Fish of the Week

by Steve Braunias

  Entries have grown from about fifty in 2003 to over two hundred. Slater: ‘Who knows where it’ll end?’ I do. On my plate, in May. As a judge, I do not take the responsibility lightly. I have begun training in earnest. Hereford Prime, a delicious meat programme run by the Hereford Association, sent me an enormous sirloin. So, too, did Angus Pure, a delicious meat programme run by the Angus Association.

  My kitchen has hosted much roasting, much frying. But the time has come to step outdoors towards the barbecue. Tongs: check. Fuel: check. Mouth wide open: no need to check.

  [November 27]

  The Remains of Christmas

  There must have been a Christmas tree. I don’t remember it in the house, but I do remember the fabulous December ritual of stalking behind the railway tracks in Mount Maunganui with my older brothers and walking barefoot across pine needles and hacking down a tree—the blade made a wet kind of sound when it got stuck inside the surprisingly white pulp—with a really big axe. I loved that sound, I loved the axe, I loved being with my brothers.

  I remember the train. I would stop and watch it on days when I ambled around the Central Parade shops in search of a comic and a doughnut—Alan Bates ran the magazine store, Ruth Causley’s mother owned the bakery. It was a goods train banging along the tracks to and from the wharf. We were told at Omanu Primary School—my father painted the swimming pool—that it was the second busiest port in New Zealand. This was apparently very important. I remember white lettering on the red carriages.

  Summer in Mount Maunganui, black volcanic rock and crushed white seashells on the slopes of the mountain surrounded by sea, sand on the pavements, the distant Kaimai Ranges pale in the afternoon light, the sky scorched red at sunset, the sound of the train banging across the tracks late at night, but I don’t remember much about Christmas.

  I remember presents. I was the youngest; I was greedy and spoiled. I loved books. George Best On The Ball. Tiger Book of Soccer Stars, starring George Best, ‘master of ALL the arts’. A Pictorial History of Soccer—bewilderingly, thrillingly, a publishing error in my copy meant that eight pages devoted to South America were printed twice. It had an introduction by George Best, and his signature. Irish novelist Roddy Doyle was given that book too, and remembers how amazed he was that his parents had somehow managed to get George Best to sign his copy.

  I don’t remember very much at all about my father at Christmas. He left home when I was nine or ten. Was it summer? The weather was warm. I got the day off school. He reversed down the driveway. Maybe the last thing he saw was his name on a sign above the garage: ‘JOHN BRAUNIAS. PAINTER AND WALLPAPERER’. He had his clothes on the back seat. He drove to the South Island. I probably kicked a ball around in the backyard—there was a white picket fence, grapefruit and peach trees, a round concrete lid for something called a sump. Officially, it was A Sad Day. But I don’t remember feeling sad. He was Austrian; for years, I had no idea what he was doing here in the first place.

  He visited now and then, during summer, but I don’t remember if it was at Christmas. He was nervous. He laughed too much. It was awkward, and finally he would leave again. I loved soccer. In the soccer books, they played on snow and in depressing English mud; in Mount Maunganui there were prickles in the grass, sun-beaten cracks in the ground, ants and wasps and crickets. I remember the summer when there was a plague of beetles. The pavements were black from one end of the street to another.

  People called my father Johnnie, but his real name was Johann. His accent picked its way through English in some sort of game of hide and seek. I loved listening to him, especially when he tried a long word, like ‘gobbledegook’. We saw each other a lot in the past fifteen, twenty years. Once or twice in Mount Maunganui, often in Wellington and Auckland, where I lived, often in Fairlie, where he lived, a popular figure in a small, lovely South Canterbury town. He would sometimes address friends with the greeting, ‘Mein Herr!’

  He was charming and funny, a terrible rascal, sentimental, foolish, a quick learner and full of the usual prejudices; he had very blue eyes, he was foreign, and as an inappropriate role model he was up there with George Best. I suppose we adored each other. He died nearly two years ago. For a while, as a widower, he tormented me with his notion of selling up, buying a caravan, and living where the road and his mood took him. Nothing came of it. He fell in love. His girlfriend took us on a brilliant road trip, two or three cold days in winter, and I remember our drinking thermos tea and cooking bacon on a gas ring beside the Benmore Dam.

  I remember another visit south to Fairlie during summer. It felt like a Christmas week in New Zealand—the hot days, the burnt grass, sandwiches and lettuces and cold drinks, the mountains bare of snow. My brother Mark was there too. The three of us drove out one day and parked along a side road. My father and my brother took brushes and a canvas each, and painted the same landscape. I lazed around, took a walk, watched them paint. It’s a very good memory. I have my father’s painting in my house, and I fancy I can remember everything about that day, that feeling of a family Christmas in New Zealand.

  [December 18]

  News, 1963

  Another summer, January 1963. It was hot as blazes all over the country—so hot that it even reached 88.9 degrees Fahrenheit in Invercargill. Passengers fainted on Wellington commuter trains when delays were caused by tracks buckling in the sun. Temperatures were the highest in Christchurch since records were first kept in 1864. There were hose bans in Gisborne. It was too hot to sleep in Auckland; the humidity rose to ninety-five percent at 4 a.m., the water in the Newmarket pool simmered at 79 degrees.

  On Sunday, January 6, Victor George Wasmuth, fifty-two, was at his bach in Bethells Road in Auckland’s Waitakere ranges. There was a boarding kennel next door; one dog was owned by the governor-general, Sir Bernard Fergusson. The barking got on Wasmuth’s nerves. He had fired shots from his .303 rifle on Boxing Day.

  A man drowned in the Otaki River after saving three kids. Flour bombs were dropped from light aircraft over Hawke’s Bay beaches to warn bathers of sharks; in the Otago harbour Laurence Waters killed a shark with a whaling harpoon. Flytox insect killer flew out of shops, and so did Skol suntan lotion, but too late for two kids who were taken to the plastic surgery department at Burwood Hospital after their backs had blistered.

  Wasmuth was insane. He said he was being persecuted, that secret agents were on his case. He wanted a ‘showdown’. The time had come ‘to get a complete cleaning’.

  In Britain, it was the worst snow in eighty-two years, and the Queen prepared for her royal visit to New Zealand in February.

  The colony had seen in the new year with blasts of ship’s sirens and car horns; in downtown Auckland, a group paraded about with a pole topped by a pair of trousers and a petticoat, while in Mount Maunganui a man was arrested after he took pity on a prisoner in the local cells and passed him three hot dogs. For a week, campers at Masterton’s Mawley Park endured teenage ‘riff-raff ’, who stole their milk money and used the most appalling language.

  Wasmuth said that he was a novelist, that he was working on a poem. He had sold short stories to Australian publications. A neighbour later said, ‘He was a clever man, very intelligent. He often used to talk about things that were above me.’

  There were excellent harvests of tomatoes, peaches and plums. Clutch Cargo was on television at 6.03 p.m. At the movies, there were Hoodlum Priest, Gun for a Coward and The Devil at 4 O’Clock. Hats were offered for cost price at the summer sales. Peter Snell ran the mile in four minutes 3.3 seconds. A crowd of 48,000 attended the Grand Prix at Pukekohe, but many left early due to the oppressive heat.

  It rained that Sunday afternoon, but still Auckland sweltered, gasped. Wasmuth wore a singlet and shorts. He saw a man come to collect his dog. He got out his gun and shot Harry Pettit in the arm. Pettit yelled he’d been hit. Wasmuth said, ‘Well, here’s another one for you.’ He missed.

  The family who owned the kennel managed to drive away. But then James B
erry walked back to check on the dogs, and Wasmuth shot him three times and killed him. And then he made a cup of tea. While the kettle boiled, he walked outside and emptied the teapot.

  The cops were called. Actually, a man—no one ever found out who—came to Wasmuth’s door and asked him to phone for an ambulance. Wasmuth told him to go next door because he didn’t have a phone. Detective Sergeant Neville Power, the son of Auckland’s assistant commissioner of police, fired tear gas through Wasmuth’s window. Wasmuth shot him in the heart and killed him. His father listened to it on the police radio. Wasmuth looked at Power dying, and said to him, ‘Is it cold down there?’

  Another sticky summer’s day in Auckland. A beautiful American yacht, the Monsoon, lay in harbour—its previous owner had blown up three defence radio stations in Utah, then fled to start a revolution in Mexico. Mutton slaughtermen were urgently needed to fill jobs in Penrose. A boy in Glen Innes was operated on after he swallowed a halfpenny which caught in his windpipe and made him whistle when he talked.

  Sixteen police arrived at Wasmuth’s property, with its long grass and tomato plants. Detective Inspector Wally Chalmers shouted at Constable John Langham that he was in Wasmuth’s line of fire; Langham ran for cover, and Wasmuth fired on Chalmers, and then again, at point-blank range. Wasmuth ran up his driveway into a police crossfire, swinging his rifle like a club. He was shot in the arm and surrendered. Langham then went to Chalmers’ side. He was lying face down in mud. Langham lifted his head and turned him around; Chalmers shuddered, and died.

  Wasmuth was found unfit to stand trial. In his statement to police, he said the afternoon had been ‘staged’. He was sent to Lake Alice Psychiatric Hospital. There was a massive public funeral for Power and Chalmers at Purewa Lawn Cemetery on January 9.

  The next day, torrential rain hit the entire country. In Auckland, a month’s worth of rain collected in twenty-four hours. It brought an end to a stifling, unbearable heat wave.

  [January 29, 2006]

  Mr Heke

  Hack it down. Hack down the New Zealand flagpole at Waitangi tomorrow in the name of running up another, better New Zealand flag. Or hack it down in the name of getting rid of the monarchy and replacing it with a republic. Better yet, hack it down, above all, in the name of Hone Heke.

  No other New Zealand life tells us more about the birth of the nation. Heke was there, at the right time in all the wrong places, enigmatic, responsible, carried away, in charge, on the run, a pen in one hand and an axe in the other, hacking down the flagpole once, twice, three times, four times.

  He was there at Waitangi, on James Busby’s front lawn on that lovely summer’s day on February 6, 1840. Has anyone survived that day with dignity? Governor William Hobson was there, waiting to collect signatures; two years later he was dead—black rubbish bags stick to the spikes surrounding his unloved grave in Auckland’s Symonds Street Cemetery. Busby was there, watching his dream of being appointed New Zealand’s potentate vanish before his eyes; in debt and deaf as a coot, he died in 1871 back in England. One of the few signs of his existence in New Zealand is a resort lodge named after him in Paihia. Ngapuhi chief Tamati Waka Nene was there, arguing in favour of the treaty; his handsome gravestone in Russell commends his ‘loyalty’—verily, here lies a man who was once rewarded with a silver cup from Queen Victoria.

  Heke, too, urged Maori to sign the treaty. This is William Colenso’s translation: ‘To raise up, or to bring down? To raise up, or to bring down? Which? Which? Who knows? Sit, Governor, sit. If thou shouldst return, we natives are gone, utterly gone, nothinged, extinct … Who and what are we? Children—yes, children solely. We do not know: do you then choose for us. A father, a governor for us.’

  You could say he had a change of heart. But everything about Heke confuses, offers no easy moral lesson. He was descended from the great Rahiri. ‘From him all Ngaphui of importance trace their descent,’ writes historian Jack Lee. Born circa 1807 and raised in Kaikohe, Heke saw the first white men enter the Bay of Islands and Hokianga. His influences, then, were Ngapuhi, but also European traders and missionaries; in fact, after attending mission school he became an Anglican lay preacher. Later in life he resumed his deep friendship with Reverend Henry Williams, who had converted him in 1824. In that same period he engaged in war raids against other Maori tribes.

  Heke, the heroic warrior chief. Heke, the pious Christian poring over the scriptures. Heke, six feet tall, possibly an egotist, full of bluster, calling Europeans ‘my pakeha’. He was a tireless letter-writer. He married three times—the third time while still married to his second wife, Hongi Hika’s daughter Hariata, who gave him a sound thrashing for his infidelity. Surely he was a humourist. Governor FitzRoy offered a hundred pounds for Heke’s arrest; Heke blithely offered the same reward for FitzRoy’s arrest. After hacking down the Union Jack at Waitangi, he serenely canoed the Bay of Islands while displaying the Stars and Stripes.

  Heke is defined by flags. ‘To raise up, or to bring down?’ There is a monument to him on Kaikohe Hill. In parenthesis, it pithily informs readers: ‘Hone Heke (of flagstaff fame).’ It was Heke who had the flagstaff built at Maiki Hill. He expected it to fly a Maori flag. Instead, the Union Jack proclaimed authority over subservient Maori. Northland poet Kendrick Smithyman, in his masterpiece, the book-length poem ‘Atua Wera’, references a letter Heke wrote to Governor Grey: ‘I touched the flagstaff, it was chopped down, the tree fell.’ Over and over, demolishing the symbol of monarchy, but also of government.

  It was rebellion. Naval commander Lieutenant George Philpotts said: ‘I consider losing the flagstaff in the same light as losing a ship.’ It meant war. War came: Philpotts was scalped at Ohaeawai. But settlers were spared, even protected, when Heke attacked Kororareka. He was all for the kind of free-trade agreement the Bay of Islands had enjoyed before the government shifted commercial power to Auckland. He was all for two peoples.

  But what to make of Heke’s fabulous alliance with Papa hurihia, perhaps the first of the Old Testament Maori prophets, known variously as the red god, hot god and fiery god (atua wera), who claimed to speak with the dead, and who fought alongside Heke as his tohunga? At the siege of Ohaeawai, in Heke’s absence, Papahurihia composed a victory song for warriors: ‘On Jesus Christ and the Book, I will turn my back, and I will empty my bowels upon them!’

  When the war was over, Heke made peace with Grey. He died in 1850. According to his biographer Freda Kawharu, ‘He was buried in complete secrecy in the burial ground called Kaungarapa, at Pakaraka … So intense was the tapu that all clothing had first to be removed.’ He had survived February 6, 1840 with dignity.

  And still does. He was courageous, he was sardonic. He was complex, he was human. Honour the treaty? Honour Hone, the man who saw a problem and solved it by hacking, hacking, hacking, hacking it down.

  [February 5]

  Birdland

  Everywhere, birds. Summer in New Zealand fills with so much light that we become the land of the long white page; every corner, every margin is filled with birds. From dawn to dusk, and even beyond that. Auckland city, a hot Saturday night in late January, approaching midnight: one black-backed gull, a big, quiet thing, in no apparent hurry, coolly flying past where I stood on the balcony of an apartment, then coolly flying back again, its silent and surprising appearance in darkness stranger than anything happening down below among the traffic and the street lights.

  More and more birds. An estimated 90,000 godwits are mooching around New Zealand harbours and estuaries before their autumn return to the Arctic. So, too, are the lesser knots— I have no idea as to the whereabouts of the higher knots—as well as a few thousand other migratory wading birds. About now, these transients are changing their plumage to a bright and eye-catching red for the flight home. Imagine that sight in March: the sky turning red.

  So many birds, in bush and on shore. The swamp hen, drunk on the last of their summer wine of fermented berries, blundering into trees. The blue reef herons, their b
odies as soft as mittens. The birds with ridiculous names—the crake, the coot, the crested grebe. Few birds sound better in Latin, with the exception of the kingfisher—Halcyon sancta.

  Rare and endangered birds always enjoy good press. Fair enough. Bravo to the protected species huddling in sanctuaries and islands. But most of us live at home: the woman in Herne Bay who locks her cat inside and feeds pigeons on her front lawn every morning; the man in Eastbourne who walks to the sea wall every afternoon and feeds seagulls—he claims he can recognise individuals. Every day we can see starlings, blackbirds, mynahs, house sparrows, plovers, red-billed gulls, thrushes, tui, silvereyes—average avians, common or garden, the usual identified flying objects making the world a better place.

  Birds bring nothing but good. Except the H5N1 flu, with its prospect of the human race dropping like flies. We have nothing to fear in New Zealand, according to experts, who found no evidence of the killer disease after subjecting godwits and all other migrants to intense cross-examination. You may recall that Algerian refugee and suspected terrorist Ahmed Zaoui called his book of poems Migrant Birds.

  Our own bird population merely indulge in such innocent pastimes as killing each other. From my priceless copy of Geoff Moon’s first book, Focus on New Zealand Birds (published in 1957 by Cameo Press in Warkworth): ‘I once watched a harrier attack a grey duck with her ducklings … I was surprised to see him fly off leaving behind the decapitated and partly plucked mother duck.’ As for the kingfisher: ‘It dives on to the prey and, returning to its perch, kills it by bashing it senseless before swallowing.’ Exactly why was it ever called Halcyon sancta?

  So many good New Zealand bird books. Every home should have an edition of A Field Guide to the Birds of New Zealand. My home would like to have such classic works as W.R.B. Oliver’s 1930 study New Zealand Birds; The Life Histories of New Zealand Birds by Edgar Stead (who was also adept at death histories: a brilliant marksman, he ordered 50,000 shotgun cartridges every year from England until his death in 1949); Bird Secrets by Major Geoffrey Buddle (who migrated from Auckland Grammar to fight at Gallipoli, then France, where he was gassed, lost his voice, and was expected to die in a sanatorium in Scotland, but recovered after sunbathing for a long spell in Suva before returning home); New Zealand Birds And How to Identify Them by Pérrine Moncrieff (a Nelson woman who wore a cap of white hen’s feathers dyed sapphire blue, kept a pet macaw called Miss Macawber, and established Abel Tasman National Park in 1942); and works by our great nineteenth-century ornithologists Walter Buller and Andreas Reischek, even though both happily shot and collected rather too many endangered species.