‘He went to the library in Kawakawa faithfully every Tuesday,’ Karen said. ‘His bed was to the right of the door,’ Pauline said. ‘It was more like a cot than a bed. He’d sit there to do his reading, because that room got the sun. He had a rough old mattress and army blankets.’
‘He kept his lawnmower inside,’ Karen said. ‘It was the best, most modernest thing he owned.’
Underneath one of the two feijoa trees on either side of Stan’s cottage there was an old Masport mower. ‘It wasn’t that one,’ Karen said.
Both of the women were standing up. They had been on their knees, rolling up a backdrop painted with the moon and stars. They used bamboo poles that Pauline had cut down on her brother’s farm. They were the only people in the church that afternoon. Sunday’s congregation would probably number about ninety. An email from Sid Going was printed out and stapled to a noticeboard; with his wife Colleen he was performing missionary work in Sydney. Down the hallway, a door to an office was marked with the number 12 and the word BISHOP.
‘Stan would go to the pub every night for his dinner,’ said Pauline.
‘He wasn’t a hermit. Not really,’ said Karen. ‘He said, “I don’t do the social thing.” But he appreciated everything people did for him. We found a bag in his cottage after he died. We were looking for some form of ID. No one knew anything about him, where he was from, whether he had family somewhere. And we found a bag – you know, like a bowling bag that people keep bowling balls in – and that’s where he kept his treasures. He had kept every Christmas card that people in the valley had given him. The whole lot. And there was a piece of paper with a lady’s name and a telephone number. Beside it, he’d written the word SISTER.’
Moerewa, pop. 1500, almost entirely Māori, is a kind of usual suspect: it’s constantly mentioned whenever the media wish to discuss poverty, unemployment, feral behaviour and ‘Māori initiatives’ in the Far North. But on that Friday afternoon in spring it had the carnival atmosphere that invigorates all small towns when school is over and done with for the week. Teenagers stood on the pavement and leaned against the Food Market scoffing iceblocks and gossiping. There was also a burger bar, a bakery, a butcher: ‘PORK HEADS. MUTTONBIRDS.’
Moerewa’s famous Tuna Café – tuna as in Māori for eel, famous as in many glowing reviews for its coffee and its kai – had closed down that day. The next-door hair salon was for sale.
A man parked his van to get a box of Lion Red at the Four Square. His trailer was full of kiwifruit, which he’d bought for $30. A kid with an eager face said, ‘Can I’ve one please mister?’ Another kid rode past on his bike and said, ‘Did you see that bunny hop I done?’
I sat a while outside the bakery. I was happy. I liked Moerewa. But I wondered how long it had been since a tourist or any kind of visitor had lingered in plain view there. It wasn’t that the place was dangerous. There are streets, neighbourhoods, whole towns, entire cities that radiate a distinctive New Zealand nastiness. Moerewa lacked that edge. But the town centre was only just hanging on. Moerewa was at the gateway to the Bay of Islands’ pleasure resorts of Paihia and Russell, but it seemed unlikely that any of the German or American drivers of the passing fleets of campervans would ever stop on Main Street, look around, and buy a box of Lion Red or a pork head.
The campervans took their loot and their bladders five minutes away to Kawakawa, the town that has marketed itself as a urinal, thanks to colourful public toilets designed by Austrian fanatic Friedensreich Hundertwasser. I went to Kawakawa on another pilgrimage. I was on the trail of Stan Stuart.
I liked everything I’d heard about Stan. People we celebrate as larger than life are usually enormous bores, bereft of subtlety or grace; Stan was smaller than life, private and intricate, a loner surrounded by Mormons and biscuit wrappers, a reader.
At the library in Kawakawa, librarian Shakira Pia (‘I think it’s French’) said, ‘He came in every Friday. He liked cowboy books mostly. He was very brief. “Hello, Shakira,” he’d say, and that was it. But he used to give me a gift every Christmas. A bottle of wine once. A box of chocolates last Christmas.
‘He used to park around the back of the shops and he’d take forever to cross the street. I kept thinking he’d be knocked over. He was so creaky. The last time I saw him he was really struggling to walk. His face was all sweaty. I was worried for him. I rang the district nurse the next Friday when he didn’t come in. I knew something must be wrong. Poor old Stan.’
The library was empty. Shakira was about to close it for the weekend. She was in a wistful mood. She was thinking back to the shy customer who came in every Friday to rustle up another cowboy book. ‘He was a nice man,’ she said. ‘He was humble.’
Friday afternoon on the main street of Moerewa was happy with the freedom from school. Friday night at the low, roomy Klondike Tavern was happy with the freedom from work. There were maybe 60 or 70 drinkers, most in their twenties, the girls in ponytails and the guys in laceless slippers, laughing and playing pool and knocking back cans of bourbon and coke.
I spoke with Frankie Owen. ‘You’ve heard of Rena Owen, the actress? She’s my auntie.’ Like the Goings, the Owens were one of the great local dynasties, and unlike the wholesome Goings in pretty much every other respect – drinking, all the rest of it – except that at 23 Frankie was just as much a solid citizen as any Mormon. In fact, he’d settled down with a Mormon when he was sixteen.
They were parents of two girls, newborn Paskelle and seven-year-old Sativa. I said, ‘As in Cannabis sativa?’ ‘Pretty much,’ Frankie said.
He had left school and got a job at the Affco freezing works in Moerewa when Sativa was born. He’d held down the job, and lived with the girls’ mother, Charis, in a rented house on Main Street. They were preparing to make an offer to the landlord. Frankie thought they could buy it for maybe $180,000.
I saw the Owens taking an afternoon stroll on Saturday. The young parents, the sleeping baby tucked up in a pram, Sativa racing ahead on a child’s motorbike: it was a cameo of ordinary happiness and the New Zealand way of life. And it set the theme for everywhere I went that day. The theme was family.
Family, on the bare front porch of a house on the main street, where young mum Aroha Cooper had come outside to cuddle her baby son Paepae. They had recently moved from Porirua. She had come to visit her grandfather, who was sick, and then her partner found a job. She said, ‘We don’t know much people.’ A paddock separated her house from the freezing works. ‘It’s good having cows next to you knowing you’re gonna eat them one day.’
Family, on the crowded front porch of a house around the corner, where Ginger Harris, large and puffing and 75, peeled oranges with a knife. The fruit had fallen from the two trees in his garden. ‘I’m bloody smothered with the things. I pick up three bucketfuls every day. The wind blows them all left, right and sideways. I cut ’em up, juice ’em and stick ’em in the fridge for the grandchildren.’
He’d lived in Moerewa for 46 years. ‘Said I’d never live here. The freezing works bloody stank the whole town. Well, I got a job there and the money never stank. When I got my first pay cheque I’d never seen so much money in my life.’
He opened a dairy, drove a taxi. He also possessed the wit to set up a mobile hāngī food cart. A souvenir from that adventure was among the clutter on the porch: a massive stainless steel chamber. ‘I’d cook 400 meals at a time in it, all done in heavy duty tinfoil, and the food would taste exactly like a hāngī.’
Family on horseback on Main Street, when brothers Gavin and Harley (Like the motorbike? ‘Pretty much’) Brown, saddled up with rifles, were heading south. ‘We’re going hunting,’ Gavin said. Pig hunting? ‘Nah, beef hunting,’ Harley said. ‘Wild cows up in the bush.’
Family at the Moerewa Tigers rugby league clubrooms in Simpson Park, where Harrison Williams and his wife Meri, both 71, sat sipping beer as Dave Bristoe took the microphone and announced the prize-giving after the day’s round robin seniors’ tournament be
tween teams from Moerewa, the Far North, and the Ngāwhā Corrections Department.
‘We’re not doing player of the day or any of that Pākehā bullshit,’ Bristoe said. Everyone who had played that day was given a ticket. The winning ticket would be taken out of a hat. First prize was a water blaster. ‘We’ve also got prizes of $20 meatpacks from G & H Meats in Kawakawa,’ Bristoe said.
He started raving. He’d had a skinful. ‘There’s some good shit in those packs. We’re not gonna say, “Here’s your prize, cunt, now fuck off.” We’re gonna say, “Good one, cunt.” Yeah.’
Family, wholesomely, on the Maromaku Valley farm of Jared and Kaelin Going, and their daughter, Lijana, eighteen months. I visited Jared because he had been the landlord to the man without family: Stan Stuart, the tenant in a shack on Mormon land.
‘He only ever paid the rent in cash,’ Jared said. ‘He was reliable as. I’d forget when it was due but he’d always show up, almost to the minute. We’d have a little chat and then he was off. You’d say, “What’re you doing today, then, Stan?” He’d say, “I’m going home to read a book.” And then he’d leave to do just that.’
Jared’s father Sid Going had performed the funeral service. ‘Stan was the first person to be buried at Towai Cemetery for 50 years. It was a real big funeral, would have been a hundred people, easy.’ I imagined the bowed heads, a Bible passage read out loud by an All Black legend. I tried to imagine the meaning that people took from the outsider and misfit in Maromaku Valley. ‘Everyone liked him,’ Jared said, ‘but no one knew him.’
But someone did know him: the woman whose name and number he had written down on a piece of paper next to the word SISTER. I asked Jared Going for her details. On Sunday morning, at a large lovely home in the suburb of Kensington Heights in Whāngārei, I called on Shona Nash.
Her husband Neville boiled the jug. Their children were visiting for the weekend – Matt, a fashion design student, and Rachel, who had been up most of the night with her restless baby. They moved around each other with the easy, casual affection of a typical New Zealand family; the ghost of Stan hovered at their side.
Shona brought out a folder. It was marked STAN’S AFFAIRS. It included his birth certificate (November 1, 1928), an ancient reference from an employer (‘I have always found him to be an honest and obliging boy’), and a winning Lotto ticket from 2004, when Stan pocketed $5,885. ‘Stan’s girlie magazines,’ winked Neville, when he showed me two 1974 copies of Australasian Post, kept in a box with encyclopaedias, and cowboy magazines that included a 1973 copy of Old West. ‘No fiction,’ boasted the cover.
Stan, propped up on top of his small bed with the bright light of the Far North falling through his bedroom window, happily reading true stories about prospecting in El Paso, a ghost town in the Ozark Mountains, running whiskey, lassoing a bear… What would he have made of the story about Russian exiles in British Columbia who formed a religious cult, lived on fresh or sun-dried fruits and vegetables, and staged acts of public nudity to protest the government’s demand that their children attend school? The lonely reader, dreaming of sagebrush and six-guns, angry bears and naked Russians – and playing a minor role when violent New Zealand reality came to his door one night in November 2006.
Two young Dutch honeymooners had parked their campervan in a car park at Haruru Falls near Paihia when they were seized by two men armed with a shotgun. The couple were handcuffed and driven around Northland; $900 was taken from their ATM card; the woman was forced to swallow sedatives, and raped. ‘Despicable in the extreme,’ said the judge, sentencing the main offender to preventive detention.
The couple were dumped on the roadside by Towai Cemetery. From there, they called on the closest house: Stan’s. ‘The couple knocked on his door, but he slept through it,’ Tony Wall wrote in The Sunday Star-Times, ‘which is possibly just as well as he is not set up to cater for visitors.’
Tony had gone inside Stan’s shack. I was still outside on the porch, peering through the windows, even as I visited Shona Nash at her nice house in Whāngārei. The girlie magazines, the winning Lotto ticket – the cardboard box contained the few remnants of his life. The rest belonged to Shona’s memory.
When her parents lived in Ōamaru, they had taken Stan in as a boarder. He was eighteen. He got a job on the railways. This was before Shona was born; she was the youngest child in the family. When she was three, the family moved to Whananaki, a seaside town in Northland. The amazing thing – Shona couldn’t explain it, it was just something that happened – was that Stan came too, and continued to live with the family. He took a job as a rural delivery mailman. His folder included a Kodak snapshot of a baby-blue mail van, dazzling in the sunlight of a Northland summer day. Shona grew up and moved to Whāngārei; Stan moved to nearby Maromaku Valley and worked at the freezing works until he retired. He never married.
‘He was a very clever, very intelligent person,’ Shona said. ‘He could tell you anything about anything in the world. He was like an encyclopaedia. That’s what he’d read, encyclopaedias, things like that, as well as his cowboy books.
‘But he was so simple. No, not simple, simplistic. No fridge, no stove. I suppose he was eccentric. He was very shy. A little bit socially awkward. He was also the most trustworthy person, and so punctual! You could set your clock by him. He was so methodical. He would spend hours doing the dishes.
‘He had this ritual when he came to town. He had a track he’d stick to – meal at McDonald’s and then groceries at Countdown. You’d see him on the odd occasion but he wouldn’t stop; he’d just say hi, and keep going. He had a path and that was it.
‘He’d come here twice a year to get a haircut. It’d be down over his face. It really got away from him. He’d sit here, get his haircut, and then he’d be out of here like a scalded cat. It wasn’t him being rude; he was never like that. But that was Stan for you. He wouldn’t hang around. He was always in the background.
‘He didn’t leave much behind. He had only about two sets of clothes, and a suit in the wardrobe – I’m sure it was the suit he wore to our wedding 35 years ago. His possessions were in a suitcase that was at least 50 years old, and some in a box.’
Yes, she said, there were a few Christmas cards he’d kept in a leather zip-up bag. Shona found a card marked ‘From Nolan and Darlene Going and the kids’. A child’s hand had written, ‘Hope you never change ’cos you are special.’
‘When he died,’ Shona said, ‘Sid and Colleen – yes, the Goings – said, “We’ve organised the funeral.” It was a real sign of respect. I was blown away by how many people came. To see such a humble person loved by so many people. The funeral was at six on a beautiful evening in March.’ I imagined the golden light at the end of a summer’s day in Northland. And then Shona said, ‘Sid filled in the grave with a front-end loader.’
I’d visited the grave earlier that morning. A pair of eastern rosella parrots yelled in the trees. The stiff spring wind that blew all weekend continued to blunder its way around. This was the end of the Stan Stuart story but it was still only in outline; there was something else to it, something that really mattered.
Shona’s husband remarked on Stan’s visits to the house over the years. He said, ‘He adored you.’ Their son Matt remarked on the family snaps that Stan had kept in his suitcase. ‘They were all of Mum. All of them, from when she was a kid to when she was an adult.’
Shona remarked, ‘Stan looked after me when I was little.’ Like a playmate? No, not really, she said. More like someone who made sure she was all right, who protected her.
Stan, the old man who read cowboy stories (‘no fiction’) in a single bed in a shack, who rode out one day from the South Island to live in a valley at the top of the North Island; Stan, who followed his heart when he followed Shona. He wrote his own story with that one word on a piece of paper: SISTER. The ghost of Maromaku Valley had left behind a love story.
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to the benevolence and gene
rosity of the CLNZ Writer’s Award for making this book possible; to North & South editor Virginia Larson and former publisher Sally Duggan, who were the perfect employers; to Mary Varnham and Sarah Bennett at Awa Press, for their honesty and kindness, respectively; to Finlay Macdonald, for his intelligent advice and black humour; to Matt Vance at Antarctica New Zealand, for the passport to hell; to Southland Tourism, for the trip to beautiful Winton; to Martin Unwin, Caroline Harker and Beth McArthur, for permission to publish their stories from the Upper Clutha Arts Council Autumn Art School writing workshop in Wānaka; to Brian and Diane Miller, for the extract from Macandrew Bay: A history of a community on the Otago Peninsula; and to everyone who welcomed me into their homes and enriched my life during these travels, especially Lance Roberts (Hicks Bay), Heriata Porter, Nathan Rayner, and Jim Dennan (Ōhinemutu), Jean Smith (Te Aroha), Tanielu Pololua and Fesouaina Matalavea (Samoa), Ross Mitchell-Anyon (Wanganui), Des Thomas, Jeanette Thomas, and Bill Thomas (Mercer), Graeme Ingils (Winton), Ken Reeves (Mosgiel), Tracey Thomsen, Marcus Thomsen, and Kieran Grice (Tangimoana), Fred Nyberg (Notown), Harry Martin (Wainuiomata), and the ghost of Stan Stuart (Maromaku Valley). The deepest thanks are to Jane Ussher, who was there every step of the way, suffered for it, but never once wavered in her friendship.
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Civilisation Page 26
