Fish of the Week

by Steve Braunias

  I ask her, ‘Are you all right?’ She says, ‘No.’

  Wednesday

  There’s a celebrity guest list at the afternoon james&august show, designed by Sally Ridge. Her partner, Adam Parore, is there. So are Marc Ellis, Matthew Ridge, Lana Coc-Kroft, Nicky Watson, Charlotte Dawson, Kelly Swanson-Roe, Susan Wood, Neil Waka and Oliver Driver. The tent catches on fire and they all burn to death. Am woken from this pleasant reverie when a fat woman yells in my ear, ‘Are you famous?’

  After the late-night Nom*D show, I tag along to a bar on Ponsonby Road, and spot the elderly gentleman I saw on Monday smoking a pipe—now in deep conversation with an intense brunette. I eavesdrop.

  She asks him, ‘I felt that Nom*D established their dark, intellectual qualities, and adopted the cool, considered gaze of the fashion outsider. But I want my ideas to express even more of the outsider’s gaze … Out is the new in.’

  He replies, ‘Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday; I can’t be sure … Do you see what I’m getting at?’

  She leans forward, and says, ‘It’s the opening line of The Outsider, the great existentialist novel by Albert Camus. We studied it at Elam.’

  ‘Very good,’ he smiles. ‘And what is the central drama of The Outsider?’

  ‘Meursault kills an Arab.’

  He arches an eyebrow. She gives a squeal, and says, ‘I’m seeing a new take on tea towels!’

  He says, ‘That might be a bit literal. Consider what Camus called “the gentle indifference of the world”, and move in that direction.’

  ‘Yes. Yes. Yes,’ she says.

  Thursday

  Named by Time magazine as one of the twenty-five most influential people in fashion, VIP guest Cameron Silver swapped his front-row seat for the Catwalk Club luncheon, where he spoke about Hollywood stars, the craze for vintage gowns and his life styling the rich and famous in clothes first worn decades ago. Am woken from this nightmare when a fashion writer taps my shoulder, and whispers, ‘I’ve heard you read books. Come with me. Something strange is happening.’

  She takes me to a suite at the Hilton—where the elderly gentleman, who goes by the name of Wilson, is holding court to all the big names in New Zealand fashion.

  He is asked about the new Kate Sylvester range. He affects a yawn and says, ‘Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.’

  Zambesi? ‘So black no sky could squeak through.’

  Caroline Church? ‘So that is marriage, Lily thought, a man and a woman looking at a girl throwing a ball.’

  And then someone asks about Trelise Cooper’s show. There is a crackle of anticipation. In his previous devastating put-downs, he had quoted writers John Berryman, Sylvia Plath, and Virginia Woolf; now he quotes poet Delmore Schwartz, in a booming voice: ‘Clumsy and lumbering here and there … A stupid clown of the spirit.’

  There is tumultuous applause and howls of outrage. A fat woman throws a shoe. ‘Excuse me, but that was my shoe,’ I tell her, but she doesn’t hear me above the noise of what develops into a riot. Two models are injured, and later photographed lying languidly in their hospital beds, wearing quirky organza smocks with zany velvet trim whipped up that afternoon by fashion designers World.

  Friday morning

  Wilson has disappeared, leaving behind bruised egos and bruised faces all over the Viaduct. There’s something else, too—a new mood, a new direction in New Zealand fashion. Literary theory has taken over; Penguin classics are the hot accessory. But there is still the grand finale of Fashion Week to come: Karen Walker’s show at 7 p.m. How will our most celebrated designer cope in the face of a revolution?

  Friday night

  And the answer is: triumphantly. Walker’s stunning collection is a masterpiece of dark intellectual qualities. Her tunics are likened to Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, her old hats recall Proust’s À la Recherche du Temps Perdu, and her pièce de résistance—her hoodies—are heralded as the ultimate outsider garment by evoking Jean-Paul Sartre’s great existential novel, Nausea.

  [October 9]

  Beef and Liberty II

  Rolled rib roast, fillet, scotch fillet, T-bone, porterhouse, sirloin, rump, silverside, shank, shin, brisket, blade—no matter how you cut it, beef is good. God eats beef. Vegetarians dream of beef. Butter and lamb get all the press, but much of the story of New Zealand is the story of beef; one of the great dates in our history is December 7, 1881, when Otago farmer and refrigerated meat pioneer William Davidson rode to Port Chalmers and personally stowed the first frozen carcass to sail from our shores.

  Beef exports last year were $1.86 billion. The cost is eternal vigilance. In October, seventy-seven boxes of New Zealand beef, weighing nearly two tonnes, were recalled from Taiwan after authorities found the meat contained high levels of endosulfan, an insecticide that kills fleas. And we all remember the state of emergency when some clown claimed he had released foot and mouth disease among Waiheke Island livestock.

  But there is another cost. An estimated 83 percent of New Zealand beef is exported. For years, the suspicion has been that the rest of the world gets our best, highest quality beef, and that we’re left with scraps.

  Frankly, this is alarming. I recently wrote a column that served as a guide to New Zealand steakhouses, from the Bulls on Bank Steakhouse in Whangarei to Aino’s Steakhouse in Invercargill. I counted thirty-three steakhouses. That figure still stands, even though Wayne of Te Awamutu scouted out Bill’s Seafood and Steak Diner and sadly reports: ‘The place is no longer and I think it may have been gone for some time.’ Happily, I received news that the Mu Premium Steak House will open in Christchurch in December.

  Mark Rose, general manager of the Carrington Resort and Karikari Estate Vineyard and Winery in Northland, wrote in detail about the beef from their Black Angus stud farm: ‘We select animals that are approximately eighteen months old, ensuring that they have a balanced diet up until they are sent to the works. The beef is then hung for a minimum of six weeks (longer where possible) before being used as fillets, scotches and sirloins in our dining room.’

  Tremendous. My thanks, too, to Susan, who emailed with the illuminating news that our army marches on stomachs filled with beef: ‘All over the country hungry soldiers chow down at NZ Army messes to plentiful supply of juicy steak … The downside, of course, is the punishing defence force ration packs when out in the tussock. Huntley & Palmers cream crackers with cheese spread certainly bring on fond memories of steak and the comfy chairs in the mess.’

  Yes. But are we being served? Are we getting the highest quality steak from the seventeen percent of New Zealand beef reserved for our plates? Or are foreigners licking their chops and wolfing our best beef? I asked that latter, burning question of Greg Heffernan, a former chef at Huka Lodge, and now an advisory chef for the New Zealand Beef and Lamb Marketing Bureau. His answer: ‘That’s not entirely true.’

  This was not entirely comforting. Asked again he said, ‘In my professional and personal opinion, it’s a myth.’ Well, that was more like it. But I put the same question to Jane Allan, marketing manager for Hereford Prime, a quality steak programme run by the New Zealand Hereford Association. Her answer: ‘I think it’s fairly common knowledge.’

  Alarming, disgraceful, just not right. But both confidently stated that the local standard has vastly improved. ‘We’re getting better steaks all the time,’ said Heffernan, who pointed to Southland, Waikato and the Far North as the best beef pastures in New Zealand. As for delicious Hereford Prime beef, Allan reports that demand has led to trebled kills in the past twelve months at its processing plant in Invercargill, and double at its Te Awamutu slaughterhouse.

  Another encouraging sign is the advent in 2003 of an award for New Zealand’s best steak, in a competition which really is called Steak of Origin. Held at the Beef Expo in Palmerston North in May, the cook-out has been won for two years by Angus breeders, Pahiatua couple Joe and Lea Fouhy. There were more than two hundred entrants this year; each steak was tested for tend
erness on a Massey University machine that really is called a tenderometer—it imitates the biting powers of human teeth. The steaks were whittled down to sixteen finalists. The judges included Olympic rowing gold medallists Caroline and Georgina Evers-Swindell. They got to eat sirloins pan-fried in oil, no seasoning, and rated their meals on taste, tenderness, aroma and juiciness.

  I want this job next year. My qualifications are greed, hunger, and a selfless desire to honour our history: Captain Cook owes his second Pacific voyage to the patronage of John Montagu, the Earl of Sandwich, who invented the first sandwich when he ingeniously whipped up two slices of toasted bread filled with a slice of salt beef. The earl, who devoted his life to the pleasures of flesh, saw the possibilities in our ungrazed islands. That dream was passed on to William Davidson. It needs updating. I am willing to book my passage to Palmerston North next May—full results guaranteed—and act on behalf of all New Zealanders to enjoy the very best of the fat of our land.

  [October 30]

  The Graveyard Shift

  The basement of modern New Zealand history is situated on the corner of Karangahape Road and Symonds Street in downtown Auckland. A damp basement, dark and disorderly, this nineteenth-century graveyard serves as an excellent refuge for wretches both dead and alive. Alcoholics sit and guzzle under the oak trees; glue sniffers clutch potent gas masks to their ruined snouts as they stumble and curse around the tombstones. The dead just lie there and take it. Poor old Matilda has this inscription: ‘Jesus loves thee best. Good night.’

  All graveyards mark the dead end of town, but the Symonds Street Cemetery is deader than most in New Zealand. The vast majority of burials were made between 1842 and 1886. Here lie some of our earliest settlers, the dusty remains of the first great white wave of colonists who sailed from Britain (‘Isabella, arrived by ship Brilliant in 1841’) towards a new land, a new life. They helped make this place, populated it, gave it nails and streets and God; they dealt with ‘the natives’, they waited for letters, they combed their hair and played cricket and worked. They had law. They had hope. Good night Gertrude, Lillie, Alice, Felix, Florence and Ernest.

  The most famous inhabitant is William Hobson, New Zealand’s first governor, who received the chiefs at Waitangi in 1840 with his amazing greeting ‘He iwi tahi tatou’: ‘We are all one people’. There is something lonely and pathetic about Hobson’s grave; the father of our founding document rests a few paces away from a public toilet; no statue, no bust, nothing upstanding, a flat expanse of concrete hemmed in by a short rail, with three black rubbish bags caught on the spikes. Hobson was forty-nine when he died. He had been described as seventy in appearance. Speculation persists that he died from mercury treatment he received for syphilis. There’s probably no merit in that mean claim; he was exhausted, he had already suffered a stroke, he never wanted to be here in the first place.

  Hobson is surrounded by sorrow. William, died seven months. Herbert, eight months. Flora, ten months. ‘Our little Archie. Aged thirteen months. To be with Jesus which is far better.’ Better even than Auckland, which Hobson made the capital. The first mayor, Archibald Clark, is buried in this city of snails, along with merchants (Robert the ‘rope manufacturer’) and military veterans (George, a veteran of the Burmese War and served in the Madras Horse Artillery). No poor, no riff nor raff, although there is a handsome monument to Sidney Stephen, acting chief justice, ‘kind friend to the poor whom he was always ready to advise and assist in their troubles’.

  Good night Mabel, Lillie, Turpin, Agnes, Charles, Felicia, Henry and Eliza. And good night to … sorry, we didn’t catch your name: ‘Remembered here also are those who through various circumstances lay in unmarked graves.’ Life’s a bitch, and then you die, and then there are ‘various circumstances’. And then there is the indignity of progress: an army of the dead were walked off the premises in 1964, when 4,100 graves were interred to make way for the motorway.

  The shaded lanes, the daffodils in spring, the peculiar appearance of brittle seashells on top of the graves. It’s very pretty, a little England, with its stiff Victorian sentiment and droning Anglican pieties: ‘His end was peace … Who was called home … The quiet haven of us all.’ But raw life thrusts through in death—there is a kind of accidents’ row in the cemetery, neighbouring Captain Duncan (accidentally killed while rigging a schooner) next to James (killed by a fall from his horse) and Alexander (drowned off the North Head). And in a tangle of vines and roots, there is the forgotten tragedy of Emily, ‘shot while on her way to bible class’. She was seventeen.

  Typhoid fever, ‘a painful malady’, ‘this vault erected by his sorrowing wife’. City of the dead, city of the truly alive: Frederick Maning, one of the strangest New Zealanders of that century, is buried here. ‘I take a good deal of killing,’ he boasted. He died in England, but had asked for his body to brought back to the country where he was variously known as ‘a double-faced sneaking thief ’, ‘a Pakeha Maori’, and ‘wild, rollicking, adventurous’. Maning married Moengaroa, sister of the Ngapuhi chief Hauraki, and had four children. He advised Maori against signing the treaty, saying they would be ‘degraded’ by British rule. He claimed he had been made a tohunga, and given a priceless greenstone mere—‘The Emperor of Brazil, I think, has it now,’ he wrote in his bizarre memoir, Old New Zealand. Fabulous, except he turned into a virulent racist, and washed his hands of his children.

  We have a rotten history, grasping and nasty and mad; we have a proud history, brave and happy and full of purpose. The dead did the hard work, they got it started. They are worth a visit in Symonds Street, among the twisted railings and collapsed headstones, the long grass and the whistling of birds; good night to a man who really was called Ebenezer Fitness.

  [November 13]

  Beef and Liberty III

  As we stand on the doorstep of summer, and await sunshine, and holidays, and Christmas gifts, something else approaches. The waiting is so very nearly over for the cows to come home. To our homes, to our front yards and our backyards, to that place of rest—they can put their hooves up, and roll over and more than just play dead—known as the summer barbecue. Be prepared. Put your house in order. Have tongs. Paper towels. Matches. Wood, coal, petrol, any kind of fuel. Stand well back. And then dive in, head first, mouth wide open.

  That happy whiff, that curl of smoke stroking the sky’s soft skin. Hungry? Of course you are. Want the best? Of course you do. In this, my third column in recent weeks to celebrate New Zealand beef, I strongly advise you to ask for either Hereford Prime or Angus Pure. It helps to know whom you’re eating.

  First, though, an update on steakhouses. I had previously listed thirty-three such restaurants the length and flank of New Zealand. Trish from Tauranga was appalled that my column failed to register the existence of a steakhouse in her town: ‘So I made enquiries only to find we didn’t have any. But my husband discovered one recently opened, Dine @ Fourth on Fourth Avenue. We tried it last night and his one-inch fillet was cooked to perfection.’ Bravo, Trish, and to your husband with his one-inch meat.

  Meanwhile, two English lads, Sam and John, heard word on the street about my steakhouse guide. They had been in New Zealand for three months, were about to fly home from Christchurch, and felt in desperate need of a good steak meal before they left. I sent them to the pleasantly eccentric Sgt Peppers steakhouse. They subsequently wrote: ‘We both had the big fillet and agreed it was the best steak we’d ever had.’ I love a happy ending.

  But another column cast grave doubts on the quality of our domestic steak. Was it really, I asked, anywhere near as good as the beef we process for export? Actually it’s better, according to meat experts who responded with barely concealed rage.

  ‘The damage has been done by your article,’ wrote Clark Ambury, livestock manager for Wilson Hellaby. He wanted it corrected. ‘We target animals up to two years of age and at all times seek only well-finished cattle in prime condition. The animal cannot be treated with an hormonal growth promota
nt (export can), and they are constantly monitored for their tenderness … The eighty-three percent of beef that is exported is predominantly manufacturing or grinding beef.’

  ‘You have fallen well short of the mark—failed miserably in fact,’ wrote Doug Lineham, regional livestock manager for PPCS Richmond. ‘New Zealanders have access to a meat industry that should be celebrated for the standards under which they accept their raw material (livestock), the manner in which it is processed and delivered to the consumer … There is simply none better in the world!’

  I also heard from Rod Slater, general manager for the New Zealand Beef and Lamb Marketing Bureau. ‘It is a total myth to say that all the best beef is exported,’ he confidently asserted, and pointed to the Quality Mark standard that our meat aspires to, and consistently achieves.

  I called him for more information. The secret of tender meat, he said, is to control the ageing process. How? Since 1997, livestock at meatworks have been given an electric shock before rigor mortis sets in. The beef can be cooled slowly, and that temperature is monitored from the killing floor right to our plate. Beef tenderness has been monitored since 1991. Back then, about fifty percent was considered unacceptably tough; today, that figure stands at 0.2 percent.

  All this was good news. But what I really wanted to know was whether Slater had taken me up on my plea, expressed in a recent column, to be appointed a judge at next year’s Steak of Origin award, which rates the best steak in New Zealand. He said: ‘Mate, you’re in.’

  In May 2006, I will be among a select panel of three judges attending the Beef Expo in Palmerston North, where the Steak of Origin award has been held since its inception in 2003. The grand champion that year was Mike Curnow of Motueka, with an Angus-Wagyu cross. The winners for the past two years have been Angus breeders Joe and Lea Fouhy of Pahiatua. What are the Fouhys doing right? Slater: ‘No one really knows. The mystique is there.’