I asked whether this was a rural legend. ‘No, no. These friends of ours went fishing for trout at the Loganburn. One of them was – should I say who, Jay?’
Jay shook his head. Graye said, ‘Well, let’s just say he was a significant player in our enterprise. The others thought they should do the right thing and go the farmhouse and ask the farmer if it was okay to use his land. The farmer invited them in for a cup of tea. They glanced around and saw the dartboard with Grahame’s photo – and next to it a photo of the guy who I’m not going to name. They went outside and told him to lie low in the back of the car.’
Heidi said, ‘That’s how personal it’s got.’
Graye said, ‘That bitterness persists right now.’
Grahame said, ‘I’d go so far as to say they’ve been bought off.’
The first course arrived. It was a green salad with feta, stilton and pears. Heidi said, ‘You’re welcome to have some, Brian.’ The significant player in the Save Central Otago enterprise said, ‘No, thanks. I ate on the road. Cooked up half a tin of peas and a poached egg.’
There is an amusing, mistaken notion that Turner is a curmudgeon, an incurable pessimist, a grouch muttering into his beard, but he told long funny yarns and sometimes couldn’t talk for laughing. There were stories about rabbiting as a young man with his uncle Jack. Jack shot anything that moved. Once that included a car that wouldn’t let him pass – he drew level, fired a round from his side-by-side over the roof, and roared, ‘That’ll cramp your fucking style!’
The good old days. As a poet, and also as New Zealand’s best nature essayist, Turner has written firm lyrical lines about his love of the timeless land and his loathing of glibly defined progress. He said, ‘When I was a boy…’ He talked of wide open spaces, now despoiled. The 176 turbines would be 176 blots on the landscape, 176 obscenities, 176 insults that too many New Zealanders (‘peasants!’) took without flinching.
‘We have a duty to look after nature,’ he said. ‘This talk that Meridian’s scheme is in the “national interest” – I hate that term. I hate that cringing acquiescence people have to the “national interest”. What really pisses me off is that the attempt to sacrifice nature is beyond any so-called benefits.’
Dinner was served – a French-Vietnamese seafood bouillabaisse – with French and Central Otago wines. The conversation turned to the Blue Lake in St Bathans. Grahame said, ‘I tried to stop it from being motorised. Keep it quiet. Feel the serenity. I loathe jet skis. But I lost that fight.’
Then he talked about plans to dam the Clutha, and how they had to be opposed.
Graye said, ‘That’s not my fight.’
Grahame said, ‘How can you lie down and let that happen?’
And then he clenched his fists and seethed about his failed campaign to stop the introduction of a street light in St Bathans.
He was a strange fellow. His paintings and photography strongly suggested he possessed genius. Nothing in his art was ever out of place. The clipped voice with well-rounded vowels, the straight face, the deliberate movements – he was more military in his bearing than Graye. He spoke with such intense dogmatic fervour; he followed a path of moral certainties. Environmentalism seemed the least of his passions. It was as though he was ruled by fury. He’d once said that nuclear power was preferable to wind farms. Equally, though, there was nothing equivocal about his generosity. He was the kind of man who would think nothing of giving you the world.
The world was outside his front door – Rough Ridge, Old Woman Range, Hawkdun Range, Dunstan Peak. Above all, the highest peak, was Mount St Bathans, where ‘the wind shakes the sparse grasses / water runs, stones rattle unexpectedly / and the land speaks’, to borrow from Brian Turner in ‘Under Mt St Bathans’, a poem included in his collection of essays Into the Wider World. The book features his address to the Otago District Council in June 2007, when he presented his case against ‘Meridian’s application to build a giant windwhatever’. The speech is his magnum opus, ringing and defiant, tempered with grace notes: ‘Our economy should be required to serve the natural world, not the other way round. … This landscape, raw in winter, expansive, golden and rhythmic in summer … Our finest natural glories can’t take any more major assaults. … The tyranny of apathy … When I was a youngster in the 1950s…’
The wine flowed, and so did the Pernod. Dessert was a choice of chocolate gâteau or stewed stonefruit. Brian said, ‘I’ll have both.’ The table experienced a rare silence as dessertspoons were put to work.
Jewel said, ‘Beautiful, Heidi.’ Grahame liked the sound of that. He decided to improve it by getting rid of the comma. ‘Beautiful Heidi,’ he said. ‘That’s you. That’s what you are, my love. Beautiful Heidi.’
The next day I ran into Graye and we drove to the home he was building on the other side of Dunstan Creek. It was to be off the grid and rely on solar power, with a back-up generator. It had nice stone features made from rocks he and Wendy had pulled out of the creek. ‘And this room,’ he said, ‘will be for when the grandkids visit.’ The thought made him very happy.
He and Wendy were house-sitting a cottage in St Bathans owned by their friend and Save Central co-conspirator, All Black legend Anton
