Nathan stared at the floor. He was thinking about his job as a scrub-cutter. ‘I just got laid off this year actually.’ And then: ‘No, it was last year I got laid off.’ I asked about employment. He said, ‘There’s no jobs around Rotorua. The mills and that, they’ve all laid people off.’ I asked about his dealings with welfare offices. He said WINZ made him attend ‘senimars’. They weren’t much help.
While Ata wrote and read phone texts about the house she was caregiving, Nathan held up his beer can and said, ‘Up to me, I can stop just like that, eh. I just choose to carry on. But I can give up drink if I want to, if I had to. But she won’t stop.’ He said it without rancour or judgement, just as a hard little fact.
Ata held up her beer can and said everyone called their caravan the ‘canavan’. Who was everyone? The friends who liked to visit and, as she put it, ‘rock’. Then: ‘But any men try to rock here, I stand in my doorway. That means they can’t come in. ’Cos they think they can come here and drink our beer and smoke our smokes.’
‘And spot on the stove,’ Nathan said.
‘There is no spotting in here, eh,’ said Ata. ‘I don’t mind people having a joint, but hash oil – nah. It stinks.’
So all the friends who came to rock were women? ‘Yeah,’ said Nathan. ‘Bee-atches.’
‘They’re not bee-atches,’ said Ata.
‘I go next door when they come over,’ said Nathan. ‘Just sit in there by myself.’
‘Nobody’s around me, I’m bored,’ said Ata. ‘I’m a crowd person.’
‘I’m a loner,’ said Nathan. ‘I haven’t got any friends.’
‘Hello!’ said Ata.
‘I haven’t got any mates.’
What about his scrub-cutting crew? ‘Nah, ’cos they’re all recovering alcoholics,’ he said.
Ata received another text and said to him, ‘Do we want to go to Di’s?’
‘Who’s that?’ he asked, nodding at her phone.
‘Auntie Eru,’ she said. ‘Yay or nay?’
‘Nah.’
‘Can I?’
‘Yeah.’
She got up to leave and put on the man’s hat. Nathan got up too. He said he’d go for a walk and when he got back he’d either sit in the caravan by himself or in the cabin by himself. I waved as he walked off. His grey tracksuit was the same shade as the lake and the sky.
When night fell, Rotorua’s main drag, Fenton Street, glowed from one end to the other with the neon force of its motels. The lollipop reds, emerald greens, golden yellows – the names made for happy reading. La Mirage. Bel Aire. Golden Glow. Emerald. Geneva. Havana. Baden. Rob Roy. Four Canoes. There were so many. They were like TV shows, little extravaganzas, points of light shining and twinkling in the dark, with their heated pools in private courtyards.
In motels you have paperbacks by Catherine Cookson. In hotels you have ham steaks with pineapple on the restaurant menu, and a $45 buffet complete with pavlova, ye olde shrimp cocktails, and Māori cultural performances – the small stage, the acoustic guitar, the painted faces under a spotlight. In broad daylight, the window frames of the motels and hotels were chipped and flaked, because nothing stands in the way of Rotorua sulphur, chewing its way out of the earth and invading every surface. There was talk of having to change bath and sink taps four times a year. Sulphur had a particular appetite for electrical appliances. It even corrupted the alphabet: the sign for the Regal Geyserland had been reduced to REGAL CEV ERLAND. Imogen, a guest, posted a bad review with a happy ending: ‘The furniture is shabby and tatty, the mattresses saggy and ancient. The blankets are just rough cuts of material … appliances don’t work … the shower is disgusting …The staff are friendly and helpful.’
I thought of another sour-faced visitor to Rotorua, the writer and harridan Lynn Barber, who visited in 2002 and commented: ‘The town centre consists entirely of burger bars, massage parlours, tourist tat shops and Māori nightclubs offering evenings of haka and hāngī (war dances and barbecues) to be avoided at all costs.’
War dances and barbecues! Still, she got the ‘avoid at all costs’ right. But there was so much to see and do. There were the spa baths and mud baths, a fast jet-boat ride and a slow gondola. Haka World taught the haka, but not correct use of apostrophes (‘Learn the word’s and actions!’). And visitors could immerse themselves in an authentic pre-European experience at Mitai Māori Village, or Tamaki Māori Village, where guests were invited to ‘browse through the marketplace to view designer clothing and much more’.
Mitai and Tamaki weren’t living villages. No one lived there. The population at Ōhinemutu was about 300. I asked Polly Morgan, 71, of Whakarewarewa, how many people lived in her village. She started counting the people in families: ‘One, two, three, four … five, six, seven … eight, nine, ten, eleven…’ She got to 53 and then said, ‘No more than a hundred.’ We sat next to each other on a bench outside the meeting house. Tourists walked by. Polly smoked a cigarette and wore a soft tracksuit. ‘We never used to lock our doors,’ she said. ‘We’d play and then go to the auntie’s for bread and jam. It’s a business now. Tourists all the time. It doesn’t bother me.’ Asked what she thought the difference was between Ōhinemutu and Whakarewarewa, she came up with an incredible answer. ‘My own opinion is that they’re more commercialised than we are.’
However, it cost nothing to visit Ōhinemutu. Visitors arriving at Whakarewarewa entered a ticket office and were greeted with $29 general admission, $31 general admission plus cob of corn cooked in steam, $59 general admission plus hāngī lunch, and so on. Punters then set foot on the bridge over Puarenga Stream and were immediately asked to pay another tariff by ‘penny divers’, young boys and girls who swam in the river and called out to passers-by to throw them coins. ‘Please, sir! Give us some money! Lady!’ etc.
It was easy to submit to the hand-wringing liberal within and ask yourself what kind of message it was sending that Māori children were encouraged to beg. It hardly seemed plausible that this nineteenth-century custom was still in existence. It made New Zealand look distinctly Third World, but the divers could earn about 30 dollars a day in the high season. Liberal anxiety is no match for that much hard cash.
Whakarewarewa had souvenir shops, and Neds Café specialising in hāngī meals. It was dusty and tiny and lovely. Hot mineral water melted the Earth’s crust, colouring it yellow and orange and bone-white. Houses were obscured behind clouds of delicious steam. A man leaned out the window of his car and asked Polly, ‘Any mail, Auntie?’ None of the houses had letterboxes; all mail was sent to post boxes and picked up from there.
Another man dipped a plastic bucket into a hot pool and walked back to his home. ‘Water to wash the dishes in,’ he said. That morning Polly had put a pot of chicken soup in her steam box in the ground. She was about to have her ‘nanny nap’ and would eat the soup at about seven-thirty.
Chicken soup and village life, lovely, peaceful, quiet. ‘Any mail, Auntie?’ Tour guides telling attentive Germans about the apparently smooth impact of the first Christian missionaries on Māori: ‘What was written in the scriptures coincided with our beliefs.’ The sun was gentle and a tūī sang in a gum tree. But the ground was sinking, caving in, eroded by geothermal acidic fluids.
And it seemed no one knew where they stood in other ways – Whakarewarewa was in the midst of an ongoing land dispute among Ngāti Wāhiao, Ngāti Whakaue and Tūhourangi. Part of the dispute was based on the widely held view that Tūhourangi were squatters. They had only come down in the last shower: they arrived after Mount Tarawera erupted in 1886 and were ‘gifted’ their land. The message was: Gift it back. What was a mere 120 years of settlement? They were even later on the scene than Pākehā.
Polly’s iwi was Tūhourangi. She said, ‘People have called me – what was it? – an overstayer. No, not overstayer. Something else.’ I said, ‘Squatter?’ She said, ‘That’s it! “You fellas are just squatters.” That’s what some people say.’
She laughed. ‘The honest
truth is that some of us here couldn’t care less about who owns what. As long as I’ve got food in the cupboard and I have my smokes…’ She threw away her cigarette butt. It landed in the brown grass. She stood up; it was time for her nanny nap.
Nanny naps and village life; the tour guide saying to the attentive Germans ‘Repeat after me, “haka”,’ and the Germans grunting ‘Huck-ah’; the wonderful smell of the mineral water, and the gorgeous clouds of steam flung this way and that in the air – and then the mist parted, and there was a Māori chief. ‘I live in chaos, as you can see,’ he said, in his very strange house in the village. I didn’t see much chaos. Perhaps his paperwork needed arranging, and it’s true there were a lot of cobwebs up in the extremely high ceiling. The real chaos was the fact he was there in the first place. I had stepped into another underworld.
His name was Jim Dennan and he was eighty-eight. He had lost the hair on his head and he moved slowly, creakingly, on his two new knees. He was large, fleshy, pale. The immediate and dominant thing about him was his sardonic nature. Resentment kept him alert, smoothed his skin; he had quite a youthful face and he didn’t waste unnecessary energy on smiling.
He was true to himself, but who was he? It was bewildering to place him in Whakarewarewa: an aged sardonic Englishman who spoke in a fairly posh accent, living by himself in a dark timber home with exquisite Māori panelling.
He said, ‘You don’t know much about me, do you?’ That wasn’t true. I didn’t know a single thing about him. And so he revealed an epic family saga. I had come in at the end, and found an exile from Oxfordshire living in a beautifully carved whare in Whakarewarewa.
You could see the whare as you entered the village. It was up on a hill. It looked like an abandoned meeting house; there was a beat-up couch on the floorboards of the front porch. If you squinted, it looked haunted. Jim Dennan was its ghost.
It had been built in 1909 for Maggie Papakura, high-born descendant of Te Arawa chiefs, subject of documentaries and biographies, one of the great beauties of her age, intelligent, entrepreneurial, independent, a celebrated guide at Whakarewarewa who left New Zealand in 1912 to marry a wealthy English landowner and live in his stately home, Oddington Grange, in Oxfordshire. She is buried there. She was Jim’s grandmother.
This partly explained the presence of her unlikely mokopuna, the only son of her only child, in the whare in Whakarewarewa. But there was more to the family saga, other crucial subplots. Jim’s mother died when he was a child; his father was made bankrupt, had to sell the Oddington manor, shooed Jim and his sisters away to live with relatives in England, and returned by himself to Whakarewarewa, where he married the legendary Guide Rangi. When Jim’s father died, Guide Rangi inherited the whare. Guide Rangi, Guide Maggie – during their lifetimes, they were among the most famous Māori in the world. Jim was a unique link to the two women, the two celebrities.
And here he was, living in obscurity, off his wits. He had a souvenir shop in the village; it sold his paintings and carvings, and a selection of second-hand wristwatches. The shop was merely his latest business venture. ‘You name it, I’ve done it,’ he said. ‘You give me a foolscap sheet of paper and I’ll write down a different job on every line.’ He looked around for a foolscap sheet of paper, gave up and sighed heavily. ‘Chaos.’ He sat there, resentful and posh, in the dark gloomy whare with his shirts hung over the frame of his single bed. But why was he here? It was the classic New Zealand answer: land.
In 1992, he said, he was sorting through family papers, read about the whare where his father, stepmother and grandmother had lived in Whakarewarewa, and decided to come out to New Zealand for a visit. He popped into the village and made himself known. ‘And that was when I was told, “Well, it’s all yours. Why don’t you come and live here?” So I thought, “Well, I’ve had a bloody good time in NZ for two months so I will.”
‘It took three years to get passport and citizenship papers. In the meantime they were writing to me – I’ve letters saying, “Hurry on back, we’re waiting for you” and all this crap. So I arrive back in 1995 and they say, “It’s not yours. It’s ours.”’
Eventually ‘they’ let him live in the whare. ‘But I don’t own it. I don’t own a blade of grass in Whaka. Not a single blade of grass.’
It was the cause of his bitterness. I asked whether he was regarded with the respect due him as Rangi’s stepson and Maggie’s grandson. He said, ‘Well, I am a chief when all’s said and done. They tolerate me in that sense. But I don’t walk around with a feather stuck out of my head and all that sort of crap.
‘I was brought up in Pākehā land and consequently I think Pākehā. But when you try and put Pākehā thoughts into people’s heads here they don’t want to know, do they. They say, “We want to do it the Māori way.” Well, the Māori way is hold your hand out and get some free money and don’t do any work.’
Earlier in the day, I had talked to Dardin Heretaunga, a strong, solidly built 36-year-old who lived a few doors down. He wore black jeans and a black T-shirt. ‘Yeah, heavy metal, that’s right, bro,’ he said. ‘Iron Maiden, Black Sabbath, a bit of Floyd…’ We sat on his porch. The lawn had dried up because of the geothermal heat beneath the topsoil. He said he was unemployed.
‘I was in the bush for a little while, eh. Logging. Silviculture. But I got out of there and started working on my uncle’s dairy farm.’ He said the word ‘uncle’ a few other times, and always pronounced it ‘oncle’. He continued, ‘Then I was in a relationship for three years, but that… Anyway, I went to Sydney and got a job as an autoglazer.’
I asked whether wages in Australia really were heaps better than in New Zealand, as people always said. ‘Yeah, nah, it adds up about the same when you take expenses into account.’
But was life in Australia heaps better than in New Zealand, as people sometimes said? He said, ‘Yeah, nah, to be honest I couldn’t wait to be home. I partied hard and had a lot of fun but the food’s better here. Way better.’
Like what?
‘Mutton,’ he said.
He hadn’t found work since he returned to Whakarewarewa. ‘Still looking, but there are no jobs in Rotorua.’ So what did he do with himself? ‘Just stick around the village,’ he said. ‘It’s my home, eh bro.’ Some of his relatives were buried on the side of the path that ran through Whaka: I noticed the name ‘Heretaunga’ on a number of the tombs next to the pretty Church of the Immaculate Conception.
Further up the path were large monuments to that wandering bankrupt who deserted his children, William Francis Te Aonui Dennan, and his widow, Rangitiaria Dennan, Guide Rangi. There was also a wordy, windy memorial to Maggie Papakura. It stuck to the old false European narrative of the arrival of the Māori in New Zealand. ‘A chieftainess, the first-born of the eldest line of the noble and sacred ancestors. Related to seven of the eight canoes which arrived here about 1350, and from which all Māori tribes in New Zealand are descended…’
But what to make of Jim Dennan, the Māori chief who arrived in 1992? I asked him, ‘When you first saw Whaka, did you actually want to live here?’ But I’d asked the wrong question, missed the point. It wasn’t about wanting, it was about what he thought he was entitled to. ‘I wasn’t allowed in the village until my seventieth birthday. The day I was allowed in we had a chief’s welcome on the bloody marae and all that crap. You know, big fuss, big birthday party, and everybody made me welcome.’
I asked him, ‘Well, now that you’re in, do you enjoy living in Whaka?’ He answered, ‘Very much. I enjoy the tourists, especially the English.’ He didn’t socialise much with the villagers. ‘I go down to the RSA sometimes.’ He didn’t share the public hot-spring baths: ‘No. Would you? You would? What, after 20 bloody people have gone in? Good luck to you. I wouldn’t.’
He was acting the full-time snob. He said, ‘The people here don’t like me because I say it straight.’ But there was a frailty about him, something vulnerable and anxious. He said about his life: ‘I’ve written it al
l down.’ He brought out a scrapbook. It was his illustrated memoir. There were snapshots, and a commentary written in blue pen. The many and varied business ventures, a busted marriage, ending up in Whakarewarewa selling second-hand wristwatches – it told the story of a self-unmade man.
I flipped backwards. There was a photo of a white Volkswagen van taken two years before he came to New Zealand. His caption: BUSINESS VENTURE (FAILED). ‘I had a smoke alarm business,’ he said, very nearly smiling, ‘but it failed when the van caught fire.’
There were more photos of vehicles. Caption of a picture of a yellow Leyland truck: FIRST TRUCK IN THE SAND AND GRAVEL VENTURE. Caption of a green Ford van: FIRST DAY ON THE THRAPSTON LAYBY. See damp Thrapston and die; the van was his mobile snack bar, selling hot dogs and other merriments wrapped in fat.
On the same page, the narrative of his life included this remark: ‘Shirley got a job in refrigeration and soon found a “boyfriend”.’ Who was Shirley, and what was with the sardonic inverted commas? There she was, a few years earlier and a few pages back, a lively, bright-faced brunette posing with a hail and hearty Jim behind a bar. The caption read THE MILTON ARMS, LUTON, WITH WIFE SHIRLEY 1968. He said, ‘Shirley fell out with Vic Roffe, one of our customers, and busted his glass in his face. He was very good about it, but we lost all our customers. Shirley’s why I’m living 13,000 miles away.’
There were photos of Jim in the war, and then photos of Jim as a pampered child of the gentry. There were photos of his two sisters and photos of his mother. Jim’s comments read: ‘I remember spending our days with a governess. … Prep school. … Mother died in Radcliffe Infirmary on February 16, 1932. It was Barbara’s birthday. The party was held in mother’s bedroom.’ One of his sisters had added her comments: ‘I was awakened by father at two a.m. and told mother was now with the angels. … I remained in bed for two weeks.’
Civilisation Page 6
