His name was Jim Dennan and he was eighty-eight. He had lost the hair on his head and he moved slowly, creakingly, on his two new knees. He was large, fleshy, pale. The immediate and dominant thing about him was his sardonic nature. Resentment kept him alert, smoothed his skin; he had quite a youthful face and he didn’t waste unnecessary energy on smiling.
He was true to himself, but who was he? It was bewildering to place him in Whakarewarewa: an aged sardonic Englishman who spoke in a fairly posh accent, living by himself in a dark timber home with exquisite Māori panelling.
He said, ‘You don’t know much about me, do you?’ That wasn’t true. I didn’t know a single thing about him. And so he revealed an epic family saga. I had come in at the end, and found an exile from Oxfordshire living in a beautifully carved whare in Whakarewarewa.
You could see the whare as you entered the village. It was up on a hill. It looked like an abandoned meeting house; there was a beat-up couch on the floorboards of the front porch. If you squinted, it looked haunted. Jim Dennan was its ghost.
It had been built in 1909 for Maggie Papakura, high-born descendant of Te Arawa chiefs, subject of documentaries and biographies, one of the great beauties of her age, intelligent, entrepreneurial, independent, a celebrated guide at Whakarewarewa who left New Zealand in 1912 to marry a wealthy English landowner and live in his stately home, Oddington Grange, in Oxfordshire. She is buried there. She was Jim’s grandmother.
This partly explained the presence of her unlikely mokopuna, the only son of her only child, in the whare in Whakarewarewa. But there was more to the family saga, other crucial subplots. Jim’s mother died when he was a child; his father was made bankrupt, had to sell the Oddington manor, shooed Jim and his sisters away to live with relatives in England, and returned by himself to Whakarewarewa, where he married the legendary Guide Rangi. When Jim’s father died, Guide Rangi inherited the whare. Guide Rangi, Guide Maggie – during their lifetimes, they were among the most famous Māori in the world. Jim was a unique link to the two women, the two celebrities.
And here he was, living in obscurity, off his wits. He had a souvenir shop in the village; it sold his paintings and carvings, and a selection of second-hand wristwatches. The shop was merely his latest business venture. ‘You name it, I’ve done it,’ he said. ‘You give me a foolscap sheet of paper and I’ll write down a different job on every line.’ He looked around for a foolscap sheet of paper, gave up and sighed heavily. ‘Chaos.’ He sat there, resentful and posh, in the dark gloomy whare with his shirts hung over the frame of his single bed. But why was he here? It was the classic New Zealand answer: land.
In 1992, he said, he was sorting through family papers, read about the whare where his father, stepmother and grandmother had lived in Whakarewarewa, and decided to come out to New Zealand for a visit. He popped into the village and made himself known. ‘And that was when I was told, “Well, it’s all yours. Why don’t you come and live here?” So I thought, “Well, I’ve had a bloody good time in NZ for two months so I will.”
‘It took three years to get passport and citizenship papers. In the meantime they were writing to me – I’ve letters saying, “Hurry on back, we’re waiting for you” and all this crap. So I arrive back in 1995 and they say, “It’s not yours. It’s ours.”’
Eventually ‘they’ let him live in the whare. ‘But I don’t own it. I don’t own a blade of grass in Whaka. Not a single blade of grass.’
It was the cause of his bitterness. I asked whether he was regarded with the respect due him as Rangi’s stepson and Maggie’s grandson. He said, ‘Well, I am a chief when all’s said and done. They tolerate me in that sense. But I don’t walk around with a feather stuck out of my head and all that sort of crap.
‘I was brought up in Pākehā land and consequently I think Pākehā. But when you try and put Pākehā thoughts into people’s heads here they don’t want to know, do they. They say, “We want to do it the Māori way.” Well, the Māori way is hold your hand out and get some free money and don’t do any work.’
Earlier in the day, I had talked to Dardin Heretaunga, a strong, solidly built 36-year-old who lived a few doors down. He wore black jeans and a black T-shirt. ‘Yeah, heavy metal, that’s right, bro,’ he said. ‘Iron Maiden, Black Sabbath, a bit of Floyd…’ We sat on his porch. The lawn had dried up because of the geothermal heat beneath the topsoil. He said he was unemployed.
‘I was in the bush for a little while, eh. Logging. Silviculture. But I got out of there and started working on my uncle’s dairy farm.’ He said the word ‘uncle’ a few other times, and always pronounced it ‘oncle’. He continued, ‘Then I was in a relationship for three years, but that… Anyway, I went to Sydney and got a job as an autoglazer.’
I asked whether wages in Australia really were heaps better than
