But was life in Australia heaps better than in New Zealand, as people sometimes said? He said, ‘Yeah, nah, to be honest I couldn’t wait to be home. I partied hard and had a lot of fun but the food’s better here. Way better.’
Like what?
‘Mutton,’ he said.
He hadn’t found work since he returned to Whakarewarewa. ‘Still looking, but there are no jobs in Rotorua.’ So what did he do with himself? ‘Just stick around the village,’ he said. ‘It’s my home, eh bro.’ Some of his relatives were buried on the side of the path that ran through Whaka: I noticed the name ‘Heretaunga’ on a number of the tombs next to the pretty Church of the Immaculate Conception.
Further up the path were large monuments to that wandering bankrupt who deserted his children, William Francis Te Aonui Dennan, and his widow, Rangitiaria Dennan, Guide Rangi. There was also a wordy, windy memorial to Maggie Papakura. It stuck to the old false European narrative of the arrival of the Māori in New Zealand. ‘A chieftainess, the first-born of the eldest line of the noble and sacred ancestors. Related to seven of the eight canoes which arrived here about 1350, and from which all Māori tribes in New Zealand are descended…’
But what to make of Jim Dennan, the Māori chief who arrived in 1992? I asked him, ‘When you first saw Whaka, did you actually want to live here?’ But I’d asked the wrong question, missed the point. It wasn’t about wanting, it was about what he thought he was entitled to. ‘I wasn’t allowed in the village until my seventieth birthday. The day I was allowed in we had a chief’s welcome on the bloody marae and all that crap. You know, big fuss, big birthday party, and everybody made me welcome.’
I asked him, ‘Well, now that you’re in, do you enjoy living in Whaka?’ He answered, ‘Very much. I enjoy the tourists, especially the English.’ He didn’t socialise much with the villagers. ‘I go down to the RSA sometimes.’ He didn’t share the public hot-spring baths: ‘No. Would you? You would? What, after 20 bloody people have gone in? Good luck to you. I wouldn’t.’
He was acting the full-time snob. He said, ‘The people here don’t like me because I say it straight.’ But there was a frailty about him, something vulnerable and anxious. He said about his life: ‘I’ve written it all down.’ He brought out a scrapbook. It was his illustrated memoir. There were snapshots, and a commentary written in blue pen. The many and varied business ventures, a busted marriage, ending up in Whakarewarewa selling second-hand wristwatches – it told the story of a self-unmade man.
I flipped backwards. There was a photo of a white Volkswagen van taken two years before he came to New Zealand. His caption: BUSINESS VENTURE (FAILED). ‘I had a smoke alarm business,’ he said, very nearly smiling, ‘but it failed when the van caught fire.’
There were more photos of vehicles. Caption of a picture of a yellow Leyland truck: FIRST TRUCK IN THE SAND AND GRAVEL VENTURE. Caption of a green Ford van: FIRST DAY ON THE THRAPSTON LAYBY. See damp Thrapston and die; the van was his mobile snack bar, selling hot dogs and other merriments wrapped in fat.
On the same page, the narrative of his life included this remark: ‘Shirley got a job in refrigeration and soon found a “boyfriend”.’ Who was Shirley, and what was with the sardonic inverted commas? There she was, a few years earlier and a few pages back, a lively, bright-faced brunette posing with a hail and hearty Jim behind a bar. The caption read THE MILTON ARMS, LUTON, WITH WIFE SHIRLEY 1968. He said, ‘Shirley fell out with Vic Roffe, one of our customers, and busted his glass in his face. He was very good about it, but we lost all our customers. Shirley’s why I’m living 13,000 miles away.’
There were photos of Jim in the war, and then photos of Jim as a pampered child of the gentry. There were photos of his two sisters and photos of his mother. Jim’s comments read: ‘I remember spending our days with a governess. … Prep school. … Mother died in Radcliffe Infirmary on February 16, 1932. It was Barbara’s birthday. The party was held in mother’s bedroom.’ One of his sisters had added her comments: ‘I was awakened by father at two a.m. and told mother was now with the angels. … I remained in bed for two weeks.’
The death of one parent, and the other parent abandoning his children to remarry and live in a strange house in an amazing village on the other side of the world… Te Aonui Dennan died in 1942, but the way Jim told it he didn’t even know for four years. ‘It was after the war, 1946, when I got a letter and some bits of paper to say my father had died.’ The papers were on behalf of Guide Rangi, asking Jim to sign documents that would give her the right to live in the whare. He said, ‘In those far-off happy days I believed that marriage was due to all the good things of love and passion and all that crap, so I thought I’d better give her a hand. I signed a paper saying she could have the use of our land for her lifetime. That’s what I thought I was doing, but I wasn’t. I’d gifted the land to her.’
I flipped the pages of his memoir until I got to the beginning, where there was a faded photo of a serious little boy perched on a tricycle in 1925. The three-year-old from Oddington Grange in Oxfordshire had the same round anxious face as the man who was a year away from turning 90 in the whare in Whakarewarewa. I closed the scrapbook. His life
