There were other ways to depart. ‘Farming with the angels,’ read the obituary for a man whose name really was Ray Death. But there were also interesting arrivals, and returns. Spencer Hall, the man spat at by chumps, had fled Wanganui after leaving school. Now and then he’d come back to visit, and always cringed. ‘Sleepy little place. Almost lazy.’ When he returned eighteen months ago, though, it felt different. ‘I didn’t cringe. Wanganui’s getting there. It’s finding its voice. I’d say it was stirring.’ He gave a lot of credit to Stink Magnetic Tapes, the independent record company that had moved from Wellington in 2008, and was devoted to recording ‘dirty rock ’n’ roll’ – local bands include The Death Rays, which consists of two sisters dating two cousins.
Music had also helped bring back Orrin Reynolds, 30, Sacha Te Utupoto Keating, 31, and Nigel Scanlon, 30, of Katipo Productions, devoted to recording Wanganui hip-hop. ‘Wanganui’s pretty sweet. It’s a nurturing environment,’ Reynolds said. Asked about the bylaw that made it a criminal offence to wear gang insignia in the city, he said, ‘The perception is that we’re under siege, but it’s totally the opposite, bro. I’ve never felt unsafe here. I live opposite a gang house, got me a big-assed plasma TV, and always leave my front door open.’
They were about to drive to Wellington for a benefit gig at La Bodega for the widow and children of Tony Costa, 33, who had died in a surfing accident at Lyall Bay. Spencer Hall was about to drive to Pātea for the annual Yee-Haw Spring Hoedown. (‘Pātea has an ATM now,’ advised the party invite.)
Traffic was also headed towards Wanganui that weekend. The city was hosting two cultural events – a glass festival and a literary festival. The latter featured appearances by novelist Fiona Kidman, poets Kevin Ireland and Glenn Colquhoun, baking guru Alexa Johnston, and others. You could see the writers around town happily slurping on flat whites at sidewalk cafes, gazing contentedly at the river, admiring the hundreds of flower baskets along Victoria Avenue. ‘Wonderful,’ they said. ‘Lovely.’ The festival broke even on its $23,000 budget, attracting an audience of pensioners and that one age-group to show a significant population increase since the last census – 50 to 59 year olds, up 16.8 percent.
‘North of here,’ said the organiser Joan Rosier-Jones, novelist and political firebrand – she once stood for the Socialist Party against Marilyn Waring – ‘north of here it’s a different culture. Rural, basic. Wanganui’s more sophisticated. I belong to a book club. At the moment we’re reading about Jews and the Holocaust and all that sort of thing. I’m not that interested. I’d like to move on. One of our ladies was a POW of the Japanese in the Philippines. She had to knit white cotton socks for the kamikaze pilots. They wore them so they’d go the right place, like heaven, or wherever you go when you’re Japanese.’
She said, ‘I went to Iona College in Havelock North. I’m true blue.’ It seemed reasonable to expect she hadn’t much enjoyed the long years of Helen Clark’s Labour government. ‘No. They made it all warm and fuzzy. In real life there are winners and losers.’
Who were the losers? Joan lived on St John’s Hill, also known as Snob’s Rock, where Wanganui’s money was tucked away. The bottom of the heap was west at Castlecliff, home of Black Power, and east at Aramoho, home of the Mongrel Mob. Helen Ngapo, who attended the literary festival wearing quite flamboyant dresses, taught at Aramoho Primary School. The first thing she said was, ‘It’s decile one.’
The school roll was 70 percent Māori. Many of the parents worked at the Mars pet-food factory (airport sign: ‘Wanganui, home of Whiskas!’). Many were unemployed. ‘A lot of the kids are from gang homes,’ she said. ‘People think of us as a ghetto but most houses are still on a quarter-acre section. And we have 100 percent attendance on parents’ day. I tell them, “It’s a legal requirement!”’ She laughed, and then she said, ‘The reality is that parents at Aramoho care about their children as much as any parents.’
We were joined by her husband Henry Ngapo, the school principal. There was an immediate impression of dignity and calm, strength and mana. ‘I’m originally from Waiheke Island,’ he said. ‘Pisshead for a father. No money. But I’ve got five tertiary qualifications, including a Fulbright. I tell that to the kids. We’ve got one girl who wants to be a doctor. Her parents are very supportive. Her father was one of the men implicated in the killing of baby Jhia.’ He meant the Mongrel Mob drive-by shooting that killed the two-year-old daughter of a Black Power member in 2007. Henry said, ‘It was a really horrific time. The kids were stressed to the max. But the guy I was telling you about, the father, something clicked inside his head after that. He doesn’t drink anymore, stopped smoking dope. He wants the best for his daughter.’
Helen taught social studies. ‘The kids said, “We’d like to learn about revolution” so I gave them a quote from Zapata – “Revolution is not a bed of roses” – and said, “Tell me what it means.” This girl, the one who we’re talking about, said, “Tears will be shed and hearts will be broken.” A seven year old. Can you believe that?’
Other, similarly unofficial signs of life, hope and goodness in Wanganui ran riot at the apparently endless home of potter Ross Mitchell-Anyon. It was impossible to locate anything as prosaic as a front door or a back door in his ramshackle, sprawling house on the banks of the river. ‘Built it myself,’ he said. ‘Wood butchery.’
It was more than merely chaotic. Ross was like a man who had declared war on blank space. His hair was all over the shop. He drove a big black bomb. The paintings on his walls included a portrait of David Bain. He threw planks on to an enormous outdoor brick fireplace; the warmth brought people from thin air. ‘It’s like a bloody hippie commune here,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘I seem to attract waifs and strays.’
He drove into town in his six-cylinder 1962 Vanguard 6. ‘It’s a portable blackboard,’ he said. He’d chalked its side doors with the notorious letter H. ‘I own that one,’ he said, pointing to the former Ministry of Works building. It cost $75,000. ‘That’s one of mine,’ he said, driving past the former Wanganui Chronicle building. It cost $115,000. Both are tenanted by local artists and musicians.
‘To tell you the truth,’ he said, ‘I’m a poozler.’ What? ‘A scrounger, an arranger of bits and pieces. I’d always bought parts of buildings – windows, boards – and then I thought, why not buy the building?’ I bought my first one dirt cheap. They still are. Wanganui’s art scene is such because of the cheapness of the real estate: you don’t have to charge much rent for studio space. I had someone wanting to buy the Chronicle building. They offered me a lot of money, but they wanted to knock it down so I told them to get fucked. I’ve got the glass artist guys in there. People like that keep the blood going through Wanganui.’
He parked the car near the Sarjeant Gallery. His public sculpture ‘Handspan’, which features over 5,000 casts of hands, was being dedicated in Queen’s Park. He looked around. ‘Oh, there’s my hand,’ he said. ‘Haven’t seen that in years. Ha! There’s Helen Clark’s.’ The sculpture had been funded by a peace activist called Gita Brooke. Gita’s husband Anthony really was the last White Rajah of Sarawak. His family held absolute rule over the Malaysian state from 1843 until 1945.
Later, back at his house, Ross and his posh sexy girlfriend Bobbi Magdalinos, a school inspector, stoked up the giant fireplace. Bobbi said she’d only recently moved to Wanganui. Her husband, Napier architect Paris Magdalinos, had died in July the year before. She said, ‘There I was, the widow in mourning black. Three months later I fall in love with a bohemian potter in Wanganui.’
We looked into the flames, and into something even more compelling and primal: a dirty great big hole in the ground directly in front of the fireplace. It was art, a statement. Mitchell-Anyon had concreted the sides. A very, very long ladder stood in it. You could barely see the bottom. It looked like a journey into the centre of the Earth. Bobbi said, ‘We were sitting here one night by the fire and Ross said, “I’m going to dig a hole.” And I said, “Fantastic.”
Because that’s what you say to someone like Ross.’
He said, ‘You can go up, and you can go down. But not many people go down.’ No. We continued looking at the hole. It was a void. It was an abyss.
Mercer
Fog
The graveyard was across the road from the school and over the fence from a three-bedroom house on the edge of a paddock. It was raining hard at last; summer’s drought had rusted the countryside. Mercer – exactly halfway between Auckland and Hamilton, a fast 40-minute drive in either direction – smelled of chimney smoke on a Friday morning in early winter. A thrush was singing above the dirt track that led to the gates of the primary school, which had a roll of 22 – seventeen Māori and five Pākehā.
A spade and a copy of Jehovah’s Witness magazine The Watchtower were in a corrugated iron shelter in the grounds of the cemetery. Grave markings blamed the Waikato River, which flowed past the town: George Sellwood drowned at Mercer, 1900; Roy Carter drowned, aged 27, in 1920: ‘Sometime we’ll understand’.
The sky was almost black, and the dark outline of a man could be seen through the windows of his three-bedroom house. Paul Whitelaw, 53, had sat down for a cup of tea. He was a new face. He’d moved in exactly two weeks ago, packed a suitcase of clothes and shifted from Whitianga to run sheep and beef on an 1,100-acre farm. ‘I worked up north as a carpenter building homes,’ he said. ‘We did well. The boys are still hard-out. They’re busy on a three-million-dollar home not due to be finished ’til November.’
He was trying to knock his own house into shape, had torn up the floorboards and lowered the ceiling. He touched the new ceiling. ‘What d’you reckon – bit bright?’ He’d bought very white ten-millimetre ply for $15 a sheet. ‘The house was rat-infested,’ he said, and pointed to a black rubbish bag in the kitchen. ‘Full of droppings. When I pulled down the ceiling, paper and nests came spilling out. The smell! Took days to get rid of it.’
He had no family, was on his own. Moving to Mercer marked a return to farming in the district where he was born. ‘I’m excited about it but it’s not been the greatest of seasons to kick off, and I’m just praying it’s not going to get cold.’ He was thinking about his thousand ewes.
Peter Black, whom he’d known since school, called in to see if he needed a hand. Black, a drain-laying contractor, employed eight people. ‘Mercer’s good,’ he said. What did he like about it? ‘It’s quiet. And it’s got the rowing club. All my kids have rowed for Mercer.’
Paul started up an electric saw. Peter shouted, ‘Mercer used to have an IGA, a Four Square, a butcher shop. Twenty-six truck and trailers used to be based here. They’d take sand to Hamilton and Auckland when they dredged the river.’ What did he make of the modern Mercer Food Junction Service Centre? All day, every day, traffic on the State Highway One Waikato Expressway turns on to an off-ramp, crosses an overbridge and stops for gas, for coffee, for the familiar happy stench of McDonald’s. Peter said, ‘I never go there.’ The history of Mercer was still on his mind. ‘Go and see Terry Carr,’ he said. ‘Lived here all his life. Retired now. Fit as a trout. He’s down the road, waiting for his dog to die.’
The houses of Mercer nestle in a foothill above the river. Terry was at home with his wife Dorrie. She said, ‘It’s not a very happy home today.’ She looked at Terry. He met her eye, then put his hands in his pockets and sat down in the dining room next to the brightly painted kitchen.
Dorrie put on the kettle. The sky had turned darker; midday had the pall of five p.m. Terry said, ‘Just buried the dog.’ What was its name? Terry said, ‘Lucky.’ And then he brightened. ‘He was lucky to be alive! Lived like a king. Never slept in his kennel. He’d back in and decide it wasn’t for him. He always slept in the shed. But he was going blind and deaf and… We took him to the vet this morning.’ Back home, Terry had put on his gumboots and got to work with a shovel in the front garden in the rain. ‘That’s where he is now, old Lucky.’
The sudden absence of his fourteen-year-old border collie made the house feel empty. ‘I guess I’ll move now,’ Terry said. ‘The dog was the stumbling block. He would have hated it.’ He meant Pukekohe, ten minutes’ drive north, where Dorrie had lived while Terry stayed in the family home, waiting for Lucky to die. ‘The new house had nowhere for him to run around. It’s one of those places where you can hand a cup of tea through the window to the person next door.’
Dorrie said, ‘No, it isn’t.’ She admitted their home in Mercer was on a larger section, which included a vast magnolia tree. ‘It’s not in great shape,’ Dorrie said, ‘because someone’s not looking after it.’
She looked at Terry. They both smiled. She said she was seventy. Terry said, ‘I’m seventy-seven. No, seventy-eight?’ Dorrie said, ‘Think again. You’re seventy-six.’ Terry said, ‘You’re the boss.’ They shared another fond and private smile.
They had lived apart for two and a half years. Dorrie stayed over on Saturday nights, after a round of golf at nearby Te Kauwhata. The rest of the time Terry looked after himself, cooked his own meals. ‘Spuds and vegies. Sausages. Steak once in a while.’ Dorrie smiled again. ‘Bachelor’s heaven.’
Did he shop at the service centre? ‘No.’ He gave a brief history lesson. There used to be shipping on the river. There used to be railway station tearooms (they inspired poet Rex Fairburn’s quality pun ‘The squalid tea of Mercer is not strained’). There used to be a wine bottling plant. There also used to be a tennis court: it was on their property, abandoned now, netless. They had laid the court in 1971 for their two kids, as well as everyone in Mercer, to enjoy. ‘We ran Housie down the pub to pay for it,’ Dorrie said. There used to be a pub.
Soon, too, Terry would be part of Mercer’s past. Pukekohe had a doctor and a supermarket: ‘We’re just waiting for a Farmers, then we’ll have everything we need.’ Terry looked out the kitchen window towards the front garden with its freshly dug grave. He said, ‘I’ve got no excuse now.’
A big blue roadside sign decorated with a knife and fork beckons motorists to the Mercer Food Junction Service Centre. ‘We get, like, 250 customers on a slow shift,’ said the bleary youth behind the counter at Mobil Oil. How many on a busy shift? The thought made him drop the bags under his eyes; they fell halfway down his face. He said, ‘Unimaginable.’
The unimaginable numbers, streaming in from the four-lane expressway, flicking cigarette butts in the car park, yawning in the forecourt, busting for a piddle inside the service centre mall on the banks of the slow, broad Waikato River. There were five tenants: McDonald’s; an ice-cream parlour; a food court with a choice of Country Chicken or Indian curry; an Esquires Coffee House next to a Pokeno Bacon Café. For children, entertainment options were limited to a small carousel with three luridly painted ponies sniffing each other’s bottoms, and another coin-operated ride with a notice in Chinese above a notice with an incredible English translation: DON’T SPLIT AND FOR PROFESSIONAL ONLY.
Inside the mall, filling their faces, were the tourists, the families, the lovers, the hungry and muttering teenage hordes. Also, the truck drivers and the duck shooters, and the drag racers on their way to the nearby tracks at Meremere and Hampton Downs. Everyone was on their way to somewhere else: like all departure lounges, the service centre could be anywhere. It felt like nowhere.
Even stranger, the town was neither here nor there: it had been pushed aside when the State Highway One bypass was built in 1992. The new expressway separated the houses from the river. The shops closed down and up went the service centre, like some sort of squat, brightly lit robot. It became the central fact of Mercer’s existence, reducing the rest of the town to a bystander. Does the centre belong to Mercer, or does Mercer belong to the centre?
North lie Pukekohe and the Bombay Hills, the fresh air and open countryside of the Franklin district, with winter crops in the long brown fields and signs advertising a possum shoot. South is the Waikato, potent with the forces of Taupiri Mountain and Tūrangawaewae Marae. In between, in the middle of this
grassy and riverine nowhere, is cramped, damp Mercer, dissected and disassembled by a motorway. It was always a transport hub: it used to be a shipping town, a railway town. But it also used to be a town.
By the river, where welcome swallows skimmed the water’s surface and goldfinches rustled in the tops of willows, the rugby clubrooms were abandoned, the H of the rugby posts bent out of the shape. At the Mercer Reserve, steps led to a flagpole draped in thick moss. On a side street in the shadow of the service centre was a compelling and eccentric war memorial, a statue of a First World War soldier on top of a gun turret rescued from British gunship HMS Pioneer, which had blasted at Māori in the land wars.
Opposite the memorial was something alive and thriving: the famous Mercer Cheese Shop, recognised in over 30 national awards as producing New Zealand’s best cheese. Dutch cheesemaker Albert Alferink opened the shop in 1982. It used to be the butcher store. It’s now a destination for gourmets. Life, too, was good on the river. Just before dusk on Friday afternoon, three teams of rowers emerged from the rowing club on the western side of the bank and set off towards the sunset. They followed the tide, flowing north.
After dark, life was played out in great high spirits at the Last Post Tavern, a small friendly bar with room for a pool table and a wood burner. The jukebox played The Drifters and Bruce Springsteen very loudly. There were about a dozen drinkers in on a Friday night. Friday night is always a happy ending to the working week – or, for that matter, the non-working week. I got drinking with a bunch of unemployed men who drove in from nearby Meremere. I went to Meremere the next day. It had a dairy surrounded by barbed wire, and an abandoned dementia unit, painted turquoise. On the balance of things, I preferred Mercer.
Civilisation Page 13
