Fish of the Week

by Steve Braunias

  [December 23]

  The Year Ahead

  CAPRICORN (Dec 23–Jan 20)

  2008 is an old tub on calm waters. You won’t go fast and you won’t go far, but there is minimal danger of chaos. Use the idle months wisely. Rehearse, invest, plot. Don’t look back; that way lies madness, and the past never did you any favours. If the phone rings, snatch at it. Opportunity is a stranger who could turn out to be sweet Jesus.

  AQUARIUS (Jan 21–Feb 19)

  You’re seriously anal, so watch your back. You’re not built for pain. Crisis is inevitable, but remain calm at all times. Remember: women and children first. Drink deeply when it’s midnight at the oasis. Where there’s a chicken, there’s a road. Romance wants a word with you, outside, to settle things once and for all. Sow what you reap; quit looking for handouts. Avoid decisions, pesto and children.

  PISCES (Feb 20–March 20)

  Step boldly into the great unknown. Your loveliness is your passport. Learning a new language will seem impossible, but your future rides on it. Rely on others to feed and pamper you. Money is the least of your problems. Study hard, but play up whenever the mood strikes. You can afford to be naked a lot of the time. In short, do as you wish: you’re gorgeous.

  ARIES (March 21–April 20)

  Burn the candle at both ends. It’s a jolly good tallow. Caution is the bore at the party; don’t even bother being polite, just keep moving. You are the sun and the moon and the stars. You’re not bound by the Geneva Convention. Buy now, detox later. Success is guaranteed if you stay unfocussed. What’s good for the goose is sauce. Remember: make this a year to forget.

  TAURUS (April 21–May 21)

  Spiritual values assume a profound importance. Science is a nuisance; there are good reasons ancient superstitions have remained so potent. Covet thy neighbour. Criminal charges are unlikely to stand up in a court of law. Your family will only want to mess with your head. Tell it like it is to complete strangers. Loneliness is a burden, but its yolk shall be lifted. Work hard, and bathe often.

  GEMINI (May 22–June 21)

  You’ll be poor, yesterday’s news, an old sock, stuck indoors with the washing-up, superb in the kitchen, accident-prone but right as rain in no time, radiant, content, sober, dying for a drink, moody, exhausted, stretched to the limits of your endurance, reliable, inventive, lucky, blessed, cantankerous, full of vim and vigour, a good egg, adored, adoring, in love—in short, you’ll be the happiest you’ve ever been.

  CANCER (June 22–July 23)

  You think you’re your own worst enemy, but there are plenty of other people much better qualified for that role. Please, keep a civil tongue in your head. Give up on artistic pretensions. Have faith in your mediocrity: it pays the bills. Pay close attention to grooming habits. See your family doctor. Replace back-stabbing malice with acts of charity. Remember: nothing comes from nothing.

  LEO (July 24–Aug 23)

  2008 is an email sent back by The Postmaster, marked ‘Undeliverable’. Rage against the machine by all means, but trust only in the natural world. Observe the migratory patterns of birds, raise your own crops, know thy tides. Watch the pot ’til it boils. A friend in need is a pest. Walk softly, and carry a warning. Avoid Christians, Muslims and boring left-wing blogs.

  VIRGO (Aug 24–Sept 23)

  Those close to you will ask an awful lot. Give as much as you can, but measure how much you get in return. Work is liberating. Where there’s a nest, there’s an egg. Honey soothes a bear with a sore head. Suspicion is old hat. Relax; trust and yoga suits your figure. Read your life like a bodice-ripper. Demand to be kissed all over, and over again. Worship indulgence.

  LIBRA (Sept 24–Oct 23)

  Go away in February. Come back in June. You don’t need bad news. If love comes calling, run a check on its credit rating. The secret to tip-top health is sloth. Champagne and dessert are your friends; they’ll support you in times of need. When put on the spot, offer no comment. You need public exposure like a hole in the head. Work is a hoax; start calling in sick.

  SCORPIO (Oct 24–Nov 22)

  Cosy up to power. When it comes to office politics, no one will vote for you. Revenge is a dish best served with toxic waste. You’re not bound by environmental law. Adopt an exercise regime that borders on self-loathing. Cosmetic surgery is a tool. Use it. Where there’s a will, claim your share. Be kind to children and pets; you’ll need an outlet for your pangs of conscience.

  SAGITTARIUS (Nov 23–Dec 22)

  Stick to your guns. Your superb judgement means that you’re right even when all known facts suggest otherwise. You’re needed in the community; join in, and take charge. The weak adore a thrashing. At home, give whatever your family demands. They are precious and deserving. Travel beckons. Don’t be afraid not to make the most of it. There’s always mañana. Que sera, etc.

  [January 6, 2008]

  Gazebo Nation

  This long hot summer has seen New Zealand at its undressed best. Such easy loveliness, the familiar lazy script of postcard days. Everywhere, deserted cities and tyre marks on dirt roads. Everywhere, steak and cricket and liquor. Everywhere, fish and shore birds, dew and sunlight, fruit and flesh. And everywhere—towering and cheap, a welcome blot on the modern landscape—gazebos.

  The quiet revolution of kit-set gazebos has escaped the attention of those deathless magazines devoted to homes and gardens. The gazebos are cursed with that stamp of disapproval: MADE IN CHINA. But they are legion, staked out across our lazy sen sual islands in vast numbers—ranging in price from $69 (Mitre 10 Mega) to $179 (Spotlight)—they have become the architecture of summer. Look around. A cheerful beauty is born in the backyards of Hawke’s Bay and Hokianga, Motueka and Milton. Where there is middle New Zealand, there is a gazebo.

  We interrupt this column to bring you a musical interlude. Gazebo: what a luscious word. It has the lightness of silk moving on a soft breeze; its open vowels are shrouded with the mist of hazy consonants.

  Perhaps there is less music in the physical appearance of portable, foldable, stick-up-able gazebos. But they look so good, so simple. They are fashioned like a tent, but without walls—you can come and go as you please, and the high roof means you can walk tall. Form follows function: the gazebos provide shade, but also elegance. They come in a range of colours, and some boast frills, tassels and vivid stitching. They are instant outdoor furniture, providing room for a family of at least four, along with a dining table, chairs, perhaps even a couch. In short, they promise the good life.

  I got one this Christmas. I was thrilled. I had dropped subtle hints. I said: ‘I want a gazebo.’ And there it was, under the Christmas tree in a long white box, MADE IN CHINA, 2.4m x 2.4m, a sticker translated into many languages. First: PARTY TENT. Then: GARTEN PAVILLON. Also: TIENTE DE JARDIN. Best of all, the last word: GAZEBO.

  I clawed open the box. The gazebo came with instructions. At this point you have every right to expect this column to conform to a standard narrative. Most columnists make a great show of their spectacular incompetence in practical matters. They like to perform a comedy of haplessness. But there is something terribly false about the whole routine: the self-mocking is a boast, the meticulous descriptions of failing to connect this to that a form of pride. What are really saying is that they are loveable fellows who don’t take life too seriously.

  But it wasn’t like that with the kit-set gazebo. I took it very seriously. I looked at the instructions, couldn’t understand their gnomic and hopeless translations—‘Don’t fix cover where are the angles’, etc—and flew off in a rage. The plastic poles and green fabric lay in the box for three or four days. The giver of the gazebo took charge. She explained that all the poles were numbered—it was just a matter of connecting each to the other. She set to work on the lawn. A rectangle took shape. But the diagonal poles failed to meet, and she flew off in a rage.

  New Year’s Day came and went, we swam at beaches and ate barbecued lamb, the sharp coconut smell of fallen Moreton Bay
figs rose from the pavement. New Zealand at its undressed best… I dumped the gazebo fabric in the garage. The poles lay on the lawn, and sank into the grass. It was a sad, dismal sight, the end of a golden summer before it had even got off the ground, the debris of a columnist’s facile standard narrative.

  More days passed. Finally I set to work. It soon became clear that the clown who assembled the box had misnumbered the poles. A new rectangle took shape. The diagonal poles met in a clinging embrace. There was more work to be done, much more: it took all day. I flew into a rage and she flew into a rage; sometimes we flew into a rage with each other. It was suggested we take the thing back and exchange it for something easy, like the assembly parts for a nuclear-testing station, but I thought: There are gazebos from Cheltenham to Pleasant Point; there will be a gazebo in Point Chevalier if it kills me. In the cool of the evening, it was completed.

  It looked magnificent, a jolly green giant, its legs lissome and firm. The instructions claimed, ‘This gazebo should not be left erected overnight.’ Nonsense. It was there the next morning, ready for action. We walked to the shops. The hot summer’s day was fanned by a soft breeze. When we returned, the gazebo had collapsed. Two legs had buckled, and fallen to the ground. Such debris, perhaps even a useless heap of cheap Chinese junk—but it was still upright on its other two legs, still holding on.

  It remains there today. It sits at a rakish angle and provides shade for someone very short. It offers a budget version of the good life. It has its own ramshackle dignity, quietly hums its sweet gazebic song in my backyard as the fruit trees drool with bounty and golden summer burns in an azure sky.

  [January 20]

  Gauguin’s Teeth

  They do a nice fresh fish with vanilla sauce in Hiva Oa. I travelled to that beautiful Tahitian island last week on business. It was hot work toiling away with a spade—the days were humid and steamy, and the scent of wild gardenias was like an incessant whisper telling me to cease my labours, relax, and order a refreshing poolside drink at the Hanakee Pearl Lodge—but I persevered, and found what I came to discover. You could call it buried treasure.

  A brief news story in The New Zealand Herald caught my eye in December. In one paragraph, it told that four rotten teeth, a New Zealand bottle of beer, a syringe, a broken coconut shell and other petty items had been uncovered in a pit next to the house where Paul Gauguin lived on the island of Hiva Oa. A subsequent story in The Dominion Post confirmed that the dark brown beer was made by the Kauri Brewery in Woodville.

  Interesting. I wondered, did the great French artist (1848–1903) discard his possessions in only one pit? Might he have dug another hole to use as his rubbish dump? If so, what else had he thrown away? I began to make inquiries. A chance remark—it was made by an old Tahitian man, now living in Napier but who had grown up in Hiva Oa, where his grandmother knew Gauguin, possibly on intimate terms—led to more inquiries. I was soon hot on the trail. I flew to Papeete and chartered a boat to the Marquesas Islands.

  For years, I had heard rumours of a diary that Gauguin had kept during his ten-day visit to New Zealand in August 1895. He was en route to find his primitive ideal in Tahiti, and complete the series of paintings that have made him one of the most famous artists in history. Bronwen Nicholson, in her excellent 1996 book Gauguin and Maori Art, has revealed the specific Maori sources that inspired a number of images in Gauguin’s works. But what else had the Frenchman learned during his visit to these shores? The pages of his New Zealand diary, if it existed, would provide a fascinating insight into our early settlement from the mind of a genius.

  It exists. I dug it up late on a Thursday afternoon in the village of Atuona, where Gauguin is buried. Acting on information that he had thrown out unwanted personal effects in another pit soon after he arrived on Hiva Oa, I found his New Zealand diary inside a biscuit tin that also contained two rotten teeth, a bloodied swab of cotton wool, a jar of manuka honey, a black feather, a red sock, a blue sock, and a postcard of Palmerston North.

  The diaries will be published in book form later this year. In the meantime, I have translated a few selections.

  Gauguin arrived in Auckland on August 2, 1895. His diary reads: ‘Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? The scholar sitting beside me in the tavern says these are very good questions, and bores me with his anxieties about “the New Zealand identity”. Retire to my room and gnaw on biscuits long into the dark night.’ He records his impressions of Maori art from a visit to the Auckland Museum the next day, and relates a curious incident on the North Shore. ‘Am minding my own business when a teenage drunkard accosts me and demands to know whom I am looking at and whether I desire a fight. I demur. He then announces I am the best friend he ever had. Soon he dissolves into tears, and tells me the story of his life. I decline his invitation to copulate, and he hits me.’

  Gauguin visits Rotorua on August 4. ‘In order to do something new we must go back to the source, to humanity in its infancy. A friendly, laughing wahine recommends Palmerston North.’ He arrives there on August 5 and writes, ‘How long have I been here? My bones too weary to remember my age. Retire to my room and feast on honey until dawn.’ He writes the following day, ‘How long have I been here? My age too weary to remember my bones. I look at my watch. It is 10.15 a.m. I continue walking the streets of the city. A week passes. I look at my watch. It is 10.18 a.m. Run to catch the next coach.’

  August 7 is a long rage against man-made laws, and concludes: ‘Who will solve the mystery of missing socks?’ August 8 consists of only one cryptic entry: ‘Biscuits.’ The next day, he details a hike through unspecified forest with a Maori guide. ‘He promises to show me a rare bird he calls huia, which has a special place in his culture. We find a pair feeding on the ground. “Observe, Pakeha,” he whispers … We feast well of the meat, which tastes like chicken.’

  On August 10, in Wellington, he is granted an audience with Premier Dick Seddon, who invites him to witness ‘a carnival atmosphere’ in Invercargill. Gauguin accepts. They arrive on August 12. ‘I shut my eyes in order to see,’ he writes of the hanging of Minnie Dean.

  The last lines of his diary see Gauguin bid a fond farewell to New Zealand. ‘Cold, suspicious, aggressive, the colony is a barbarous place, and the women are too thin. Good biscuits, though.’

  [February 10]

  Miss Price

  The name of Beverley Price lives by water, lives beneath trees. There is a memorial to her in front of a bridge that crosses Oakley Creek. I first saw it last year, and I wanted to see it again after the talk began of what kind of memorial the government should create in honour of Sir Edmund Hillary. Like him, she was a great mountaineer, practical and droll, admired and loved, but he may well have envied the quiet way she was able to go about her life. In death, too, she eludes ceremony.

  Oakley Creek is in Point Chevalier. A narrow, winding walkway runs alongside for about two or three kilometres. It’s a terribly pretty track—there are oaks and plane trees, the city’s only natural waterfall, and the scenery also includes an intimate view of the back of the Mason Clinic for the criminally insane. There are eels in the creek, and the birds in the trees include the shining cuckoo I saw in early spring. It’s a quiet oasis, a godsend, watery and leafy, and the memorial by the bridge reads: ‘In memory of Beverley Joy Price, whose research, foresight, and active campaigning provided the foundation for the development of a walkway route along Oakley Creek. An accomplished mountaineer, tramper and teacher, Beverley died in the Air NZ DC10 plane crash on Mount Erebus on 28 November 1979.’

  I stopped to talk to two women who were pointing at something on a bank of the creek. Scattered seashells: they were a nineteenth-century Maori midden, one woman said. Yes, said her friend, she should know, she’s an archaeologist. They asked how far I was walking and I said just as far as the bridge to look at a memorial, and the archaeologist said, I know the one you mean, it’s for Bev Price. She gave me the name of someone who knew her well. I later phoned Joan B
rock. We talked for a while, and she gave me numbers for Beverly Williamson and Bernie Davies—with Bev Price, they had formed an all-women alpine team, tramping or taking on Mount Cook, Mount Ruapehu and Mount Tasman in the 1940s and ’50s.

  They talked about their friend. They said she attended Auckland Girls Grammar, became a teacher, and was head of languages—Latin, French—at Westlake High. She took early retirement after thirty years. It was at the end of her first year in retirement that she died on Erebus.

  They said, She was a very fine person. They said, She was unflappable. They said, She was by far the best climber of any of us. Three rules were set in place for their alpine walks. Anyone could stop for a photograph; there were no leaders; it was for fun. They said, We weren’t flying the feminist flag or anything.

  They said Bev was as strong as any man. They talked about her wiry frame, her amazing fitness—she also climbed with men, reaching the highest peak of Mount Cook (she climbed the mountain three times). She was once begged by a man in a search party on Ruapehu if she could please slow down: she was going too fast for him to catch up.

  Their alpine trips were during the Christmas holidays. They said, We did it on a shoestring. They took long-handled ice axes—the kind used as a guard of honour at Hillary’s funeral— ten-point crampons, ropes and woolly balaclavas. They ate dehydrated stew. They said, Oh, that was dreadful stuff, you had to soak it for a day to make it edible but it was still disgusting, oh my goodness yes.

  They belonged to the Alpine Sports Club. Yes of course, they said, Bev knew Ed Hillary—the first time she would have met him was in the summer of 1945 or 1946, in a hut on Mount Tasman. They said, He was a rather gangling young man, very good fun. The good humour went out of their voices when they talked about Bev’s Himalayan expedition with an all-women climbing team from India and New Zealand. Four climbers were killed in an avalanche.