That night they saw something amazing: a city, its lights blazing – a container ship. The sea was rough and they were told rescue was impossible until the morning. They woke up when they heard the massive iron sides of the ship bumping against their yacht. A rope ladder was thrown down; they had only minutes to pack their most precious things in a shoulder bag. For some reason Graye took a set of knives, a Christmas present from his daughter. The ship took them to the United States. All hell broke loose at Customs when officials detected the knives. The date was September 12, 2001.
They never saw the yacht again. ‘And now here we are,’ Graye said, ‘two shipwrecked mariners as far away from the sea as possible.’
A year later there they were, Graye and Grahame, standing next to each other and smiling very widely on the front page of The Otago Daily Times beneath the gigantic headline GONE WITH THE WIND. The news was stunning: the Environment Court had upheld their appeal against Meridian’s wind farm and refused Meridian consent to do its worst on the Lammermoor Ranges. Graye wore a jersey. Grahame was dressed in jeans and T-shirt. They were photographed on the side of the road in St Bathans. All you could see was blue sky and tussock grass, ruffled by the wind.
Ohinemutu & Whakarewarewa
How to Cook a Fish Head
The mist parted and there were a couple of drunk people. Heriata Porter was 49 years old with slender legs, a sensual, blurry face, and a man’s hat jammed on her head. Her partner, Nathan Rayner, 36, stood behind her wearing baggy grey track pants and a loose grey top. His head floated like a balloon above her shoulder. They were outside their caravan, which was parked on a scruffy patch of gravel next to a cabin. ‘That’s our bedroom,’ Heriata said. ‘We pay $50 a week to whoever we hire it off of.’
A garden table and chairs were set out in front. A mob of garden gnomes squatted in the dust. The couple walked inside the caravan and resumed drinking from cans of Brenner, a cheap German lager brewed in Papakura. They crushed their empties into a plastic bag hooked over the door handle.
It was getting on to tea time. Dinner: fish heads. Heriata’s recipe: ‘You boil them in fresh water with onions and salt. That’s it.’ But that wasn’t it. They had no electricity – no TV, no lights, no fridge, no stove. They watched the sky, lit candles, kept their beer cold in a chillibin filled with ice water, and cooked outside. Heriata said, ‘We live off steam.’ The pot of fish heads sat in a thin trickle of hot springs that bubbled and steamed out of the earth in one of the most amazing places on Earth.
Rotorua, world-famous for its geysers and its mud pools and its dancing, painted Māori; Rotorua, New Zealand’s battered old shopfront, fuming and humid, rampantly erotic, with public pools for many and private tubs for two. It attracts an estimated three million ‘visitor arrivals’ each year. They come to boil their flesh in hot pools, to marvel at and possibly eat shrimp cocktails. They come from Korea, Australia, Germany, England, Japan, America. Mostly they come from the principality of Auckland.
On this Friday afternoon in January, under a grey drizzling sky, every visitor looked the same: limp and disappointed. Misery is a great leveller. International tourists caught on fast to the distinctive melancholy of a lousy summer’s day in New Zealand.
The wind flew up and tore at the surface of Lake Rotorua, shredding it with its claws. The water looked foul and cold, like a bucket of suds. In the distance Mokoia Island assumed the shape of a fat dark lump. At the lake’s edge, a colony of feral black swans bobbed up and down, screaming and shitting. The wind gained strength, rain began to fall in fat dark lumps; two days later residents would emerge to find unusual carnage and a death toll of about three hundred.
Glyssa Bosworth told The Daily Post she was strolling downtown with her one-year-old daughter when they noticed a dead sparrow. ‘I could smell something absolutely horrific.’ She turned around and saw a great many dead sparrows at the base of a tree. ‘There was a humongous pile of them. It was gross.’
She immediately thought of bats, which had been seen in nearby trees a few years earlier. There had been no recent sightings of bats. Council staff blamed the storm but that didn’t account for the slaughter. Later, the SPCA accused person or persons unknown of poisoning the sparrows with the pest control agent alphachoralose, but the birds had already been destroyed and with them any evidence. The file remains open.
Death, humongous and gross; a suspicion of bats and poison; meanwhile, tourists driven inside, puzzling over the contents of motel and hotel libraries, with their ancient paperbacks by Catherine Cookson, their never-opened volumes of Reader’s Digest condensed novels (‘Call me Ishmael. The end.’). The heavy overnight downpour uprooted trees, raised the river, and spilled dishwater out of the lake. Playing fields were flooded. Already desolate playgrounds were deserted.
But rain never stops the giddy, happy play of mist, steam and warm thermal smoke. Everywhere, the lovely sleepy scent of sulphur escaped from the earth. Money is well spent at Te Puia cultural centre to gape at the famous Pōhutu geyser fizzing at the bung, but it’s just as bizarre and astounding to be simply walking along a road and noticing a drain smoking its head off. There was a drain smoking its head off in the lakeside village of Ōhinemutu.
Much about Ōhinemutu is bizarre and astounding, including the fact that people live there. It’s one of only two so-called ‘living villages’ in New Zealand, open for tourists to wander around and gawk and point and photograph while locals go about their business. The other living village, Whakarewarewa – duly astounding and bizarre, and smoking its head off on the raised banks of Puarenga Stream – was at the opposite end of town. As in Ōhinemutu, the silica looked as though it were melting.
I traipsed from one village to another. In places, the mist was as thick as a scrub fire, as slippery as fog, sliding along the street, lingering upon the pools that stand in drains. And then the mist parted and I stepped into another, stranger underworld. Heriata – Ata for short – opened the door to her caravan.
She took off her hat. The caravan had a view of the lagoon, the lake, the island. The storm began to build; unsuspecting sparrows were on their last legs; big fat raindrops sizzled on the pavements. Ata said, ‘I’m a chronic alcoholic. We drink every day, bro, that’s the truth. We do 36 cans between us. But it doesn’t kick for me no more. I don’t get no buzzes no more like the younger days, eh. It’s just a bad habit now. To wake up to a drink – it’s just a bad habit. And that’s what I do. As soon as I wake up I grab me a can, and then I go for my bath with my can of beer. No, two cans of beer.’
At six every morning she went for a bath in a shallow, steaming pool in a dark bathhouse behind the caravan. ‘I live in it,’ she said. ‘Go in four times a day. I’m the cleanest Māori in town.’ She was funny and vivid, brash and shrewd, drunk and tidy.
Outside, where the garden table and chairs pretended to be in a garden, there wasn’t a single discarded cigarette butt. I didn’t notice that: Ike Mitchell pointed it out. He gave Ata high marks. To Ike, cleanliness was possibly above godliness.
Jandalled and singleted, no spring chicken but as agile as a boxer, Ike moved at great speeds and with serious purpose around Ōhinemutu in his role as caretaker. He said he got by on four or five hours’ sleep every night. The marvel is that he managed to sleep that long. He talked quickly, non-stop, cursing and laughing, adamant. ‘I love history,’ he said, ‘and I hate bullshit.’
Most people lose their voice when they’re quoted in a newspaper – they don’t sound like themselves – but I instantly heard Ike’s voice when I googled him later and found a Daily Post story from 2004. He was responding to a thin-lipped little government booklet that presumed to instruct Māori how to prepare and cook hāngī hygienically. Ike was asked to comment. He was insulted by the booklet. He said: ‘You show me a bastard who has died from eating hāngī.’
He spoke exactly like that. He mentioned the funeral of former Ōhinemutu resident Sir Howard Morrison, and how a female journalist had wandered ov
er and asked him an impertinent question. ‘I said to her, “Lady,” I said, “if you had a pair of balls I’d put you on your arse.”’
He was standing on the forecourt in front of the meeting house. He decided to give a quick tour of the kitchen. ‘Spotless,’ he said. ‘You could eat off every inch of the floor.’ He banged the side of the three enormous metal steam cookers. ‘Can do 1,790 meals in an hour and a half.’ He turned on a tap. A roar of hot thermal water squirted out, and then he turned it off and sped towards Ata’s caravan. On the way, he was moved to give a speech about a civic official who lived in Ōhinemutu. ‘There was a sewage leak here last year and it was going straight into the lake. Well, he walks up and down and he sees it but pretends not to notice. Too much like hard work to try and fix it. He doesn’t give a shit. He’s just in it for himself and his overseas trips. Fucken arsehole.’
As Ike passed by in a whirl of passion and oaths, Ōhinemutu hissed and bubbled, steamed and blew smoke. Daylight packed it in and the colour of Lake Rotorua turned to dishwater. A few limp and disappointed tourists wandered around. They were cheered by Ōhinemutu’s picturesque Anglican church St Faith’s, built in 1910. Inside, they saw the frosted figure of a handsome, daintily bearded Māori Christ on a window overlooking the lake – when they parked their bums on pews they could see Christ’s brown feet walking on the water. They photographed the church and the cemetery. ‘When we die,’ Princess Te Puea once said, ‘the Earth folds us in its arms.’ But it doesn’t do that at Ōhinemutu: the bodies are put in whitewashed tombs above ground.
Ike briefly directed his wrath towards the city council (‘Dickheads … mongrels … pricks’) and then he arrived at the caravan. ‘Spotless,’ he said. ‘Never throws a single butt on the ground. See? Nothing. There’s some other people here live like animals. Generations of druggies. But I don’t worry about the bastards. I live my life. I’m happy.’
I was exhausted. Ike made introductions then left on some fresh mission. Inside, the caravan was very tidy, and also very narrow. The couple’s very old dog Sooty lay on the floor. It didn’t look as if he were ever going to get up. He was more like a species of rug than a dog.
It was good to get out of the lousy weather and sit in the caravan. ‘Some people says it’s an eyesore,’ said Ata. ‘They’ve tried to kick me out. Well, how come all the tourists come to photograph my pretty place? But it’s hard being stuck in here sometimes. We don’t have no car. No toilet. We do a mimi in a bucket, and go to a cousin’s house for the other.’
Her living conditions were somewhere around the halfway mark between Third World and First, more or less as primitive as when Ōhinemutu was settled. Strange to imagine the village in an earlier century, because it would have looked much the same: the moonlight glowing the same way on the surface of Lake Rotorua, the mist rising the same way out of the Earth’s crust.
Army officer Herbert Read described Ōhinemutu in 1825 in his racily titled memoir, A Ride through the Disturbed Districts of New Zealand: ‘In an open space in the middle of the settlement stone flags have been laid down, which receive and retain the heat of the ground in which they are sunk. This is the favourite lounge, and here at any hour of the day, but especially when the shades of evening are closing round, all the rank and fashion of Ōhinemutu may be seen wrapped in their blankets, luxuriously reclining on the warm stones.’
Steam is the constant fact of Ōhinemutu life. The modern trimmings as enjoyed by Ata and Nathan were beer, smokes and WINZ. Nathan said he got about $180 a week on the dole. He spoke in a thin quiet voice, as though he wasn’t used to forming words out loud. He said about the dole, ‘By the time you pay your bills and that, it’s bugger all.’
Ata laughed and said, ‘What bills? Stop lying! We don’t get bills, darling. We’ve only got one bill and that costs us $50 a week.’
Nathan said, ‘Yeah, that’s what I mean.’
Ata said, ‘And that’s for our cabin. But we’re gonna… we’re trying to set ourselves up, ’cos I wanna get rid of it. Our friend – I’ve got this friend – is looking to find me a cottage. He’s a demolition man. He knows what I like. He can pick one up that no one wants and put it beside the caravan. And then I can get rid of the cabin and pay him the $50 a week.
‘I tell you, man, I wouldn’t mind a bloody two-storey home. But hey, that’s just a dream. We gotta get real. You know. But hey, we’re happy with what we’ve got anyway. We don’t sit here and wish for anything more. Eh. I say to my tane, “We be grateful for what we’ve got, darling.”’
‘What we’ve got,’ repeated Nathan. ‘Yeah.’
‘And don’t think, eh, we need this and we need that ’cos we don’t,’ said Ata. ‘’Cos we got it all. We got a lot more than anybody else. Some of them out there are homeless, eh. But we’re happy. We never starve. And Ōhinemutu is full of life, tangis going 24/7.
‘You know, I’m in paradise, bro. I don’t even go to the city much. I can’t be bothered. If we want anything in town, my tane goes to get it.’ Her tane stared at the floor. ‘Plus,’ she said, ‘I caregive a house. I don’t just sit at home and drink all day; I drink on the job. And we always put in our ten cents worth of mahi at the marae. Do the cleaning, whatever. It’s only next door, and we’re doing jack. I take a can with me but I don’t advertise it. I’m discreet.’
From the big bay windows of the Lakeside, an old wooden shack posing as a pub directly above Ōhinemutu, I watched a young woman run out of the bathhouse with a towel wrapped around her, unlock her car and speed away. Three teenage boys lifted their bicycles on to the front wheel and rode through the village. Tourists with bare legs and backpacks pointed and recorded. The ground smoked.
The pub was large and semi-deserted. Two tough bastards with bruised faces – one Pākehā, one Māori: violence often attracts racial harmony in New Zealand – kept ducking outside to take some kind of drug and returning to lean against a wall, grunting and frowning, their eyes behind wraparound dark glasses. They must have been really stoned because on the jukebox they selected ‘Moonlighting’ by Leo Sayer. It blasted out at deafening volume.
I shared a table with a couple of old boys. We stood and drank in silence. We had no choice: it was impossible to talk. When the song finally finished, Henry Webber, 83, talked about the time the great Australian pool player Eddie Charlton walked into the Lakeside. ‘Must have been, oh, about five, six years ago. He was in his prime then. We played at that table just there. Just a frame. Eight-ball. It wasn’t a one-sided game, it was a close game. Very close. But I beat him.’
‘That’s right, he did!’ said Peter Garlick, seventy. Henry was dark, solid, stocky; Peter was pale and thin with slicked-back hair, and wore a pair of shiny silver polyester pants. He had turquoise eyes and a long nose that dipped into his glass. He stood in the doorway, hunched against the wind, lit a rolled-up cigarette, and took just two quick puffs before coming back in. He was economising. He said his pension paid $617 a fortnight. I asked where he lived. ‘Upstairs,’ he said. I asked how that had come about. ‘It’s quite funny, actually.’ But it wasn’t, really.
He had lived in a comfortable pensioner flat for ten years. ‘I’d have stayed another ten if I’d had my way. I was happy as Larry. I had TV, a stove.’ Then a woman from South Africa bought the flats and evicted him. It had something to do with his drinking. The room in the Lakeside was small and cheap. ‘I sit up there and read cowboy yarns,’ he said.
The shabby pub left to rot, the weak sunlight, the two tough bastards probably on more than dope – I felt nostalgic for Ata and Nathan’s snug caravan, their friendly company, their bond. ‘Together,’ sang Leo Sayer. ‘They’re gonna make it together.’
‘I was brought up in Catholic schools,’ Ata said. ‘My mother told me I was going to be a nun. I was like, “None at all.” They made us pray so hard it wasn’t funny.’
Nathan said, ‘I go up to St Faith’s sometimes.’
Ata said, ‘I haven’t been to church for years.’
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‘I go up and have a listen, eh,’ Nathan said, staring at the floor.
I asked Ata whether she had been good at school. ‘Nah. The only class I liked was typing.’ Was she fast? ‘Oh, yes, tweet, tweet… Everyone calls me Tweety Bird.’ Tweety Bird’s hands were covered in faded tattoos. She said, devastatingly, ‘I knew I wasn’t going nowhere right from day one.’
She said she had two children. ‘The eldest is 34 but I don’t know him. He got taken away from me. The father took him away ’cos I was sixteen when I had him. He was thirty-one. He kidnapped my baby, actually. I say to the family, “Tell him to come home. Mummy’s waiting.”’
No one said anything for a while. I thought about the stack of ancient paperbacks at my motel, where I’d flipped open Fenwick Houses by Catherine Cookson and read: ‘I was just sixteen when I realised that you don’t go to hell because you sin but because you love.’
The love story was in the room. The older woman, the younger man: she was wise to the ways of the world; he seemed confused, hesitant. They were gentle with each other, protective, tender, patient. The long hours in the caravan with their cans of Brenner… They had been together ten years.
‘I was boarding with his mum,’ Ata said. She brought out a plastic folder that contained news clippings. She had been photographed for a story about smoking. He had been photographed talking to a police officer about his mother’s death – the cops had viewed the death suspiciously but concluded the poor woman had just fallen over and cracked her head.
Ata continued, ‘His mum used to go with one of my cousins. So yeah, I’m boarding there and next minute he rocks in and I’m like, “Hey, he’s got a job! Fuck, he’s making good money! He can fucking keep me going!” Hah, hah, hah!’ Her raucous laugh tailed off and she said, ‘No, it wasn’t like that. I just fell in love with him.’
Civilisation Page 5
