Civilisation

by Steve Braunias

  The grandest rest home of all was Maran-Atha, a magnificent pile built in 1900 on Gordon Road as Dr Allan’s residence and surgery, and reopened in 1959 as a rest home by the Open Brethren. Clarence Pringle, 91, said, ‘They take us to church in Dunedin on Sundays.’ Bill Leslie, 85, said, ‘And they drove us to the Waihola Tavern the day after it burned down to see what was left.’ What was left? ‘There was a team of horses out front.’

  Bill was a big lad. He sat out on the front porch in shirtsleeves and talked about his days of farming – dairy, then cattle. He said, ‘I had a head operation. I’d bought a horse off Robinson – he was a great one at the rodeo, could ride anything. The horse was as rough as they make them. One day he set off the calves on a stampede. They came at the horse full belt and tipped his front foot. I went head over heels. Sconed me out.

  ‘Then I had a clot problem. I got put in the hospital in Dunedin. I phoned the manager at Maran-Atha and said, “What do I have to do to get in?” It wasn’t easy. Someone turned up for an interview and said, “A strong healthy man like you, wanting to be put in a rest home?” They said, “The people I worry about are the taxpayers.” I said, “I used to be one of those.”

  ‘They couldn’t make out why I specified this place, but it was because of my sister. She had polio at eleven, and had a room here for fourteen years. I’m in that room now. An old fella who was in there fell out of bed and ended up dying. They said, “You can have his room if you want it.” I said, “I’m not going to let that go by.”’

  In the dining room at lunch, Bill reached over to a sideboard and picked up a handbell. He rang it to announce grace. The men sat at their tables, the women at another; beef stew was served, with potatoes, broccoli, peas and carrots. The staff were tremendously nice and cheerful. ‘Would you like me to push your chair in closer, Olive?’ ‘Here you are, Emily. Does the beef need cutting?’ Residents are served breakfast in bed at seven a.m.; most go back to sleep for a while. There was morning and afternoon tea, Housie, indoor bowls, craft and God.

  After lunch, Lawson Adam, 80, sat in his high-ceilinged upstairs room. It was bathed in sunlight. He had trouble talking; he had no trouble playing a hymn on his Hammond organ. There was an open packet of blackballs on the couch, and toothpaste, a toothbrush and Johnson’s Baby Powder beside the washbasin. Lawson brought out a family album. He had written about his childhood on the family farm in Otokia, about his brothers and sisters, about a world of hope and suffering: ‘Katy was the first born. She was a lovely child but was tragically drowned. Second came Peggy, who as a toddler ingested some barley grass, causing death. The outcome of the next pregnancy was a stillborn boy.’

  Maran-Atha was full of lively spirits and kindness and good company. There was another kind of rest home in Mosgiel, independent, lonelier, outdoors – the caravan park. It was on a rural edge of the town, with room for twelve berths.

  Len, 71, had lived there for eight years. ‘I was a grocer in Dunedin,’ he said. ‘I came to Mosgiel for a lady. It didn’t work out. We were dance partners and I can’t dance anymore.’ His lungs had packed up. ‘A month ago I collapsed in a heap at the RSA. Legs just went under me.’ He was trying to cut down on smoking to two a day; he had fashioned an ash-tray from a Marmite jar half-filled with black water.

  Retired driver Tom Bell had lived at the caravan park for fourteen years. He kept a tidy ship. The bed was made, the dishes stacked. He said, ‘Mosgiel’s got everything you want. You wouldn’t catch me living in another town in New Zealand. No – no way. Great scenery. The only thing you can’t see is the damned sea and who wants to see that?’

  But then he said, ‘I’m off soon. Drive down to Invercargill, then right up the West Coast, over to Picton, and jump on the ferry and go all over the North Island.’ An epic road trip. ‘You got it. And then,’ he said, ‘I think I’ll be due for the box.’

  Saturday night’s patrol had begun at Allister’s house in a new sub-division of faux mansions on the foothills of Saddle Hill. All of Mosgiel rests beneath the sensual hump of Saddle Hill, named by Captain Cook from on board the Endeavour on November 26, 1770: ‘In the country was an elevated saddle hill, whose summit appeared above the clouds. From this hill, the land fell in a gentle slope…’ Empty then and emptied now – the theme of Mosgiel’s modern economic history is collapse, with the closures of Fortex freezing works (900 jobs), the famous Mosgiel woollen mill (140 jobs), and in 2008 the Fisher & Paykel dishwasher assembly plant (400 jobs).

  But the town soldiers on, very 1950s with Andy’s Milk Bar, Knox’s Milk Bar and Monte Carlo Milk Bar, very 21st century with Perreaux Industries, which makes and exports amplifiers to 30 countries. Paper Plus and The Warehouse set up premises in 2009; McDonald’s wants in.

  The streets are full of horse floats. Baghdad Note, the grey gelding that won the 1970 Melbourne Cup, was trained at Mosgiel’s charming Wingatui racetrack. There are a lot of oak trees and peeling gum trees. Poverty always finds somewhere to go; the wrong side of the tracks is a kind of slum hidden away on Sinclair Road, where converted air force barracks have gone to rack and ruin, windows are smashed or boarded up, and car wrecks rust in front yards.

  The Mosgiel–Taieri Community Patrol doesn’t go there. It doesn’t go any place where its patrol car might get boxed in. ‘And they don’t confront,’ said Bill Feather, who serves on the local community board that gave $9,000 to start the patrol. ‘They report anything suspicious to the police and get in a safe position.’

  Bill was born and bred in Mosgiel, like his parents before him. He said, ‘My grandmother came here from Rangiora. I lost my grandfather in the first war, in… Linda?’ Linda, his wife, sat in the kitchen with a cup of tea and a really good-looking ham and tomato sandwich. She called out, ‘1915.’ She was about to dress up and drive to Dunedin for a meeting of the Methodist Women’s Fellowship.

  There was a photograph in the hallway of the couple smiling in the gleaming sunshine of Hamilton Island on Great Barrier Reef. Bill worked at Fisher & Paykel all his working life; the Hamilton Island trip was a present from the firm, to commemorate 40 years’ service. He was enjoying his retirement. ‘We’re blessed living in this street,’ he said. ‘The council mows the grass once a week.’

  But he was aware of the danger beyond his driveway. It came as close as the driveway itself. ‘Civil disobedience is the main thing, the nuisance value of people walking the streets late at night and knocking over letterboxes.’

  He talked about the patrol’s formation, inspired by a public meeting held by Tubby Hopkins, vicar’s warden at Saint Peters Anglican church in Caversham, Dunedin, and national deputy chairman of Community Patrols of New Zealand. ‘People said it was a good idea but nothing ever got done. I was always waiting,’ Bill said, ‘for someone to take charge.’

  Allister Green took charge. He said, ‘Bill promoted the idea that I was the new champion. I had a lot of drive. I wanted a safer community. I was always reading about needless petty crimes by school kids.’ What kind of needless petty crimes? He said, ‘Gangs of kids kicking in letterboxes.’

  But there was also the arrival in Mosgiel of the barbarian hordes known throughout New Zealand as boy racers. They came on Friday nights, Allister said. They’d leave Dunedin at midnight and do a circuit across the Taieri Plain to Allenton and Outram, and thence to Mosgiel – to Dukes Road, right in front of the deserted Fisher & Paykel factory. There were a hundred, maybe two hundred, of them. ‘They didn’t know what to make of us at first. Then they got peeved and more intimidating. I’ve heard that next time they see us they’ll try and tip the car over.’

  The patrol has 43 members drawn from the citizenry. Malcolm arrived at Allister’s house. Malcolm liked to talk. He talked about his sleep apnoea business and his unlikely sideline, hiring out exercycles. ‘I’ve got a hundred thousand dollars’ worth in stock.’

  Then he gave a kind of resumé. ‘I was the first male student in New Zealand to do homecraft. I’m a chef by trade. I knocked off sc
hool the day I turned sixteen and began an apprenticeship at a bakehouse in Dunedin the next day. … I opened my own restaurant. … I worked for DB as a hitman. If one of their pubs needed sorting out I’d go in and do it. I started getting quite a few threats. I couldn’t go into certain pubs for a drink.

  ‘I worked at a lodge in Blenheim. My flair was doing buffet sculptures… I went to Australia and worked for Ansett; I jumped into a can there. The trouble with me is I give it a big nudge and then burn out.’

  It was getting on to ten. Malcolm and Allister drove to the police station. They entered through the back door, pulled up chairs in the kitchen, and looked at the report from the previous night’s patrol. Alistair said, ‘They did 93 ks. We can get up to 120.’ Nothing had happened. Malcolm said, ‘It’s not all beer and skittles. We do a lot of stuff in the background.’ Mosgiel constable Nayland Smith was in the control room, sighing as he shuffled through boring paperwork. He’d worked in Auckland once. ‘It’s great being home,’ he said, ‘but I miss the action.’

  The community patrol was ready for the night’s rounds. Malcolm opened up the boot of the patrol car. It contained traffic cones, a First Aid kit, towels, gloves, wipes, and rolls of toilet paper. Malcolm said, ‘You just don’t know if you’ll need it.’ They put on their fluorescent vests, and drove into the dark Mosgiel night, towards something happening at midnight, at Outram Glen.

  On Saturday morning in Outram, Geoff Woodcock said, ‘I’m continually shocked at how beautiful the Taieri is.’ He had moved to Mosgiel five years earlier with his wife Melanie. They had now sold their house there and rented in Outram, a village of 200 households. ‘It’s a real boom time here for young families. You do hear about people coming down from Auckland to live here.’ Miriam said, ‘Who?’ Geoff said, ‘That girl Tracey looks like an Aucklander.’ Miriam said, ‘What makes you say that?’ Geoff said, ‘She wears make-up.’

  He works from home as an IT consultant. ‘Work is for rainy days and nights. If it’s a beautiful day we go to the beach. We were at Sandfly Bay last week; the kids played a game between three seals.’ They have four kids, Jacob, seven, Keziah, five, Gabby, three, and Tim, one.

  Geoff was lean, youthful and smart, and had seen a vision come to life: he had built Mosgiel’s playground. ‘It was a quality-of-life issue,’ he said. ‘There was just nowhere to take your kids. The existing park was a set of squeaky swings and an old fort.’ The playground is a spectacular achievement, large, exciting, gleaming with new equipment; attractive families come from as far away as Milton – an hour’s drive – to bring their kids and make a day of it. The playground cost $750,000. Geoff chaired a local trust and worked hard to raise the funds. This included finding another $30,000 to top up the council’s $85,000 for a toilet.

  Geoff said, ‘The toilet! Oh, God. Where do I start? Okay. There were lots of kids urinating in bushes. We pushed eighteen months for a toilet but the council offered us something really horrible, square and boxy, just ugly. And impractical – one of the trust members had once been locked in one just like it. We had world-class playground equipment in the park, so we put in another $30,000 and they gave us what we wanted.

  ‘It was well worth the wait. The toilets are exceptional. It’s a Nova Loo; I first saw them in Albert Town near Wānaka and really liked them. They’re curvaceous, modern, spacious.’

  Toilets were an unusual subject to inspire such a passionate speech but Geoff was a man of strong convictions. He made another speech. ‘We looked at lots of catalogues of playground equipment. A lot of them were neutered and sedated. It was that PC, risk-averse thing, cotton-wooling.

  ‘All the safety compliances these days with playgrounds – something’s been lost along the way. We spent $30,000 on soft-fall surfacing. It does your head in! A playground should have a mix of danger and risk. If kids can’t hurt themselves, there’s something wrong. Adrenalin is fun. Pain is good. Pain,’ he said, ‘is a teacher.’

  ‘Pain,’ said Larry Williamson, ‘is a switch.’ Larry was an amazing sight. At 48, moustached and long-legged, dressed in cowboy boots, cowboy hat, and tight Wrangler denim, he stood as trim and straight as a board. The thought occurred that he might be a mean son of a bitch, but he was another kind of character – a good ol’ boy. He tipped his hat to women.

  He drained his beer and wiped his moustache. ‘Mine,’ he said, pointing to the rifles and pistols displayed on the wall of the Silverstream Steakhouse and Bar. ‘Them too,’ he said, pointing at two beautiful saddles – his prizes as the New Zealand Rodeo Cowboys Association champion saddle bronc rider in 2001 and 2008. He won the last saddle as the oldest bronc rider in New Zealand. ‘I’ve broken everything there is to break,’ he said. Pain, the switch: ‘You turn it off for eight seconds.’

  He meant the eight seconds of adrenalin, skill and madness on top of a bronc. ‘It takes 30 or 40 rides for you to remember the whole eight seconds. The first few times you might remember only the first second. It’s all about timing, rhythm and balance. And breathing: you can get away with not breathing for the first two or three seconds, but then – bang! – you’re on the ground. I try to breathe the whole time.’

  He spoke in a deep slow drawl. He talked about rodeo life: the travelling, the rooms above pubs, the hopelessness of maintaining a marriage. He had competed professionally in America, Canada and Australia. He now worked as a farrier. It seemed likely he spent a fair bit of his time at the Silverstream Steakhouse and Bar.

  The pub was off the beaten track in North Taieri, at the back of Mosgiel, on its lonesome with a wide open space, a log fire, Fender guitars on the wall, and a stage for live country music. The publican lived next door in a caravan. ‘Marriage fell over,’ Ken Reeves said. There were slices of burnt toast in the sink. He’d filled a Marmite jar with cigarette butts. ‘Back when I was farming in Winton I’d go to the pub three or four times a year. Now it’s every night.’

  He had a happy red face and a beer in his hand. It was getting on to lunchtime. He said, ‘I’ll show you around next door.’ He led the way over grass and dust to the pub. By the back door a rubbish bag had split open. ‘Bloody dogs getting in the rubbish again,’ he said. He had taken out a lease on the neighbouring bowling club. He pointed to a field out the back. ‘I’ve got plans to turn that into our own private rodeo.’

  Ken, too, was a good ol’ boy. ‘We attract good solid country people,’ he said, and poured himself a beer. He ran a hell of a good pub. It was big and very friendly. It was the kind of pub where you wanted to stay all day, maybe gaze at the play of sunlight and shadow on Saddle Hill, listen to the music of travelling and broken homes, and stay ’til closing time – it was the kind of pub that celebrated freedom.

  Saturday midnight at Outram Glen, a gang of teenagers picked out by headlights: they had escaped Mosgiel’s desperate boredom to have a party on a riverbank. Malcolm and Allister’s presence was unwelcome, a drag. The men weren’t police; they were self-elected party poopers of middle age. Three pretty girls in short skirts walked by. ‘All right, girls?’ Malcolm asked. ‘Yeah,’ they said, and kept walking.

  Mosgiel, with its lovely lines of poplars and bees in the azaleas, its cupcake of the day at the Aurora Café and a tray of four dozen farm eggs in the back seat of a gorgeous wood-panelled, olive-green Pinto Squire parked on Gordon Road; horsey, fresh-aired Mosgiel, cradled beneath Saddle Hill, happily dangling twelve kilometres from urban Dunedin… but crimes do occur. Last year a man armed with a machete ran off with $400 from the Mini Mart, and another villain was arrested after climbing through the roof of the ANZ bank and attempting to cut open an ATM. He was seventy-one.

  Malcolm and Allister were driving away from Outram Glen and towards the Mosgiel police station for a cup of tea when their police radio relayed an update from Dunedin. There had been a report of youths kicking in a letterbox: ‘One is wearing a tartan top.’ A tartan terror on the loose in Dunedin. ‘It’s all happening,’ Allister said, ‘in the wrong town.’

&nb
sp; Wanaka

  The Stories of Others

  The alarm clock rang at five-thirty in my room in the Manuka Crescent Motel and I got out of bed like a shot. Something amazing was waiting outside but the light of dawn would chase it from view. I turned off the electric blanket, switched on the bedside lamp, put a jersey and a pair of pants over my pyjamas, and ate breakfast standing up in the kitchen – the Manuka Crescent prides itself on serving guests two slices of bread and a single-serve box of Skippy Cornflakes. I blew on my cup of coffee made from a 1.5-gram sachet of Premium Freeze Dried Robert Harris Swiss Gold (‘an aromatic smooth golden roast with delicious nutty cocoa notes’) as though it were a hot coal. I was out of the room by 5.43, creeping and crunching over the driveway gravel towards the pavement, where I looked for Venus.

  Martin Unwin had told us it would be visible in the eastern sky. This was during his speech about the planets. He always asked for permission to stand up and address the class. I always said yes. I wondered if he was a genius. Martin had once designed an underwater lighting system in a fish farm to prevent salmon from maturing too early, but that seemed the least of his talents.

  He was 59 and surrounded by a beard. He bounced on the balls of his feet when he walked. One day, he came back late from lunch because he had walked up Mount Iron. He was a tramper and a white-water rafter. He lived in Christchurch and was about to start commuting to the back of beyond at the end of the line on the West Coast – his wife was to become sole-charge teacher in Haast.