Civilisation

by Steve Braunias

  Martin worked for the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research, and volunteered as a spokesperson for the Canterbury Astronomical Society. One day he brought in a telescope so we could stare at the sun. It trembled, and his filters made it look red. His speech about the planets was to advise the class about a rare opportunity to see Venus, Mercury, Mars and Jupiter. The planets, he said, would be visible in the hour before sunrise all that week.

  I asked him at morning tea one day about his slight stutter. He said it was bad when he was young. Did he think it was physiological or psychological? He said it always got worse when his sister was around. I said I hoped he might write about that one day because I liked the way his mind worked, and was curious to read how he would write about his own life. One day he brought in an old photograph and wrote:

  It’s just two wooden Ministry of Works’ huts in a bare field. The black and white photograph of the infant Lauder atmospheric research station in 1960 is faded, but sharp and clear. The empty spaces behind emphasise the isolation, the distant mountains suggest the scale.

  People came. Gordon and Rima Keys arrived with their young family in 1963, after five years in Samoa and Rima’s native Rarotonga. Next winter, hoar frost filled wire-netting fences, and snow lay for three weeks. Now long retired, they look towards Lauder from their home above Alexandra. They will never leave.

  Alan and Colleen Cresswell, then in their early twenties, arrived from Christchurch in December 1964. At his job interview, Allan stepped from the Alexandra airport into Blossom Festival week. ‘It’s lovely,’ he told Colleen. ‘Lots of trees, orchards, gardens – everything is so green.’ Driving across a brown Maniototo midsummer they approached their new home with mounting apprehension – where did this landscape come from? Colleen gathered schist slabs to build a rock garden. One day she added some translucent pink rocks from the next-door field to her pile. A few days later the puzzled farmer called by to ask why she wanted his salt licks. They came for two years, stayed for twelve.

  Others fell in love with the land immediately. Nineteen-year-old Ruth Stillwell and her husband came from Northland to work on a station near St Bathans, from where she later joined Lauder as a part-time typist and librarian. Driving north from Alexandra into a painted land of open valleys and linear ranges she was excited. She thought, I’m going to the mountains.

  The land defined our horizons, measured our days, and embraced our senses. From our family living room, we saw morning light on the Dunstan Mountains. We saw the distant Hawkduns shimmer in the midday sun, and the soft amber glow of evening light settling on the Raggedy Range. Two sharp, craggy hills framed our southern sky. At night we listened from our beds to the roar of nor’westers ripping through a narrow defile in the North Dunstans. We watched summer thunderstorms turn afternoon skies from blue to black, and felt the chill on winter nights as hard starlight hammered down through freezing air. We smelt wild thyme under our feet as we explored the hills, and drank smoky tea brewed in a battered billy on riverside picnic fires kindled with dry willow. We lived there for ten years, and for a lifetime…

  Wānaka is stupendous on the eye, a tourist mecca with papery willows and poplars in autumnal orange, an alpine lake, mountains waiting for snow – it was already so cold the lake smoked. The town’s retail and hospitality precinct was tastefully laid out facing the lake. It didn’t do McDonald’s or KFC; it did curries, interesting beers, merino jumpers. There were a lot of old people. But it was a party town, too, and every night happy groups of 20-somethings wrapped in scarves and woolly hats headed into town. Teen-somethings did other stuff. From the police file in Wanaka Sun: ‘Police called to disorder at an Aeolus Place party. A fourteen- and fifteen-year-old were detained in an intoxicated state, many also affected by the use of the party drug Kronic.’

  The sun looked red and trembling through a filter, but exposed in a clear blue sky it didn’t have any warmth in it at all, and lay about like a white inert lump. The mountains were bare and dark and enormous. They took up half of the sky. The rest of the sky was just as bare. It didn’t budge all that week. It looked as hard as marble, and as fixed as the mountains. It didn’t allow anything resembling cloud or wind. I arrived on Monday, which looked the same as Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. Good. All I want from the world is for it to stay the same.

  As a creature of severe habit, I value old habits, but I’m constantly on the lookout for new ones. Not only was Wānaka the same thing over and over, it presented new opportunities to do the same thing over and over. The same breakfast – toast, cornflakes, 1.5-gram sachet of Premium Freeze Dried Robert Harris Swiss Gold – in my room at the Manuka Crescent. The same ten-minute walk in bright sunshine every frosty morning to Mount Aspiring College. The same view of enormous mountains and smoking lake and blank sky.

  On the corner there was a wild strawberry tree growing out of a bank. The soft red fruit fell on to the pavement. I picked up a berry one morning and held it in my open palm. I was walking to school with painter Jane Zusters. She said, ‘Look at the way it forms shadows.’ I wondered how small it would have looked in her palm, because she had such big paws.

  The same classroom, Room 12, in a prefab block beside the soccer field, the same intolerable heat blazing from the radiators, and the same windows being opened to let in fresh mountain air. And the same students, arriving in scarves, hats and coats.

  On the first day of class I asked them to interview each other. Beth McArthur wrote: ‘Former cartographer Jan Kelly of Wānaka says, “Retirement is a misnomer. I work very hard.” The 66-year-old writes poetry, the inspiration for which comes from the beauty all around. … Jan’s interest in natural history is brought to life in the lizard garden she has at home.’

  Jan wrote: ‘Beth McArthur of Alexandra is attending a writing course so she can write her memoirs. Having been a typesetter, she now at age 66 has a small computing business doing desktop publishing. “I am adjusting to being a widow,” she said. “I’ve had a very tragic two years. My husband fell off our rock. He always said that no one would fall off the rock.” He was a merino classer, she said, very fit, very active; he called himself “the old blind guesser” because classing wool is by feel. His accident changed both their lives in an instant. “It took only a minute. Everything is different now.”’

  Beth moved heavily. Lonely, she sat in the front row. Jan, clever and thin, worried about people and sat in the back row. Everyone sat at the same desks every day. The teacher’s desk was jammed into a corner.

  I’d appeared at the college a few years earlier, one of six writers touring schools, libraries and town halls on a road trip arranged by the New Zealand Book Council, and remembered it as a plain and faintly depressing holding cell – the usual New Zealand high school, the familiar prefabricated misery. It was strange to return and see it given over entirely to adults. They were jolly and polite. They grunted when they bent over above the drinking taps, and squeezed their wide hips past doors marked BOYS and GIRLS. Watching them chat about woodblocks and watercolours as they nibbled on digestive biscuits and poured thermos tea in the playgrounds, it was as though they had liberated the college, civilised it. They’d also aged it. It was like a retirement home with netball courts.

  The Upper Clutha Community Arts Council has staged the Autumn Art School in Wānaka for over 20 years. My role was to teach adult writing classes for a week. I loved every second of it, beginning with the first seconds when I walked from the motel to the school. The ten-minute amble felt as if I were being pulled in by the tide. It was the force of an acquired new habit, and the decision to get up before dawn on Sunday and find a vantage point to observe the planets turned into an opportunity to do the same thing I’d been doing all that week for one last time. After breakfast I walked from the motel to the school. There was the wild strawberry tree, Arbutus unedo, with its soft red fruit on the pavement in the glow of a street light. There was the high line of the mountains, forming a darker tone
than the black of night. There was the steaming, freezing lake. There was the school. I looked at it with longing, already nostalgic for the days and the lessons, already missing my sixteen students.

  Richard Howarth had an open face: you could easily read on it the pleasure he took in wine and vintage cars. He was 57, lived in Wellington, kept a holiday apartment in Wānaka, and had recently accepted a generous financial package from his law firm. Don McDonald was nimble, and looked at life with an amused sideways glance. He was 71, lived in Picton, and had returned from a cycling tour across America with his second wife, Val.

  Brian Miller talked fast and muttered even faster. He was always on the move, restless, searching, loyal – he visited David Bain in prison to show his support. He was 63, lived in Dunedin, and had no real need for a writing course – he was a pro. As a publisher and an author, he specialised in science textbooks, memoirs, and local histories such as his lively book about Macandrew Bay on Otago Peninsula.

  Macandrew Bay School was presented with a surplus air raid siren after the war. The school committee viewed the new arrival, then could not resist taking it outside and winding it up on a still moonless night. After a few seconds of wailing, followed by the howling of all the neighbourhood dogs and lights going on all around the bay, the siren was tucked into the basement, never to be used again.

  Tough little blades of grass stubbled the hard surface of Lisemore Park opposite the school, where I walked each lunchtime and ate the caterer’s delicious sandwiches. It was another new habit. I observed it with my usual bovine obedience – wandering into stands of pine trees, then wandering out and following a concrete path that curled up and over small hills and valleys. It made a nice break from the sound of my voice talking all morning in classroom twelve. I thought about how to keep the students occupied and possibly entertained in the afternoon. I thought about them all the time.

  Jane Bloomfield, 45, blonde, sexy, with hooded eyelids, commuted from Queenstown, where she wrote about the adventures of Lily Max, a character she’d developed in her novels for young adults. Diane Wales was arch and witty, with a kind of moneyed nonchalance about her. She dressed well, and wrote, ‘After a life on the edges of remote airstrips, Sally Middleton, 70, now divides her time between painting and gardening, and caring for her elderly husband.’ Sally was small and industrious, a talented portrait artist. She wrote, ‘Diane Wales, now 74, was a young school teacher in Christchurch and married to her first husband when they produced three sons, who now live in London, the Cayman Islands and Auckland. Diane lives in Dunedin. She says about coming up to the week-long Autumn Art School, ‘I had to set up an incredibly complicated system to look after my 84-year-old husband.’ I thought about their ailing aged husbands.

  Sarah Ballard, 61, was tall and willowy, a chatterbox, apparently nearly blind. She grew up in Manchester, and wanted to come to some kind of terms with her father, a doctor and an alcoholic, whom she remembered staggering up the stairs while her mother implored him to just die. Her eyesight was so bad that when she wrote at her desk she lowered her head barely more than an inch above the page. It always looked as though she’d dropped dead. This was my first teaching job and I didn’t want to lose anyone, but Sarah was wonderfully and exuberantly alive. I heard talk in the town that she had a beautiful singing voice. One day I asked if she would stand in front of the class and sing a folk ballad. My excuse was that it would demonstrate another way of telling a story. I just wanted to hear her sing. It was true what they said about her in town. I looked at Sarah as her voice soared around the classroom, and turned my head and wept.

  There were a lot of tears in classroom twelve. I invited the painting teacher in the next-door classroom to come in and answer questions about her life. Gala Kirke talked about growing up in communist Slovakia. She talked about leaving for New Zealand after the Velvet Revolution. She talked about her paintings – art critic T. J. McNamara once identified her as ‘a rising star’ – and about how she seldom had time to paint since becoming a parent, and a teacher at Christchurch Girls’ High School.

  She said she hadn’t talked about the earthquake before. When it struck she was tipped down a flight of stairs but didn’t think about that: she was desperately frightened for her two little boys. It took her and her husband two hours to drive 15 kilometres across the shattered city to their children’s playcentre. The memory of those two hours of fear rushed at her, ambushed her, as she sat in front of sixteen students in classroom twelve. She said they’d sold their house, were leaving Christchurch. She didn’t care all that much where they were going to live: the point was that it wouldn’t be in Christchurch.

  Two days later I invited an ex-footballer to come in and answer questions about his life. There was a public notice in the school grounds advising that Richard Johnson would be holding a training clinic during the holidays. I heard shouts and laughter, and looked over to the fields, where I saw Johnson with eight or nine kids.

  He talked about leaving Australia at fifteen to pursue his dream of being a professional football player in the English Premier League. He lived the dream. He played for Watford. He scored a cracking goal against Manchester United. But then he picked up a bad injury, and drifted, falling back down to a club in Australia. He was hoping for a transfer to Malaysia. It fell through and he got drunk, then drove, and when the cops tried to pull him over he did a runner… He was looking at maybe six months in jail.

  His voice slowed down. He looked at the floor. The shadow of his former self crept into classroom twelve. Johnson closed his eyes, took in a mouthful of air, and puffed it out. He said the judge gave him a break. He now lived at Jack’s Point in Queenstown with his wife and son.

  The Slovakian painter about to escape, the nobbled Australian soccer player back on his feet – the makeshift press centre in classroom twelve at Mount Aspiring College wasn’t fussy about where it got its pound of tears. One day they came from Robyn Bardas. Red-haired, 45, opinionated and Australian, Robyn lived in Hāwea Flat. She told the class she wanted to write about and come to some kind of terms with, her parents, but she also wanted to find a way, ultimately, to write about, and possibly come to a semblance of some kind of terms with, the death of one of her children. It happened eight years ago. She swayed on her feet: it was happening again.

  Then there was the day senior constable Mike Johnston was going to come in but had to cancel – he was telling a Queenstown family that their son was dead. Trainee pilot Marcus Hoogvliet, 21, had died with instructor Graham Stott, 31, when their Robinson 22 helicopter crashed in strong winds in Mount Aspiring National Park. A ground and aerial search by 20 volunteers helped recover evidence from the wreckage at the head of Arawhata River. Most of the machine was in a ravine. ‘It was a difficult thing to see if you weren’t on top of it,’ Johnston told reporters.

  The moon, shaped like a bracket and white as ice, was softly sinking towards a black line of some nearby hump. To its left and down a bit was Venus, bright and obvious. Two other planets were to the right and down a bit. It was exhilarating to witness the planets in the night sky, just before dawn, in the cold autumn air of a mountain town – I walked past the school and up the road to the reservoir, where I sat and rested, stargazing.

  Mercury, Jupiter, Mars – one of them was missing behind cloud. Cloud! That clean, immaculate sky, as scrubbed as a sink, had finally budged. The first light of dawn began to smudge the sky. It was too early to return to my room at the Manuka Crescent. I had too much air in my lungs, I needed to keep going, somewhere, so I set off towards the nearby hump beneath the moon, and walked on the side of the highway towards Cromwell and Queenstown. I looked up: I could see the moon, Venus, and now only one of the other three planets.

  All I had on were the pyjamas beneath the clothes I stood up in. I was free, floating through an empty stretch of road, clinging on to my last few hours in Wānaka. I thought about Toni Cathie, 68, who played bridge and tennis, and wrote with a delicate touch and fine wit. I thought a
bout Prue Kane, red-haired, a quarter of an inch short of six foot tall, at 30 the youngest in class, who wrote amusingly about returning to live in Wānaka after her OE. Family friends gasped and clutched at their throats when Prue told them she was still unmarried. They’d ask, ‘What’s wrong with you?’

  Jeanette Emmerson, 63, small and pale, from a high-country farm in the Lindis Pass, was related to someone famous: her daughter Anna had won the 2009 World Wool Record Challenge Cup for producing the world’s finest bale of merino. The cup was presented at a function in the Italian Embassy in Paris; there were 200 people, and a five-course meal at which the waiters wore uniforms. Anna, Jeanette wrote, was born on New Year’s Eve in 1975, grew up ‘non-conformist and antagonistic’, outdoorsy, a deerstalker who once spent a solitary winter in a cabin on an island in the middle of a frozen lake in Alaska, then came back to New Zealand, bought a block of land, built her own woolshed and farmed a thousand merinos. The fleeces in her award-winning bale were shorn from a mob of 450 wethers.

  Mylrea Bell, 55, mother of two boys, tutor in business consultancy, wrote a comic and entertaining memoir about her pig. Caroline Harker, 46, a former documentary maker who came to Wānaka for love, composed a memoir about her dinner.

  I was quite happy to eat Alice. I expected to be a bit squeamish about it. After all, we were friends.

  A year ago the farmer went away and left me in charge of our herd of nineteen cows. They were calving. I had to go up the hill every morning, check they were okay, and count them.

  The first day I counted eleven calves and nineteen cows. The next day I counted eleven calves but only eighteen cows. I found number nineteen alone on the other side of the hill. She seemed to be in labour. I left her to it.