I was exhausted. Ike made introductions then left on some fresh mission. Inside, the caravan was very tidy, and also very narrow. The couple’s very old dog Sooty lay on the floor. It didn’t look as if he were ever going to get up. He was more like a species of rug than a dog.
It was good to get out of the lousy weather and sit in the caravan. ‘Some people says it’s an eyesore,’ said Ata. ‘They’ve tried to kick me out. Well, how come all the tourists come to photograph my pretty place? But it’s hard being stuck in here sometimes. We don’t have no car. No toilet. We do a mimi in a bucket, and go to a cousin’s house for the other.’
Her living conditions were somewhere around the halfway mark between Third World and First, more or less as primitive as when Ōhinemutu was settled. Strange to imagine the village in an earlier century, because it would have looked much the same: the moonlight glowing the same way on the surface of Lake Rotorua, the mist rising the same way out of the Earth’s crust.
Army officer Herbert Read described Ōhinemutu in 1825 in his racily titled memoir, A Ride through the Disturbed Districts of New Zealand: ‘In an open space in the middle of the settlement stone flags have been laid down, which receive and retain the heat of the ground in which they are sunk. This is the favourite lounge, and here at any hour of the day, but especially when the shades of evening are closing round, all the rank and fashion of Ōhinemutu may be seen wrapped in their blankets, luxuriously reclining on the warm stones.’
Steam is the constant fact of Ōhinemutu life. The modern trimmings as enjoyed by Ata and Nathan were beer, smokes and WINZ. Nathan said he got about $180 a week on the dole. He spoke in a thin quiet voice, as though he wasn’t used to forming words out loud. He said about the dole, ‘By the time you pay your bills and that, it’s bugger all.’
Ata laughed and said, ‘What bills? Stop lying! We don’t get bills, darling. We’ve only got one bill and that costs us $50 a week.’
Nathan said, ‘Yeah, that’s what I mean.’
Ata said, ‘And that’s for our cabin. But we’re gonna… we’re trying to set ourselves up, ’cos I wanna get rid of it. Our friend – I’ve got this friend – is looking to find me a cottage. He’s a demolition man. He knows what I like. He can pick one up that no one wants and put it beside the caravan. And then I can get rid of the cabin and pay him the $50 a week.
‘I tell you, man, I wouldn’t mind a bloody two-storey home. But hey, that’s just a dream. We gotta get real. You know. But hey, we’re happy with what we’ve got anyway. We don’t sit here and wish for anything more. Eh. I say to my tane, “We be grateful for what we’ve got, darling.”’
‘What we’ve got,’ repeated Nathan. ‘Yeah.’
‘And don’t think, eh, we need this and we need that ’cos we don’t,’ said Ata. ‘’Cos we got it all. We got a lot more than anybody else. Some of them out there are homeless, eh. But we’re happy. We never starve. And Ōhinemutu is full of life, tangis going 24/7.
‘You know, I’m in paradise, bro. I don’t even go to the city much. I can’t be bothered. If we want anything in town, my tane goes to get it.’ Her tane stared at the floor. ‘Plus,’ she said, ‘I caregive a house. I don’t just sit at home and drink all day; I drink on the job. And we always put in our ten cents worth of mahi at the marae. Do the cleaning, whatever. It’s only next door, and we’re doing jack. I take a can with me but I don’t advertise it. I’m discreet.’
From the big bay windows of the Lakeside, an old wooden shack posing as a pub directly above Ōhinemutu, I watched a young woman run out of the bathhouse with a towel wrapped around her, unlock her car and speed away. Three teenage boys lifted their bicycles on to the front wheel and rode through the village. Tourists with bare legs and backpacks pointed and recorded. The ground smoked.
The pub was large and semi-deserted. Two tough bastards with bruised faces – one Pākehā, one Māori: violence often attracts racial harmony in New Zealand – kept ducking outside to take some kind of drug and returning to lean against a wall, grunting and frowning, their eyes behind wraparound dark glasses. They must have been really stoned because on the jukebox they selected ‘Moonlighting’ by Leo Sayer. It blasted out at deafening volume.
I shared a table with a couple of old boys. We stood and drank in silence. We had no choice: it was impossible to talk. When the song finally finished, Henry Webber, 83, talked about the time the great Australian pool player Eddie Charlton walked into the Lakeside. ‘Must have been, oh, about five, six years ago. He was in his prime then. We played at that table just there. Just a frame. Eight-ball. It wasn’t a one-sided game, it was a close game. Very close. But I beat him.’
‘That’s right, he did!’ said Peter Garlick, seventy. Henry was dark, solid, stocky; Peter was pale and thin with slicked-back hair, and wore a pair of shiny silver polyester pants. He had turquoise eyes and a long nose that dipped into his glass. He stood in the doorway, hunched against the wind, lit a rolled-up cigarette, and took just two
