of kauri gum. It was a good shape for holding and fitted snugly to the palm like the pieces of jade Chinese mandarins kept in the sleeve of their gowns. I wondered how old it was, how many thousand years it had lain buried and I held it to the light so that the sun would catch in its curdled gold.
The kauri gum had been given me the day before by Mr William McElroy, who has lived in the Mahurangi for nearly all of his eighty-eight years. His house sits like a ship at anchor on the northern arm of the heads, not quite encircled by the sea, and commands a prospect of bays and headlands, of distant islands and fragments of them close to shore. A patch of wax-white crocus was growing by the gate and Mr McElroy came out to meet me with an excited sheepdog pup at his heels.
He was a tall old man, a little bent, and his face was set in lines of great repose and goodness. His wife is dead and his brother, who was a partner in the farm, had cleared the land with him and made it flourish. The property has been made over to a Trust and its profits devoted to charity. We walked in the garden, the little dog dancing along behind until he grew too noisy and Mr McElroy gently dumped him back in his compound.
“My father came to the North a hundred and seventeen years ago,” he began. “Although he was from the North of Ireland he was always a Home Ruler and my mother was a Fleming descended from the rebels of County Wicklow. They were both good subjects of Queen Victoria. I was the oldest child and there were four of us altogether.”
His father was a contractor and when he was putting a road across the Ruakaka Flats, forty miles or so north of here, he was killed by a falling tree. It was a hard winter, with floods, and his widow was left with four children to feed.
“They talk about the good old days and so they were in many things, but they were cruel and hard for some. It seemed Dad broke his contract by dying and Mother was left owing the government compensation. We still had a house, though it wasn’t much, and we had kind neighbours.
“When we children were old enough, we shot rabbits and caught fish and went looking for wild honey in the bush.
“I don’t remember many books in the house except the Bible and my mother could not read or write — there had been no parish school in her village in Wicklow. She would tell us stories though and recite poems my father had made up.”
We had gone indoors by now. Occasionally Mr McElroy would pause and we sat in companionable silence while he searched back to the days of his youth. Those were the gum-digging days when canvas towns of diggers’ tents and humpies sprang up where the kauri forests had been felled or burned.
“You met all kinds on the gumfields, what they called Remittance Men, poor derelicts who dug enough to buy their drink, but most of the diggers were decent hardworking men trying to buy some land. There were the Austrians — they were good workers. You’d call them Dalmatians and that’s what they called themselves too. But in those days there was still an Austrian Empire and Dalmatia was part of it.
“There were no old age or widows’ pensions when I was a boy. Six months at Riverhead was a common sentence passed in the Auckland Police Court on some old man or woman charged with vagrancy. The hotelkeeper at Riverhead used to give them a hut and a spade, and the poor old creatures dug enough to keep alive, or buy a bottle.”
I asked how old he had been when he started work.
“Twelve. As soon as I was big enough to hold a spade.” He was still for a moment. “You could dream while you dug and you never knew what your spade would strike when you went a few feet down. It was a good day when you came home with a heavy bag and a bad one if it bounced when you walked. We called it a back-walloper. Many of the settlers looked down on the diggers, but I loved working in the gumfields and I loved the gum. Nothing ever took the place of it in my life, not even nurturing the sheep and the lambs.”
“Who were the best diggers?” and Mr McElroy considered.
“Well, the Austrians were very steady
hard workers, but the Irish, they were the best diggers of all. It was Irishmen dug all the canals and roads in England. I have seen a company of Irish, with a fiddler in the middle to play them on, march on a hill in the morning and have it down by nightfall.
“They weren’t all hard days, you know. People helped each other; life was so simple, so good, not what you can count up, just treasure in your mind.”
Then he gave me my lump of kauri gum, choosing it carefully from a collection arranged along the chimney piece.
“Put it where the sun strikes,” he said, “and tell your grandchildren, when you have them, that once you talked to an old man who remembered the days when they dug the kauri gum.”
* * *
I know the road to Leigh so well that even if the bus were to send me to sleep I would still be ready for the bump when the asphalt turns to metal and see the huge white briar growing by the road; then further on, the terraced remains of a Maori fort like an Aztec pyramid, a dwarfish statue of George the Fifth at Matakana, in memory of the First World War, and the goalposts on the flat at Whangateau where I always wonder why they have them so high and always forget to ask. You come upon the huge inlet of Big Omaha after a bend in the road and see the dunes and the snowy length of the Sandspit. At high water, the blue sea comes almost to the roadside and at low tide bares a waste of mud and shingle and rickety little ti-tree jetties sticking out of the mangroves.
A signpost says ‘Matheson Bay ½ Mile’ and ‘Leigh 1½ Miles’. If it were holidays, Matheson Bay would be my destination and, like the road from Warkworth, I know the bay by heart. Its crescent shape, the slow running stream, overhung with rent flags of bamboo, that feeds the lagoon, old Captain Matheson’s house with its gables and Norfolk Pines, the fig trees in the ruins of the orchards and the little island lying off the point. The rockpools are full of starfish and sea eggs and jumbo crabs with shells pied reddish yellow. When you walk round the rocks you hear their claws scuttering like mice in an attic as they disappear under the stones.
Islands of the Gulf Page 12