Highway 85 is one of New Zealand’s great drives, nothing to look at but sky, hawk, rock, creek, tussock, and thistle and wildflower, and sunlight and shadow running their hands over the beautiful mountain ranges. It was a Central Otago pastoral, yellowish and empty, smooth and short-haired, good for sheep and bicycles. Driving was a waste of gas. All you needed was a sail on the roof. You could have cut the engine and merely steered off 85 to navigate the side road that leads to St Bathans.
The permanent residential population of St Bathans is seven. More than half the town had dinner together on a Saturday night when Grahame Sydney and his very young wife Heidi acted as hosts to Graye and Wendy Shattky, who walked from their house armed with a bottle of wine and a torch.
Jay and Jewell Cassells were also in attendance. They lived in Queens-town. Well, someone had to. Poet and golf caddy Brian Turner completed the line-up. He had thought he’d be busy caddying for Peter ‘Chookie’ Fowler at the New Zealand PGA at Clearwater. He said, ‘Chookie failed to make the cut.’ He had tucked his shirt into his pants. Jay said, ‘It looks as though you ironed that shirt.’ Brian said, ‘No, I drip-dried it.’
Heidi walked into the kitchen with a basket of vegetables from her garden. Grahame grappled with a champagne cork. There was a card on the bookshelf. It read: ‘Bryan Brown and Sam Neill invite you to partake in a beautiful, bewildering and astonishing event.’ The art on the walls included two of Grahame’s pencil drawings; the closest you could get to his celebrated landscape paintings of Central Otago was to look out the window at the wonderful view. ‘I’ve had to sell all my own paintings just to survive,’ he said. The cork popped open.
He moved into the house in 2003. ‘When I first came into Grahame’s life,’ Heidi said, ‘all his books were just lying on the floor.’ She argued for a bookcase; he wanted to keep the walls for art; she won. One entire shelf was stocked with books about the South Pole. Grahame has twice visited the white continent, is besotted with its look and shape and light and shadow – Central Otago is an Antarctica with vegetables in it, and marginally less wind.
Drinks were poured. Grahame got to work on his homemade pâté and Heidi prepared a toasted bread snack topped with grated zucchini, garlic, basil and lemon zest. ‘It’s out of an Annabel Langbein book,’ she said. It was early evening. The sky had softened, paled.
Heidi laid the table. The centrepiece was red roses and rowanberries. The drinks included a bottle of San Pellegrino sparkling water. Grahame said, ‘Where did that come from?’ Heidi said, ‘The fridge.’
The dinner party served a serious purpose: it was the gathering of the tribe. All were united by a common cause. All were devoted to a subject of consuming interest. They knew they had gained a reputation as dreadful bores, that friends were sometimes too afraid to phone for fear of an earbashing.
I took Jay and Graye aside and said, ‘So.’
‘Right,’ said Jay.
‘Okay,’ said Graye.
The tribe operated as Save Central Otago, a pressure group opposed to Meridian Energy’s two-billion-dollar Project Hayes scheme to vandalise the Lammermoor Ranges in the Maniototo with a wind farm. A very big wind farm: 176 turbines, white and whopping, chopping at the air to generate what Meridian claimed would be 630 megawatts of electricity, more than the Clyde Dam.
Jay said, ‘We’re fighting world-class spin. It’s formidably good. I give Meridian credit for that. They’ll tell you that wind turbines are green, use renewable energy, don’t burn fuel. And all that’s true. But what about the carbon footprint of producing these damned things and getting them there?’
Graye said, ‘You have to ask how this came about in the first place. The answer’s simple: Helen wanted it. Helen Clark, when she was prime minister, wanted to show that New Zealand led the world in renewable energy. Meridian said, ‘Well, Helen wants it; let’s do it.’ Then they told the public that wind farms would help solve the energy crisis, that they’d be efficient, and cheap. We’ve raised significant doubts about those claims.’
Jay said, ‘Our case has always only been about the landscape. That puts us in tree-hugging territory, doesn’t it? But we’ve always just stuck to explaining how valuable the landscape is.’
Graye said, ‘If this wind farm goes ahead, the landscape will be destroyed.’
Jay said, ‘Irreversibly. A wind farm – that’s such a bullshit term. Spin. Call it what it is. It’s an industrial estate.’
Heidi said, ‘Here’s another one. It’s turbine-ised.’
Grahame said, ‘That’s right, turbine-ised.’
Jay picked up a ukulele and plucked at it. Graye said, ‘Jay has provided us with strategic direction. We’ve been lucky to draw on his expertise as a former environmental lawyer.’ The group had also been able to draw on Graye’s expertise as a former SAS troop commander. He’d served in Vietnam, later gone private, and was now director of a security firm providing protection for oil companies and other multinational corporates in Iraq, Nigeria and Yugoslavia. Fit, alert, tidy in manner and dress, he gave only one hint of his military background. He asked, ‘What’s the latest information?’ The subject in question concerned what Heidi was cooking for dinner.
The tribe had taken their fight against Meridian to the Environment Court. They estimated that legal fees would be at least $150,000.
Graye said, ‘We didn’t bank on it being this expensive.’
Jay said, ‘I did. I knew from the start. It’s big, big litigation.’
From the kitchen, where she was washing prawns under a cold tap, Heidi said, ‘Grahame has lost six months’ income by devoting his time to this. It’s the same for all of us.’
‘Until we agree that the natural world is a community to which
