PO Box 2 Blackball

This referendum is a conundrum. The existing flag is a colonial statement: the United Kingdom (Ireland, Scotland and England – not all that united in fact, with Ireland and Scotland both having suffered from English imperialism), sits in the blue Pacific with the characterising Southern Cross in the sky above. There’s no sign of the natives – they were being conquered. It was cobbled together for the Boer War, when colonial New Zealanders went to join the imperialist mother country in its fight again the Dutch (Afrikaner) imperialists.
And then, of course, in what is considered the founding moment of our nationhood, colonial New Zealanders died under the flag while joining the mother country’s fight against the Germans, Turks and whoever else, in what was a battle between national capitalists for colonial spoils (the colonies providing resources, markets and military bases). Some Maori decided to join in this madness, both to celebrate their warrior tradition and to prove themselves equal citizens.
Various sports teams won or lost, under the flag, and then we had WWII, resulting from the mess created by WWI, and once again, we (including Maori) joined the mother country. But this time, the coming imperial power, the US, entered the scene.
Edmund Hilary conquered Everest, some more sporting feats, and the colonial flag had acquired a history of representing a society which prided itself (wrongly) on being racially inclusive and (sometimes rightly) socially advanced. The Vietnam War, when we joined the new imperial master, saw some flag burning and then the UK headed toward Europe, cutting the previous close economic ties with the colonies. The Maori renaissance and the treaty claim process began, we became immersed in the Pacific Basin economically, the postmodern diversification of society occurred and the society which the flag represented has become frayed and faded.
But, as well, the very concept of nation and nationalism has become frayed and faded. With neoliberalism, characterised by free trade, globalised production and investment, the downgrading of national governance, and a mobile population, the nation becomes a cynical concept, something to be returned to when the multinational chips are down and you need a bale out. The TPPA seems the last nail in the coffin, although there are undoubtedly more nails to come. This cynicism is accompanied by ever louder spectacles involving ‘national’ sports teams (largely made up of mercenaries), world cups for this and that; national arts providers accompanying trade missions and so on.
The old flag is an archaism in this environment, an embarrassing nostalgia; so pragmatist and/or cynic, John Key, decides we should have a flag which represents – the above? And which also has some continuity with the original? In an age where history is not only bunk but has come to an end?
While I would like a flag which represents the complex passage of the two peoples intertwining (and I still believe we can feel proud of the treaty settlement process, of kura kaupapa, of Maori television and radio and so on – despite the failures of present and historical justice), the problem has been one of how to design such an image. Sadly, it has been a corporate process, a process of market research, so that the design on offer has the emptiness of the corporate logo, it has the shallowness of the globalised product, it lacks aroha or wairua.
It could be argued that it might acquire resonance as events get attached to it, but I doubt it. Wars are fought by mercenaries and drones nowadays. Sporting events are media spectacles. There were some beautiful designs submitted, but they didn’t make the cut (and for some reason the cut was made by a secretive committee) because they had the specialness of the art object.
A further contradiction: if the new design were chosen, the old flag will begin to have the status of the confederate flag in the US. People will stubbornly fly it because it symbolises an old social order (the town of Reefton suddenly had a rash of flag flying), and this will mean different things to different people. I would suspect even some Maori would fly it.
So, a dilemma, with no solution except to not vote. And that in itself is a dilemma; and why political indifference and disenchantment grow.

I was in Auckland recently, taking a workshop at Kotare School for Social Change. It was a stimulating weekend with good talk and a taking of the pulse of things politically.

Before coming home, I spent a night with Phill, my sculptor mate and he took me for a ride along the bike trail running alongside the North West Motorway, which is being linked to the motorway that comes from the airport – I think – the Auckland motorway system is getting pretty complex.

We paused to look at the construction of a complex flyover system. There were numerous people pedaling along, some fast, some slow, the cars were hurrying past on the motorway proper as Phill pointed out an amazing machine that squeezes out safety barrier like toothpaste. On two occasions we had to leave the cycle trail and cross a main road, always a terrifying moment for a rural idiot – a bike is a fragile machine, as is the human body.

A couple of days after I got home, my soul tender from threading my way through airports and shuttle services, I biked up to Roa with the dog before breakfast.

It was a pleasant morning, the sun slowly coming up, the dog  pausing to crap in some long grass – no leashes or doggie bags required, no fines… no people yet, just the specifics of plant, coal bearing rock, water and the steady, uphill push. Two kereru flapped up from the bracken and flew heavily into the bush-clad hills. Walter was still in bed, I surmised, as was Ralf. The sheep stared, then returned to nibbling.

There were an amazing number of webs attached to the grass. I paused and studied the miniature spiders running around, still encased, too young for the wild. The dog moved to a ditch and dunked her head and shoulders into the water, came up dripping, before running on, refreshed. On the right, next to a beech tree that stands proudly, as if a beacon, lay the paddock of sawdust from the old mill – rimu, good for the garden.

I pushed up the steep part of the hill to the old picturesque hut. Noel cuts the paddock with his weed eater ‘to make it look like a Constable,’ he told me. The creative impulse.

The few houses, in one of which lives a woman who keeps llama, are nestled in privacy. No coal trucks today. Anyway, Roa mine is closing. The end of an era.

I reached the top of the hill and turned. The dog, knowing the routine, had slyly remained at the bottom of the steep ascent. A first car, a ute, drove along slowly. Probably someone going hunting. We waved at each other. And then Tony appeared, on his morning walk. Human life was surfacing. Freewheeling down, the dog trailing behind, I began to weigh the advantages of living here as against living in Auckland. I can’t go to the theatre tonight, or have a range of movies to select from. I miss out on a variety of political meetings and events. But neither will I trudge along the Auckland waterfront with a gormless expression, searching for something to do (an image that stayed with me as I was coming into the city from Kotare.

Things are slower here, that’s for sure, although they still happen. The next night I would have a conversation in the pub with a young New York Jew studying mathematics, Russian parents, father now living in Israel… he’s a young man living in the heart of the beast (he’ll nod when I use that phrase). He will tell me about Makhno, the Ukranian anarchist who fought during the Russian revolution. The young New Yorker will tell me he’d like to live in Blackball, but I will suspect he never will.

So, one is not isolated, the dog is not on a leash, the spiders will come out of their web and do what spiders do, nor do I need a million dollars to have a roof over my head. Ultimately, it can often feel more sensible than the machine which can spew out concrete barriers like toothpaste.

Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist imprisoned under Mussolini, focused his work on the concept of hegemony, the web of consciousness which a ruling class imposes upon society. It includes values, perceptions, world views, cultural norms and formal ideological belief. These become to be considered ‘common sense’. In feudal times, hegemony was imposed through both physical oppression and religion, e.g. the belief in the divine right of kings. But in modern societies, with mass education and mass media, hegemony is created daily as an internal construct, without need of violence except in times of extremity. We get up and turn on the radio or television or google Stuff, buy a paper on the way to work, the ads line the roadside – on it goes through the day.
I am old enough to have experienced the creating of the neo-liberal hegemony and its underlying belief system: the market is advocate, judge and jury; the state is hopeless when it comes to running things (and therefore socialism was a disaster); everyone can achieve their goals if they set them; the rags to riches story is the only story; globalisation is good; every organisation must have its vision, mission, and its KPIs; human beings are genetically selfish and greedy; everything is a commodity and life is consumption; and there is no alternative. All of the above has achieved the status of ‘common sense’.
But are we, with the likes of Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders and the anti- austerity parties in Europe, seeing a rupture in the neo-liberal hegemony? Are we about to experience something equivalent to the 1960s rupture now known generally as the counter-cultural movement? Corbyn remarked that his supporters are either under thirty or over sixty; either those who can remember the time before and been suffering neo-liberalism as a worrisome lie, or disenchanted young people.
It is easy to see why the young are disenchanted: they have seen the financial system create a global crisis then get bailed out with tax payer money, they begin adult life in huge debt thanks to student loans(and there’s no bail out in sight), their jobs are precarious, home ownership (the previous hook into the capitalist system) recedes as a possibility, they view the obscene statistics (64 individual rich people owning more than the bottom half of the world’s population), they are under surveillance like never before, and the planet is going down the tube.
If someone with some mana comes along, even if an old man, and starts telling some simple truths: there should be free education and free health for all and the rich can pay for it/submarines costing billions of dollars and carrying nuclear weapons don’t protect anything… they listen.
Nevertheless, hegemonic change doesn’t occur without long and painful struggle –after all, the counter-culture did not ultimately succeed other than to gift organising methods to the struggles of identity politics. I was reminded of this at a recent town meeting to discuss how to take advantage of an economic opportunity. There were multiple strands of the neo-liberal hegemony evident: the small business mindset based on debt anxiety and a threatening world of competitors, the arrogance of the managerial, the confusion of ‘common sense’ from ‘the ordinary folk’. I suspect we have a way to go before a counter movement really takes hold. But at least there is hope, plus the awareness, that under modern conditions, where hegemony is internalised, change can happen remarkably quickly. If the internal belief system changes, the system is overthrown, often without particular violence.
NZ incorporated, run by accountants anxiously fiddling the books, muddles along at the bottom of the Pacific. Labour is faced with the contradiction that it has become detached from its traditional social class, but as well, that traditional social class, under the influence of the neo-liberal hegemony, has become fragmented and demoralised. But if the shit hits the fan, we’ll be another Ireland or Greece, ready for the rupture to occur.

I first met Evan Brown at a writers’ gathering in Nelson. There was an immediate rapport. I enjoy the intellectual sharpness of those brought up in the old Eastern European satellites, who while suffering the Russian-imposed ‘communism’, also lived, in Solzhenitsyn’s words, ‘socialist relations at the street level’. This elderly Hungarian, despite having been in exile for close to fifty years (escaping in 1956) retained that sharpness. After all, she had Lukacs as a lecturer at university. Her poems, written under the name Panni Palasti, were both well-made and unusual in content for a Nelson writer; for example, describing a child’s fascination with the beauty of a WW11 aerial battle, only to realise that one of the parachutes floating gently to the earth had a dead body attached.
We became writing buddies and she proved an astute editor. She brought a specially-composed poem to read at the opening of the Blackball Museum and started the boutique publishing company, Maitai River Press, which published a collection of her poems and a collection of my stories. But she quickly became frustrated with the publishing game, unwilling to devote her life to it.
Instead, fragments of a memoir of her childhood in Budapest began to arrive for comment, and I realised she had begun to research her family history. Writing challenges surfaced. She wanted to capture the child’s innocent eye, yet there was also the perspective of the seventy year old writer, and she wanted to include stories of research visits home. There was tension between the poet capturing a moment and the demands of prose for a more linear narrative. There were the skeletons in the family closet, including one at the heart of her own family, to be revealed or not? There was background material to be fitted in as necessary context. It became a complex task and one driven by a deep personal need, and something of a race against time. Eventually there was not much I could contribute. And then there was the unsuccessful search for a publisher, not surprising given the increasingly narrow range of the market: cooking, gardening, romance, crime, celebrity biography, recreation… that tends to be it.
I was glad to hear that she would publish it under Maitai River Press’s imprint, and the handsome book, Budapest Girl an immigrant confronts the past, by Panni Palasti, arrived as a Christmas present. Immediately I realised that publication gives an authority that the e-book lacks. It’s real, you can hold it and smell it; this work required that sense of authentication. And then reading through the work (some of the material I was familiar with) I understood that this was Eva’s whakapapa, her mihi, and that she had waited to the end of her life to compose it. The concept of whakapapa is complex, moving through waka, river, mountain, family lineage, to the gods, to the void (te po) in which, nevertheless, float the male and female spirits.
In Eva’s case we have the complex Hungarian story of tribal and feudal roots, the ease with which border towns changed nationality, some peasant origins, a Jewish atheist father, various scandals, some illegitimacy, and finally the war which saw the Hungarian government collaborating with Hitler, the Jewish pogrom which swept up her father and members of his family, and the eventual arrival of the Russians. A child sees and locked in subjectivity, doesn’t see – and for a good portion of this story, despite the need to be frugal, this child is pampered by parents and grandmothers, so can avoid the mess of the world. To counter this is the overarching consciousness of the writer, with her need to fill in the gaps. And then the unavoidable war arrives. Told in fragments of prose interspersed with poems and with many photos (her father the free-lance journalist was a compulsive picture taker), it becomes, like all mihi, a treasure.
In this time of globalisation, with a large proportion of the world’s population living in exile, this book poses the problem of exile. I consciously chose not to live in exile. Chose is too strong a word. I had an intuitive need to – I won’t say ‘come home’ because I was unsure of ‘home’; but anyway I moved back to the country I was born in. Eva, after fifty years (most of her life) living away, had the need, as a writer, to go home. Perhaps, only by writing this whakapapa, can she fully claim the rest of her experience. This I took to be the sub text to one of the more striking poems in the book:
When I die
When I die
I’ll take with me every tune I’ve heard
Every embrace and every word
Every child I’ve held in my arms
And all the kisses given and taken
Sacred vows and false alarms
Passing passions
That feed an eternal flame
The fierce faith of youth
And what later came
Sweet forgiveness of blows
That missed their mark
And taught me about the shades of dark.

I’ll take reluctant winter sunsets
As they dissolve over the hills
The wistful tenderness of men
Too shy to ask
Candle-lit tables
Laden with manna and wine
I’ll take the whole show
Profane
Divine
It has been mine.

So, in a market of formulaic books, this one is as unique as a life. I suspect it will receive few reviews, would get lost at the Frankfurt Book Fair, nevertheless, it is there, it exists, it will find its readership. As I said, a taonga.

Some years ago, when I worked at the film unit and while researching a documentary on motorways, I read some work by sociologist and historian, Lewis Mumford. An image has stayed with me. Mumford compared the space shuttle with the pyramid. Both were amazing examples of technological ingenuity, but both, he argued, were elaborate tombs, at the centre of which are dead bodies. While the astronaut is not officially a corpse, he or she is, nevertheless, on life support.

Recently, I and a colleague, got an ambulance call in the middle of the night. Someone had fallen at home and pressed his medical alarm. These alarms are clever devices that an elderly or otherwise medically compromised person carries on their person. When they press the button it connects them to a centre which will in turn alert the ambulance service. We drove a considerable distance to find an elderly man who, while getting from his wheelchair into his bed, had fallen and couldn’t get up. It was a simple enough task to put him into bed and make sure he was okay.

Let me switch to a Pacific Island village. If the same event had occurred, a younger family member sleeping near the old man would’ve woken and fixed the problem in a minute or two and everyone gone back to sleep.

In our instance, a sophisticated digital system had contacted another sophisticated digital system which in turn aroused two people. These two people then had to log on to the system with usernames and passwords, checked a number of machines and driven a considerable distance,  helped by a navigation system operated via satellite, and solved an issue which, in the Pacific Island fale, had been sorted an hour ago. However, in our instance, an electronic form also had to be filled out, taking considerable time, which gathered some meta data, detailing the incident and deciding whether our response to the situation was compliant with protocol. This would be stored in the cloud for future auditing. Then we could drive home and go to bed. All this to pick up an elderly man and put him into bed.

it did seem that an extraordinarily complex system had been used, for what after all, was a simple problem, and one easily remedied; and that this complexity, if endlessly repeated, could become the equivalent of the pyramid, a wondrous tombstone, at the centre of which lies the corpse of Western rationality.

I came across an article in The Guardian: some researchers have found that the modern child is sadder and lonelier than children brought up before social media.
The image registered as correct, but why? My thoughts turned to the area of theatre studies called performance theory. A German sociologist, Ervin Goffman, in a book called The Performance of Self in Everyday Life, put forward the idea that social life can be examined from a theatrical perspective. We are all playing roles, with entrances and exits, settings and costumes, with scripts and so on. This idea was generalised into performance theory, that life is a series of performances. While the idea obviously suits consideration of the famous and celebrated, historical figures can be examined from within this framework, as can ordinary people.
The problem with the field is that it quickly becomes tautologous: if everything is a performance then everything is a performance…but there is no doubt that social media increases the level of, and universalises the performance. Via the media, we can be constantly performing ourselves. In the old days, one might be interviewed on radio or television every now and then, but now that can be as constant as the facebook post or the twitter feed.
I remain reluctant to immerse myself overly much in performance theory, because I find performance sacred. I respect the long rehearsal period followed by the liturgy of the public performance. Then it’s done and one returns to normal life with the feeling that one has accomplished something, even though it has now disappeared. That brief moment contains anxiety, energy, focus, requires trust in one’s fellow performers and at the same time one is essentially alone. And there is the communion with the audience or witness. This solitude yet togetherness has been called communitas, and is seen as the basis for community.
But if performance , via social media, becomes 24/7 and banal – ‘Here I am in my new pyjamas’, then the anxiety and aloneness of performance become dominant. If the events that can inform our lives, whether it be birth, love, illness, death, are immediately photographed and posted, colonised in a way, rather than met with awe, the hopelessness of addiction creeps in. And we know how untrustworthy the social media audience can be.
This, for me, is why kids are feeling sad and lonely.

I had a length session with a Quotable Values valuer on Friday. Our making of public noises led him to ringing and requesting a meeting. He was a pleasant enough, middle-aged bloke. ‘I’m just the messenger,’ he said when I compared him with Tom Shand, the minister who had closed the Blackball coal mine in 1964. As he explained the methodology (and I questioned him very thoroughly), it left me feeling exhausted. I suspect it would be the same if I had a session with a stockbroker or a currency trader. It is a methodology based on statistics: last twelve months of sale compared with the last QVs, seeing a trend, checking the trend against more historic sales and more recent sales, looking at similar areas, looking at the specific characteristics of each house (age, construction, section size and shape, notifiable improvements, presentation – at which point a subjectivity enters the scene), checking out the figure arrived at by dividing the QV by the floor area thus arriving at a value per square metre and judging its reasonableness. I am sure there are similar characteristics with stocks and shares.
Of course the market can be manipulated. Ten Blackball houses could be bought at above QV by an investor for two million dollars in order to lift the value of the town. If twenty other houses were surreptitiously bought by a subsidiary of the investor, then there could be a killing to be made.
In our case, he dropped the market value for improvements by $20,000 across the board, before making individual adjustments. Our 3 bedroom house, connected to national-standard sewerage, water, broadband and electricity supply, with garage, sheds, tunnel house and ¼ acre of land, is now worth less than a second hand campervan (or six funerals, or two expensive weddings, or if the NZ dollar moved by 1 cent against the US dollar and someone had seven million to play with – the same money could be made in a morning at no cost to the investor). This is obviously absurd, along with other absurdities: the subprime mortgage crisis leading to the Global Financial Crisis, considering SERCO as a contractor for CYFS, charter schools, subsidising sheep farms in Saudi Arabia, selling dairy farms to the Chinese, signing the TPPA for a possible small economic gain but giving up essential elements of sovereignty, allowing 300,000 children to live below the poverty line, everyone congregating in Auckland while rural areas are gutted – the list goes on.
The difficulty is confronting the psychotic flows of capital, which are not rational , yet are portrayed as rational. In fact, political discourse is largely about trying to justify the absurdities which arise. The psychotic creates a world based on his omnipotent desires, unmediated by others’ realities, no matter how harmful this world might be. Before neo-liberalism took hold, governance was at least partly based on people’s needs and rights: people need, and have the right to, an acceptable level of housing, food, heating, work, education, healthcare, recreation, transport for essential movements and were provided for in old age or when otherwise unable to work. These can be sensibly measured. Desire is left to energise human relationships, dreams and extravagances.
But now, value is a measure of the benefit provided by a good and service to an economic agent. What is the maximum amount of money a person will pay for the good and service, the purchase of which will mean the person has to give up something else. Desire creeps into every provision of need, advertising hypes up the benefit and increases the level of desire, and the availability of credit hikes up the amount of money available. As a consequence we have the spreading contagion of consumerism and commodification. When I was a child, most people bought or built a house to live in. They wanted the value to keep pace with inflation. There were no obvious investors and you passed on some of the value acquired over a lifetime to your kids when you died. It worked well, although it could lead to post-funeral family squabbles. And the mortgage could be paid from one wage. At times, things could be tough, for example, during a strike, leading some to link home ownership to a more compliant workforce. But now, this private capitalism has gone crazy.
Last year’s Kiwi/Possum community-based theatre production was called A Brief History of Madness. I based the script on Foucault’s Madness and Civilisation, in which he looks at the status and treatment of madness in different historical periods. We narrowed it down to two periods: Seaview Asylum in the 1930s compared to now, when Social Impact Bonds are being trialled (investors investing in the outcomes of programmes to treat mental dysfunction – a truly insane concept). I wondered about the audience interest in this subject matter. It proved, in fact, the most popular of our plays to date. Why? Certainly because everyone is vulnerable to mental illness, but perhaps, more compellingly, because, as this valuation episode reveals, we live in a mad system.

I go on a biking holiday every summer. Physically, it’s like servicing a car: the oil and filters get changed, and the belts and tires checked. A wise thing to do at my age. As well, time slows down, one learns to be patient and not assume the end is in sight. Sixty to ninety kilometres a day is reasonable. The only horror is a head wind or howling rain. But there is something wonderful knowing you have all you need on the bicycle: tent, sleeping bag, pots and pans, stove and food and you provide the power. I always think of the North Vietnamese army defeating the US by using the humble bicycle as their means of transport.
Family were coming for Christmas so I decided to do my trip in December and I had had the idea of biking from Blackball to Christchurch for a couple of years. The Lewis Pass seems less extreme than Arthur’s, even though longer. Passing through somewhat tedious if nevertheless very lush, dairy country, I stayed with the Bollingers in Blacks Point the first night, enjoying a time with old friends and learning about the ex- gold mining village as Helen took me for a stroll. It is of course a Bollinger turangawaewae. Now the museum is something of a template for a small local museum, attracting a dozen coaches a year, with the passengers having afternoon tea in people’s houses afterwards.
The next morning I left early and the long haul to Springs Junction through beech forest wasn’t too taxing. The rain held off and it was cool. I stopped for a pie and tea at the café, now run by an Indian (or are they Bangladeshi?) family. The only other guests were a couple of solitary, melancholy old Kiwi men sitting by themselves. It begins to be a phenomenon, these retirees on the road. On to Maruia Springs, a pleasant uphill stretch along the river and I decided to continue over the pass. I paused at the springs and had a cup of miso soup, which was remarkably invigorating. A couple of professional men sat at a table, and I observed middle class travellers ‘owning’ a place, a certain tilt of the head, a body swagger, colonists at heart. Mid-afternoon by now and drizzly as I began the long climb to the top of the pass, walking some, biking some, the occasional slip in evidence, the river now far, far below, a mere thread. It was amazing how that flow of water had carved out this huge valley. I was in touch with geological time. By the time I reached the summit, the rain still holding off, I realised this passing through the alps, this passing from one side of the island to the other, was an event, as it must have been in the old days, before technology dominated. The Maori also had to find their food on the way. As if to confirm that a ritual had taken place, after a brief downhill run a godly gust of wind picked me up, bike and all, and blew me across the road. If a car had of been coming… I cursed and felt like King Lear, but soon a DOC campsite turned up, full of sand flies and it was by now seriously raining. But I had crossed to the other side.
Next morning the rain had stopped but it was seriously cold as I packed the wet tent and headed off, once more the road following the swift river, having to pause to put my hands in plastic bags to ward off the chill. It was downhill for a good stretch, but the sun took forever to rise above the hill line and warm the landscape. I stopped at a bridge which had attracted the freedom camper, cars hidden away in bushes, young couples rising late and cleaning their teeth with the diligence of their generation. Then I was disappointingly faced with some steep saddles. I was still tired from the day before and had to resort to walking uphill stretches. But it was good to pause and survey the grandness of the Waimakariri River and get used to the dry, treeless landscape of the East Coast.
Eventually, Hanmer junction arrived. It was still thirty kilometres to Culverden, and I simply had to tell myself, It’ll just take a couple of hours. By now, the thoughts had begun to flow and I had the next play in mind – a verbatim piece on Love/Romance and West Coasters; part of the cultural change programme.
With Culverden, Canterbury really begins and I suspected a certain red-neckery when I ventured into the pub to be greeted by hard-eyed stares from a beery group of farm contractors. I chose a milkshake instead, a Malaysian family this time, and found the community campsite after purchasing a key to facilities at the local service station. Culverden is obviously a strange mix of local and tourist. It was hot and after putting up my tent near a gymkhana field I experienced the bliss of a shower and a lie-down on a sofa in the kitchen. I had the campsite to myself. A woman arrived in a car, let out her dog, which wandered a little way while the woman stayed in her car. Eventually she called the dog and drove off. A strange exercise routine? That evening I treated myself to a pizza in a café
Fit by now and mainly travelling gently downhill, the ride to Amberley was exhilirating, except turning onto State Highway 1 was like entering a war zone. The noise of the cars and trucks, the speed, the violence of the whole thing was overwhelming. With relief I entered this now commuter suburb of Christchurch (‘going ahead’ as my parents would have said), paused at the well-attended farmers’ market for a bite to eat, thought about continuing to Christchurch but decided to stay at Amberley Beach, a mere 5 k down the road past burgeoning subdivisions.
I set up tent by a picnic table in the campsite before an old four wheel drive rushed in and stopped angrily by the table. A pudgy, unshaven, overweight man got out, took out a small stove and pot, put it on the table and lit the stove. He filled the pan from a nearby tap and proceeded to grumpily make himself a cup of coffee. I realised I had inadvertently taken his spot. I stood watching and he eventually nodded. ‘Where you come from?’ I told him. ‘I wouldn’t mind a bike,’ he said. ‘This car costs a fortune. Five thousand a year. Costs me twenty dollars to go to Rangiora and back.’ I asked him if he worked around here. ‘Want to, but the medication I’m on, means I can’t.’ He lived in the campsite. Must have a tent in his car I surmised. Why then had he taken it down? Presumably to avoid being kicked out. ‘I should never have come back from Aussie,’ he said. ‘Had it good there. Berry picking in Victoria. Dunno why I came back.’ He didn’t have any children, but lots of nieces and nephews up north. ‘Beautiful,’ he said. ‘Don’t get it from my side of the family.’ He stirred his coffee. ‘You like the South Island?’ I nodded. ‘Not a lot of Maori here though. Not like up north.’ Perhaps he was part Maori? He told me the Council had dumped a lot of gravel along the beach in case of a tsunami and that if you go fishing you mainly catch shark. I decided to shift my tent and he didn’t protest. At the new spot I could hear an irrigator ticking away as it processed slowly down a very dry paddock.
I went for a walk and as he said, the beach had a ridge of gravel along the edge of it and a sign advising people what to do in the event of a tsunami. For some reason it was considered a major threat at Amberley Beach. The water was a beautiful turquoise, and a number of elderly couples sat at picnic tables, staring into space. The noise of a party came from one of the beach houses. Two others were veritable dumpsites, full of old washing machines, lawn mowers and the like. As I went back to my tent, the man sat in his car listening to the radio. What a miserable life he must lead. I wondered how much of this sort of homelessness existed nationwide.
Next morning a wet southerly took me past the flash vineyards, through the suburban kitsch of Kaiapoi, past the concrete plants and the machinery suppliers and kitset home makers, before Belfast arrived. Processing through the city proved the most dangerous part of the journey. The laden bike easily overbalanced when not vertical and clip-ons are not ideal for city riding.
All in all, urban civilisation was feeling pretty uncivilised in many respects, but the ritual crossing had been completed.