Graham Turner at Woodend Motor Camp owned a 1963 Leyland converted into a house-bus. He lived in it with his wife Claire, who was making a vegetable stew with barley on the woodstove while their two young sons Isaak and Leo lay on bunks watching Toy Story on DVD and munching on a snack. Isaak said, ‘I got nachos!’ Graham said, ‘Pegasus? I hope it’ll be good for the area.’
Graham worked as a carpenter. What was he doing in a motor camp? Before Woodend, he and Claire had run a café in Westport. She said, ‘It was great in summer, but come winter – pffft! It just died. We made a huge loss.’ They had rented their house and bought the Leyland for $5,000 on TradeMe. Their corner spot in the camp was nearest the beach and a pine forest. They had been adopted by a cat they found under the bus one night and called Smoochie.
Before Westport there was England. Graham’s mother had become friends with two New Zealanders who picked potatoes and drove a converted ambulance they called Mabel. Their stories about New Zealand inspired her to emigrate. ‘Then she rang me up one night and said, “I’m not very well.” I said, “What do you mean?” She said, “I’ve got cancer.” So of course I came. That was twelve years ago. Mum’s still alive. She’s got great willpower. Amazing woman.’
Then he talked about working on a plastering job at the home of a widow in her seventies. ‘Amazing woman. She can hardly walk but she’s out there in her garden digging up a patch ten foot long for two weeks with a spade handle she’s attached to a trowel. She said it was like doing it with a teaspoon. She planted celery and broccoli but the cows got in and ate it.’ He finished his story, and then he and Claire sat down outside the bus at a table and drank wine in water glasses. The good sharp scent of pine needles filled the air.
‘Pegasus? I’m not happy about it,’ said Annette Finlay. She was riding a bike in a fetching pair of black gumboot slippers – $12 from The Warehouse – while her dog Boss, a blue heeler cross, ran beside her along a country road that bordered Pegasus. She’d planned on a holiday in the Cook Islands but her husband couldn’t wangle enough leave from work. It didn’t seem too great a hardship. Boss chased a pine cone. All you could hear were sparrows.
‘It’s lovely here,’ she said. ‘We moved from Christchurch for the peace and quiet but along comes Pegasus. The people I know – none of us are keen on it. We go past and just cringe.’ She rode away, possibly cringing.
There was a red-brick cottage set back on the road. It belonged to Alan Nordmeyer. I said, ‘Nordmeyer?’ He said, ‘Yes. Arnold Nordmeyer was my father.’ Sir Arnold Nordmeyer, Labour MP under Savage, later minister of finance, eulogised by left-wing political commentator Chris Trotter in his book No Left Turn as ‘the political leader the New Zealand working class had been waiting for’, and here was the revolutionary’s son in Woodend, in a house built from red brick shipped over from Norfolk in 1865.
He was really quite benign about Pegasus. He said, ‘I’m neutral now. Originally I was against it. How to put it that seems fair? I always considered it wasn’t a good place to build a township. Too prone to flooding. The other thing I was never too sure of was the logic of starting up a new town from scratch instead of expanding an established town like Woodend, but I can see the sense in starting something new and not inheriting roading and sewage.’
On the wall there was a striking black and white photograph of a tussock range. He said it was a 1960 National Publicity Studios’ picture, taken in the Mackenzie Country. ‘It’s the transition where the pale yellow festuca tussock grass meets the brownish chionochloa snowgrass, so it must be at about 3,000 feet.’ He talked about his work as an agricultural and forestry scientist in Bhutan, Vietnam, Turkey and Pakistan, and then about his involvement in a gas exchange laboratory that measured CO2 levels in trees. He was warming to a subject: global warming.
He said, ‘I don’t mean to rave but sea levels will rise and coastal communities are going to be hammered. Woodend has been there for 140 years but will Pegasus still be there in another 140 years?’ He had his doubts. His own future? He was going to cultivate his cornfield any day soon and plant potatoes that afternoon.
The planting of spuds, the bright weekend in spring, the fresh air. For sale: alpacas, fennel bulbs, organic eggs, horse manure. Cherry blossom floated on the side of the road. The plains were low and the sky high and wide: north Canterbury was like a ranch with riverbeds and a coast. Idyllic little villages, each with their quality of silence, were tucked behind windbreaks of macrocarpa and pine. There was sand on the pavements. There were cribs called Briar Cottage and Driftwood Cottage. No one was doing anything more stressful than waiting for the burger van to open at Leithfield Beach.
All this now feels quaint and faraway, like something dating back to a long-lost past, an age of innocence. It was an age of innocence: it was before the Christchurch earthquakes. Kaiapoi and Kairaki were among the worst hit settlements in north Canterbury. Damage was extensive in the first quake, on September 2010. An aftershock on June 2011 caused further destruction. Only one town was left entirely and absolutely unscathed: Pegasus. Planners had wisely invested an estimated $20 million engineering and compacting the earth. They had brought out specialised equipment from Dubai and employed a method known as vibrocompaction – loose sand densified to create stable foundation soils. There were no instances of liquefaction, no rising sickly gloop.
The town wooed quake refugees wanting a safe harbour. According to National Business Review, Infinity had been able to assist buyers with deposits of just one percent.
Vibrocompaction, the end of chaos, deposits of just one percent – but what about the life force of Pegasus, of any town, of any place? I tried to hate Pegasus but failed: people got in the way. When I went there in that innocent spring I paid a visit to the household at 172 Infinity Drive. Retired couple James and Biddy Gardner – the first Pegasus homeowners, the town’s early settlers – were wiping builder’s marks off the windows and hosing down the outdoor tiles.
What sort of name was Biddy? ‘My parents nicknamed me that and it just stuck,’ she said. ‘My real name? It’s heinous! And it doesn’t bring out the best in me. Maxine Juanita. Yuk! No, it’s Biddy, thank you.’
How did she and James meet? She said, ‘I was flatting with nurses, and he took everyone else out and then he got to me.’ James said, ‘It wasn’t like that.’ She said, ‘Oh yes it was.’
They were full of life, giggly and giddy, brimming with a sense of adventure. James said his builder had got the bit between his teeth in the last few weeks of construction to make sure they would be the first to move into Pegasus.
It was their fourth day in their new home. The night before they’d had family and friends over for a drink. ‘Oh, it was ripper,’ said Biddy. ‘I’ve felt better,’ said James, through a hangover fog. They were a retired farming couple – sheep, beef, barley – from up the line in Waiau. ‘We were there 47 years,’ said Biddy. ‘Seventy-three for me,’ said James. ‘I was on the same farm all my life. I said I’d retire at 60 if I was ready, but I was still enjoying it. I was still pretty fit at sixty-five. By 70, 71, I had had a gutsful of farming. Been there and done that.’
Biddy said, ‘We didn’t want to retire into the Waiau village. We knew that. It didn’t appeal at all really, did it?’ As they were talking, cars drove past their house in a slow procession – the curious and nosy, drawn by the strange spectacle of a nascent town.
Biddy: ‘All the time! And they bring buses from the old people’s home, and a walking group goes through.’
James: ‘Back and forth, back and forth, especially in the weekends. What’d they say – 150 people, I think it was, came through the information centre last weekend.’
Biddy: ‘Mind you, we did that too, didn’t we? We drove in one day and looked at the model of the town and we just thought, “This feels right.” And that was that for us. We’d thought of retiring to Rangiora and we weren’t so keen on Kaiapoi and we didn’t think we were centre-of-Christchurch kind of people, so…
/> ‘People say, “How are you ever going to live with neighbours all around you?” But the beauty of it is it’s going to happen gradually. We should be acclimatised by the time Pegasus is chocka, shouldn’t we?’
James: ‘We’ve as good a view here as we had at home.’ Beyond the neighbouring golf course was the Southern Alps. Inside the house there was a macrocarpa bookcase, a set of plates hand-painted by Biddy’s mother in 1929, coasters on the coffee table; the curtains hadn’t been put up but 172 Infinity Drive was shaping up as a home. What did they make of the petty covenants placed on each resident – no caravans or tents, all vehicles with commercial signage to be parked inside the garage, no garden statues or fountains without prior approval?
Biddy: ‘One Christmas James bought me a lovely concrete gnome doing a brown-eye. Where do I put that?’
James: ‘I’ve actually got permission to put it on the letterbox. I told one or two people about it and they laughed like hell. Mind you, they did say, “I don’t think so.”’
James remembered the summer holidays they used to take in the Marlborough Sounds. ‘The beauty of it was we would sit up on a hill, and there was a wharf down below – we’d sit on the hill at night and have our drinky-poos, us and four other couples. Oh, we had marvellous holidays there for 27 or so years. We’d watch the wharf, and the world go by, and all the people…’
James and Biddy, the early settlers, had brought their history with them to Pegasus, invigorating the empty unloved town with their laughter, their ridiculous gnome, their drinky-poos, their heirlooms, their warm welcome. Effortlessly and triumphantly, they had brought New Zealand to Pegasus.
Waiouru
Operation Desert Rose
The half-moon above Waiōuru on an afternoon in the middle of winter looked nothing like as remote or unearthly as the town itself. New Zealand’s only army garrison town, Waiōuru operates as a defence zone. It looks very defensive. It looks low down, crouching. The temperature had dropped to six below; even the sky looked as though it were trying to burrow itself under the ground.
The army camp is cordoned off, out of sight, just about out of range. From a helpful brochure welcoming new residents: ‘Broadcasting Communications Ltd have supplied Waiōuru with a TV translator due north of the town on Waitangi Hill. This broadcasts TV1 and TV2 only and if you wish to receive TV3 you will need to have an aerial directed at Mount Taranaki.’
Waiōuru, pop. 2,000, is more or less in the middle of the North Island, a kind of dead centre. It doesn’t support a lot of life. The surrounding Rangipō Desert looks raw, mugged. Waiōuru translates as ‘The place that all must pass through’. The passing is more memorable than the stopping. New Zealand’s most intense highway, the Desert Road, twists and rises through the blonde tussock and red scorched earth on the high volcanic plateau dominated by Mount Ruapehu. Ice and snow seal it off every winter. There are two standing headlines in New Zealand journalism: TRAMPER LOST and DESERT ROAD CLOSED.
It closed, opened, closed and opened again all in the same week in July. The clouds hung thick and low. You couldn’t see the mountain, or much above the desert floor of tussock and pumice. Creeks and streams did their best to nudge through – the prize exhibit on the wall of Waiōuru’s pub, the Oasis, was a quite obscene length of eel, weighing 32 pounds and going by the name of Hector. Even in death, Hector looked hungry.
Waiōuru is the compulsory training destination for new army recruits. The teenage boys are housed in small bedrooms in small wooden huts with cracked windows and peeling paint. They are sent out into the Rangipō Desert to shoot live ammunition, run when told to run, sleep when told to sleep, and freeze without any instruction.
Major Chas Charlton said, ‘Waiōuru is our college and our university.’ The army camp’s policy is to place ten recruits into each bedroom: was Waiōuru also a boarding school? ‘No,’ the major said, and returned to the solemn duty of eating his hot lunch in the officers’ mess. The plate of chilli con carne was piled so high it might have defeated Hector, but the major, a trim, taut man with a trim, taut haircut that stayed close to his head at all times, spooned down the lot.
He said, ‘I’m a patriot.’ What did that mean? ‘No matter where I am, I feel a swell of pride in my bosom about New Zealand. I will do anything for my country.’
We were being eavesdropped by 1979 portraits of the Queen and Prince Philip on the far wall; they could rest assured their corner of the Commonwealth was in safe hands. Major Charlton spoke of the importance of tradition, loyalty, service. He knew his military history. He was about to go – armed with replicas of two 1861 Colt 44 open-top revolvers, an 1873 lever-action Winchester 44 rifle, and a 1905 side-by-side hammer shotgun – to a pistol contest at the Taupō Gun Club.
He conquered his lunch and marched to the elevator. His departure halved the number of officers in the dining room. With its stiff-backed chairs and its conveyor toaster, its white tablecloths and its royal portraits, it looked like the restaurant of a hotel that might have been considered upmarket in a provincial New Zealand town in 1982. It looked civilian but the armed forces were in the details – purple napkins for ordinary officers, red napkins on one table set aside for top brass.
The officers’ tower block was built in 1982. It may well be the weirdest building in all of New Zealand and is probably the masterpiece of an architect whose work I saw throughout my travels. You could never mistake his buildings as the work of anyone else. They were a particular New Zealand aesthetic – grim, deranged, bitter.
His material was concrete, a lot of concrete, great big slabs of it, thick and bare, unpainted and grey and easily stained, sometimes stippled, always insane. The buildings looked like pavements built upright. Two of the best examples were the district council offices in Greymouth and a lookout with stairs and turrets smelling of urine on State Highway Three near Palmerston North. The biggest and most creative structure, his masterpiece, was the tower at Waiōuru. Its seven levels were designed like steps; it looked less as though it were leaning back than staggering backwards.
It also looked haunted. ‘Funny you should say that,’ said Second Lieutenant Gwyn Macpherson. He was the other 50 percent of the officers at lunch that day. He talked about the ghostliness of the mess, and of the entire camp, especially at night – the silence, the dark, the wind in the gum trees. There was talk, too, at the Oasis of ghosts and spirits who popped in for a visit. A woman who had been killed in a car accident many years ago was sometimes seen driving the Desert Road. Someone said they saw – through fog, near dawn – soldiers dressed in First World War uniforms marching in line towards the army museum. Waiōuru remained afraid at all times: the gates to the army camp advertised that the security alert level was black. It has stayed that colour since 9/11.
It was a town of ghosts, but also of the brilliantly alive. Macpherson, a handsome blue-eyed blonde, 28, described himself thus: ‘I’m six foot four and I look like a Viking.’ This was only the first part of a sentence. It continued, ‘But there’s a young recruit here, she’s like four foot nothing, and she can do what I can do.’ He was proud of the recruits. They probably worshipped him but he was without vanity, and very easy company. He talked about the house he had bought in Hīmatangi. ‘It’s got a 10 by 12 shed! I couldn’t turn it down.’ What was the house like? ‘Oh, it’s all right. But the shed’s great.’ In his spare time he sews. He bought an industrial sewing machine, set it up in the shed, and runs up camouflage webbing for army packs. ‘Something always needs improving,’ he said.
He grew up in Kaitāia, skinny and long-haired, ‘wayward’, a surfer. ‘The army lit a flame under me.’ He joined at eighteen.
When he was born, his father was sixty-two. He had been a sergeant with the 27th Machine Gun Battalion in Crete when the island fell to the Germans on May 20, 1941. ‘He had nightmares to the day he died. He had twin brothers, and they were killed within 24 hours of each other, one in Crete and the other flying in the RAF. His mother blamed him for not bringing
his brother back home from Crete.’
The Germans landed by parachute. For a long time they made easy targets, shot as they drifted in the sky. ‘A shot paratrooper landed at my father’s feet. My father always said he looked exactly like his twin brothers. That might have had something to do with his nightmares.’
Every desert has its rose. Where did it grow in Waiōuru? I went out into the Rangipō Desert with Lieutenant Macpherson in an army jeep that bucked like a ship in a storm. The ground was hard and bumpy; there was a lot of ice and clots of snow, and a lot of bits and pieces of shrapnel. It all looked the same, nameless, but the army had names. Macpherson took out the map he kept in his jacket and said, ‘Over there is The Wall. That’s the Sea of Boulders. And we call this one Ghost Bush.’
More ghosts; but the desert moved with life, in the shape of recruits in the ninth week of their standard thirteen-week basic training. As their platoon commander, the lieutenant talked about how satisfying it was to see them develop into soldiers. They were out in Zone One, as the army called the desert, wrapped up tight in their uniforms. The day’s exercises included target practice with their Steyr rifles. Also, they had dug holes in the tightly packed desert earth. What with? ‘An entrenching tool,’ said Nick Josephson, eighteen. What? ‘A shovel.’ Steve Devantier, nineteen, from Te Atatu in Auckland, said they were about to charge over a hill and fill up a hole. Why? He said, ‘So it isn’t there anymore.’
They were boys with pinched faces and a Waiōuru tan – white as ice. They slept under coarse grey blankets. They mopped floors, cleaned toilets, got haircuts. Reveille was 0545 hours, lights out at 2215. The louvre window in their room was kept open day and night. They could not ever sit down on their bed. ‘It encourages idleness,’ said Lieutenant Macpherson. A whiteboard in one of the barracks was headlined SAYINGS FOR THE DAY. That day the saying was FIFTY. What did that mean? A staff sergeant said, ‘That’s how many times they’ve fucked me off today.’ Lieutenant Macpherson talked about punishments. ‘Once, I made a soldier carry an iron jack everywhere he went. It weighed 18 pounds. Everyone knew him as Jack. It’s a term we use that means he wasn’t helping out his mates.’ What had he done wrong? ‘His bed was in an absolutely shocking state. It’s funny, when one person is slack it spreads like a disease.’
Civilisation Page 3
