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Wild Journeys

Page 11

by Bruce Ansley


  It’s a beautifully simple little building, no steeple, a couple of posts and a sheet of iron for a porch. The roof’s pitch is perfect, its angles exactly right. Wire cables run from its ridge flashing and down its walls to hold down the roof. They are either tethered to the ground or attached to large rocks that hang around the church like the corks on an Australian bushman’s hat. In some places they’ve cut a groove in the ground as they sway. The wind up here at 1000 metres must rocket across this flat. Even now it clangs the roofing iron. Clouds zoom above us like spaceships.

  The door scrapes open. The roof is thatched, the iron covering the thatch. A beautiful little cupboard stands inside the door. There’s old china and mysterious pieces of iron. A couple of rough beds with fencing-wire springs.

  The church’s history has been burned laboriously into the hymn board. It was built for £100, all contributed by miners. This country is alien, spartan, and the work was truly dreadful. Miners must have looked for some kind of meaning — other than gold, of course. It’s unlikely they subscribed to the biblical view about how much better it was to get wisdom than gold.

  Back to the hymn board. It says of the very first service in the new church: ‘The Minister being late, the congregation of miners after waiting for some time went down to the hotel for refreshments and drank deeply to keep out the mean July air, keener than ever at this altitude.’ When the preacher finally arrived, he was not well pleased. After they sang the first hymn the miners demanded an encore: ‘The preacher, after expressing very strong disapproval, went on with the service which was however abbreviated.’

  Not many services were held ‘because of the small number of inhabitants and the difficulty of access’, which seems a concise enough description of Serpentine. Soon it was an impossible church. Not only did it have no vicar, it had no congregation either.

  After only a few years the church was redundant. It became the property of its largest subscriber, who sold it to a Mr Wilson in 1889. At the time the historian was searing his text into the hymn board, it was owned by a Mr Greer. It became a ‘residence’, although it can have been only slightly bigger than the miners’ huts. An old iron Shacklock stove still marks the kitchen. It would have come in handy. Even now, in a chilly September, it is colder inside than out.

  The brown tussock whispers and a congregation of rock gargoyles sings a lonely song. It feel precarious here. No birds, not even a hare. I haven’t seen anyone since the Poolburn Reservoir. I want to go. We climb into the Toyota, the real sanctuary here. We drive back through the creek, past the relics and the ghosts, and leave.

  Much later, I come across an article in the Otago Witness of 24 October 1895. Its headline was ‘The Missing Chinaman’, its subtitle ‘A Senseless Hoax’, and it was reprinted in newspapers all over the country. It concerned the disappearance of Kong Wah Jun, who had made a considerable sum on the Serpentine goldfield. He left Serpentine to go home to China, visited his brother in Alexandra, left his money there and proceeded towards Butchers Gully to see some friends who, incidentally, owed him money. Butchers Gully was a rich goldfield between Alexandra and Roxburgh, now submerged under Butchers Dam on Flat Top Hill. He never arrived at Butchers Gully. He simply disappeared.

  A little later, police found a body, apparently that of Wah Jun, on the river bank below Alexandra. His hands and feet were tied tightly together and a huge stone was tied around his neck.

  The body was taken into Alexandra for identification. Jurors were summoned to attend, along with the coroner and two doctors. A crowd of small boys collected outside the temporary morgue and was kept back by constables.

  The body had to be viewed by the jurymen:

  and for this purpose the jury . . . stood around with wry faces and highly perfumed pocket handkerchiefs. On the cloth covering the face of the deceased being withdrawn the brother failed to identify the features as being those of his brother Wah Jun.

  Luckily, as it turned out.

  One juryman found voice to expatiate upon the cash-paying virtues of the deceased, but reluctantly asked the coroner to have the cloth redrawn over the features as he (the juryman) could not bear the stony rigidity of that stare from the left eye of the deceased.

  The examination continued, the police objecting to the loosening of the knots, as they could be material evidence in detecting the crime of foul murder. On taking off the trousers, ‘a strange and gruesome sight presented itself . . . for, strange as it may appear, there was no human body there, nothing but a sheepskin, the entrails of some other beast, a few pig bones, a kidney and a set of goat’s teeth’. The article dwelt on the detail:

  The sheepskin, nicely tanned and turned inside out, formed the head and face, and in this a slit was made for the mouth, the edges being drawn back to form the lips, between which a faultless set of goat’s teeth gleamed with pearly whiteness. The features were complete, nor was the pigtail forgotten.

  No one, apparently, knew quite where to look. Eventually:

  The jurymen walked home, and so did the medicos, and so did the coroner, and so too did the police, but the latter in quite a different mood than the former. The little boys went to play marbles or some such harmless game, and so ended one of the most remarkable inquests of the nineteenth century.

  What of poor Kong Wah Jun? I could find no further reference. Like Serpentine, he vanished.

  7

  Strutting stuff

  Queen Street, New Zealand’s best-known street, has a double life. In one it is a thoroughfare. Buses and cars jostle on the roadway, pedestrians on the footpath, shops and tall buildings line its route. In the other, it chucks the suits, climbs into its jeans and screams. It mutates from a city walk to a wild journey. It becomes a stage. It turns into New Zealand’s Trafalgar Square, National Mall, Central Park, Place de la Bastille. If you need to say something, protest against anything, even celebrate a win, then off you go down Queen Street.

  This is the most crowded street in New Zealand, yet there’s always room to move on its broad pavements. Sometimes people change places with the traffic, for on Queen Street nothing stays the same for very long. Pedestrians burst onto the roadway, dodging the mysterious construction choreography that is a constant part of Queen Street theatre. People in hard hats and hi-viz vests are always directing traffic to, well, somewhere else.

  In the first decade of the new millennium Queen Street was upgraded, and everyone — cars, buses, trucks, pedestrians — was subjected to years of torment. Adding injury to insult, the cost of the upgrade doubled. Queen Street claimed another victim: the work took some of the blame for unseating the mayor, Dick Hubbard. A new mayor, Len Brown, promoted an even bigger project, the underground city rail link. Queen Street choked again. Brown went too, but for other reasons.

  Through all of it Queen Street emerges with panache as a fine piece of Auckland theatre. Now people dance around traffic which runs lights and hops lanes, for on Queen Street progress depends not so much on driving as creativity.

  The same applies to its other life. Queen Street’s alter ego is, in fact, a public megaphone. An amphitheatre for popular opinion. New Zealand’s Circus Maximus.

  Sometimes Queen Street has changed our world. In 1981, an anti-union march named ‘Kiwis Care’ attracted 50,000 people to Queen Street. Flags flew; the national anthem evoked the sanctimony of a test match. The young organiser, Tania Harris, became an instant celebrity. Trade unions, whose own march along Queen Street attracted just 4000 marchers and an awful lot of abuse, were excoriated. The wounds never healed.

  Sometimes the street hasn’t changed anything. Some 10,000 people marched on Aotea Square in 2001 opposing genetic engineering. Helen Clark’s Labour government took no notice, allowing GE experiments to continue.

  Win or lose, the wild journeys along Queen Street have a life of their own.

  In 2010 Queen Street accommodated one of the biggest protests in our history. It blocked Queen Street from top to bottom, opposing the newly elected Natio
nal government’s decision to allow mining on conservation land. The government had promised to consult the public, and here on Queen Street were plenty of public to consult. Some said the government backed down as a result, but history has shown they simply made the changes more subtle.

  Usually, no one dies on Queen Street, although egos and dignity may suffer grievously.

  It is the place where causes wither or bloom, the stage upon which the citizenry treads the boards. Excellent, you say. The street has a vivid reputation. Excitement. Public mayhem.

  I’ve been on several of these performances both up and down Queen Street. The first was soon after I moved to Auckland, in 2012. Television New Zealand had delivered the chop to its Channel 7, a commercial-free channel strong on the arts. The government had pulled the plug on the channel’s funding, and the last vestige of public television broadcasting was to shut down at midnight that night. Given the choice between a remarkably small amount of money and some 1.6 million viewers, the government took the simple view: cut the viewers loose, the subtext being they were unlikely to be National voters anyway.

  The idea was to have a funeral procession along Queen Street, in the forlorn hope that it might save the channel. As only a few hundred people turned up, it probably had the opposite effect.

  As we all marched up the street, it soon became clear that, news-wise, the focus had shifted. Closing New Zealand’s only public broadcasting television channel had taken second place to a large, rich immigrant who called himself Kim Dotcom.

  Dotcom’s famous mansion had been raided by the police not long before, ineptly. Now he saw Channel 7 as a symbol of the internet freedom upon which his fortune depended. People who were not interested in internet freedom, still less Channel 7, saw only Kim Dotcom.

  I was right behind him. In both senses. The enemy of my enemy was my friend. Besides, he was a large man, it was a rather cold evening, and he was a mobile shelter belt.

  We marched past Britomart, disguised as the old Chief Post Office and soon to become, yes, another construction obstacle as somewhere far below workers cut through the sediment of centuries to build more underground rail and carry the Queen City a little further into the twentieth century, with the twenty-first still to be tackled. We went past the expensive stores — Dior, Prada, Hugo Boss, Louis Vuitton, Gucci — where mysterious queues sometimes form at some unseen signal and, kept in line by uniformed attendants, are let into the store a few at a time without unseemly rush.

  Up the street we went, past the barely discernible bend that shows the course of the Waihorotiu Stream, which Queen Street was built along, following what was once a bushy gully. Past Vulcan Lane, enticing faint-hearted protesters to abandon their futile quest for beauty, and instead, pop into one of its narrow pubs for a beer.

  The Front Lawn sang of Vulcan Lane, of seeing themselves in a cafe window as if they were in colour and everyone else was in black and gray. Now that was reversed. I thought I was in black and gray and everything else was in colour. It was quite clear that Channel 7 was going to go out with a whimper rather than a bang.

  We passed the 1865 Bank of New Zealand building, which is the only survivor of Queen Street’s mid-ninetheenth-century roots, now in true Auckland fashion just a silly façade for the high-rise now occupying the site. I felt a bit of a silly façade myself.

  When you start checking the architecture, you might say you’ve lost momentum. When you investigate its history, likewise. This was a timid affair. A century before, people knew how to stage a decent protest. In 1913 hundreds of strikers, shouting and throwing stones, tried to prevent ships being loaded on the wharves. Large numbers of armed and mounted strike-breakers, supported by hundreds of police and a naval warship, were put on duty at the Auckland docks to protect strike-breakers, or scabs.

  The Weekly News reported that as the clock struck 5 a.m. on 10 November:

  Every unit in the defence of the waterfront, comprising fully 1000 ‘irregulars’ and regular police, was stationed in the position selected for it. As the day advanced, a very angry crowd of strikers and their sympathisers congregated in Little Queen Street, which was guarded by farmers from Cambridge, and towards ten o’clock it looked as if there would be trouble. The mass of excited men forced itself nearer to the double row of mounted country men and shouted the most offensive epithets in its vocabulary, varying the theme occasionally with a chorus of howls and hoots.

  The Cambridge farmers sat quiet, calm and outwardly unmoved; but their batons never left their hands, and their gaze was fixed very steadily on the seething, raging crowd in front. ‘We don’t want to start fighting’, said the commander of the troop, when a particularly vile invective was flung at them, ‘we are here to protect our port and not to fight’.

  Violence broke out all over the place, of course, but the strikers lost.

  This day, in 2012, a century later, my body may have been intact but my head was so bored it might even have welcomed a knock from a cockie’s stick.

  Where was the spirit of, say, 1932, when 15,000 angry unemployed marched up to a Town Hall meeting, fought police and, enraged when one of their leaders was struck down with a police baton as he rose to plead for calm, ricocheted down Queen Street, smashing shop windows? They took one chemist shop’s entire stock of contraceptives and vandalised all the wax dummies in a department store. That’s picturesque looting.

  Well, many of those people lost their livelihoods, and their pride, and their future. We were only losing an arts channel.

  On the other hand, a mere power cut was enough to set off a riot at a concert in Queen Street’s Aotea Square in December 1984. The concert, ‘Thank God It’s Over’, celebrated the end of the academic year but when the power went off and the music stopped and people started throwing bottles, the riot police arrived. Damage in the end came to more than a million dollars and everyone went home that night with a common thought: ‘Thank God, it’s over.’

  The Queen Street protest against the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA) in 2016 showed more fire. Thousands of us turned up at Aotea Square and marched down the street, ‘shutting down central Auckland’, according to some reports. We felt the proposed agreement didn’t just stink, it reeked to high heaven.

  John Key, the Prime Minister, smelled only roses. Around the corner, choosing the casino for his own stage, he signed the agreement with a flourish. Outside, protesters capered and howled. This was more like it.

  I marched sedately behind a group of Maori who believed their sovereignty was about to be signed over to the Las Vegas Roundtable, or Philip Morris. They thought they stood a much better chance with Queen Victoria’s descendants.

  We all argued that banks would rule the world, that multinationals would roll right over us, and that the environment would be ruined, as if the TPPA would make any of that worse. We shouted so loudly that even John Key might have heard us above the clinking of glasses and chinking of pokies. He emerged from among the high-rollers to declare that Aucklanders were pretty disappointed and a bit confused by the protest, that we were left-wing rent-a-protesters and that anyway there were only a few thousand of us. The media reckoned there were 10,000. The organisers guessed more like 15,000.

  Academics argue that big street protests are effective not so much for their cause but for the way they activate the participants politically: they inspire political movement. Later that year Key quit as Prime Minister. Did he detect a flutter in the chorus, a tic in the corner of the nation’s smile? But in the end the TPPA was scuppered not by the left in Queen Street but by the right in the United States, in the form of its new president, Donald Trump.

  A few months later I was again strutting the tarmac. This time the march was part of a Week of Peace, whose object was to poop the Royal New Zealand Navy’s birthday party on the Waitemata. The harbour wasn’t exactly crowded with visiting warships, for New Zealand is not only near the bottom of the world but a very long way from any tactical territory: both factors are probably
more useful in protecting us than the Navy.

  It was a particularly forlorn day, and the warships strung along the harbour looked as if they could think of much better places for a party. So did the matelots wearing short sleeves and lining the decks and probably thinking that if they’d joined the Navy to see the world, sometimes the world just wasn’t worth it.

  A few protest boats lurched back and forth in the choppy water, none of them threatening but all of them attended by police, who apparently had more boats on hand than the Navy.

  We congregated at Aotea Square and listened to speeches so boring even the speakers seemed to be nodding off. This time the group of Maori under their sovereignty banner was all set to go when a group accompanying two elderly ladies, one in a wheelchair, made their way to the front. The two were truly veteran protestors. One or both had been at Greenham Common in the UK, when tens of thousands of women protested against nuclear weapons outside an Air Force base. That protest went on for years, and even after it ended and the authorities announced there was nothing left to protest about, groups of women cut holes in the fence for a week.

  So these women had earned their place at the head of the parade, even if, not far away at the Viaduct, arms dealers including the world’s largest nuclear arms manufacturer, Lockheed Martin, were signing orders for weapons which would make those Greenham Common missiles look like popguns.

  Around 2000 of us set off down Queen Street. We hadn’t gone far before I was admiring the Smith and Caughey building and thinking about the remarkable Marianne Caughey, who founded the business and proved it wasn’t just the road to hell that was paved with good intentions but Queen Street too.

  The upper storeys of the department store, containing all manner of staff amenities — library, sitting rooms, women’s rooms, and . . . well, once you start thinking about architecture and history and mourning the good intentions of a bygone age, all the while marching down the street in protest at the intentions of the current one, then you might as well give it away. So I did. The proper thing to do, I felt, was to abandon the parade and let the others deliver tribute to the barbarians.

 

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