The past, mobilising in the dark, tapping his shoulder as he lay in bed – what was that about three wives? ‘I played up,’ he said. ‘If I couldn’t jump over the fence I’d crawl under it.’ There were dusty old black and white photos of him on the walls; he’d been a strapping young guy, with a barrel chest and a wide face. One big paw usually held an axe while the other curled around the shoulders of various lascivious broad-hipped women. I asked how many children he had. ‘I haven’t chased them through the gate to tally them,’ he said. ‘Oh hell, let me think. One, two, three … oooh hell … eight, nine…’ He wasn’t sure, but he thought there were fourteen.
Memories of pūhā and watercress, women and children – his life was passing before him. It was a good life. He knew the East Coast like a room, knew its valleys and skies, knew how many miles of fence lines he’d dug with his bulldozer, how many sheep he’d sheared on the board. He knew who he was. He knew his facts. But it was news to him when I told him he occupied a unique place in New Zealand fiction. He lived in the ruins of the Hicks Bay freezing works, the setting of David Ballantyne’s 1968 novel Sydney Bridge Upside Down, a masterpiece right from its opening sentence: ‘There was an old man who lived on the edge of the world…’
Travelling south on State Highway 35 on a Friday in late summer was lovely and empty, full of sea and sun. There was a chestnut mare in the playground of an abandoned school, a black bull in the shade of the only tree for miles, road signs advising WANDERING STOCK PHONE 0800 444449. A tattooed Māori man and his blonde 17-year-old girlfriend, who wore cut-off shorts and red nail polish, prepared to head for the hills, where they cultivated a dope plantation. Yellow cornfields peeled in the heat. Washing hung over fences.
In Hicks Bay no one was around, except for a girl smoking in the doorway of the store. Pears from an overhanging tree lay scattered in long grass and wasps crawled inside the white mushy flesh. ‘I haven’t been there since 1978, when Dad & Mum & my little son drove down to Wgtn via Dad’s landmarks in my car,’ Stephen Ballantyne wrote to me. ‘Dad showed us the shack where he lived. Looked like a big chicken coop.’
His dad David spent five years of his childhood in Hicks Bay, which he renamed and reimagined in Sydney Bridge Upside Down as Calliope Bay. It’s the only place name in the book: one of the small, crucial achievements of the novel is that there’s absolutely no reference to New Zealand. His book is set free, rids itself of New Zealand, and travels only in the mind of its protagonist, schoolboy Harry Baird, who tells of what happened at Calliope Bay one particular summer.
Another narrative of Hicks Bay is played out in the Papers Past archive, which records that the two most important subjects in the town’s history are death and meat. Newspaper report, August 12, 1897: ‘A Māori woman named Kamiera committed suicide at Hicks Bay by hanging herself to a tree.’ July 23, 1921: ‘J Lamb, aged 60, whilst working at Hicks Bay, met with a fatal accident, a large boulder rolling on him.’ Headline, December 16, 1919: PROPOSED FREEZING WORKS AT HICKS BAY. August 27, 1920: ‘Considerable damage was caused to the construction of the Hicks Bay freezing works when a fierce hurricane lasting over an hour was experienced at midnight.’ October 14, 1921: ‘The first shipment of meat from the new freezing works at Hicks Bay is being made by the steamer Kumara.’
All that red gold shining in the refrigerated holds, five slaughterhouses, an industrial revolution on the shores of the Pacific – all that promise and wealth to be delivered by meat. But the golden age was brief. Sheridan Gundry chronicles the rise and fall in Making a Killing: A history of the Gisborne–East Coast freezing works industry. She writes of the excitement and optimism as money was raised for the Hicks Bay meatworks; the problems with building a suitable wharf – the first attempt was battered by heavy seas and the pilings collapsed; the great Māori leader Āpirana Ngata naming the new wharf Hinemaurea after a great ancestress. The wharf had tram tracks, a locomotive. In the spirit of the times when New Zealanders gathered to celebrate the opening of an eyelid, it was opened ‘amid fanfare’ on April 14, 1925.
The meatworks closed down the next year. The business was no longer feasible and perhaps never really had been. Access to Hicks Bay was difficult, and the price for New Zealand meat had begun to plummet in 1921, the year the works opened. As Lance put it, ‘The guts fell out of it.’
The building was stripped of machinery, fittings, even the roof. It was already a ruin when David Ballantyne came to live in its shadow. The long summers of childhood, the crash of the ocean, the secret caves, the thrill and menace of the roofless crumbling meatworks – something took hold in his imagination, and was still there when he set to work on Sydney Bridge Upside Down, which he began writing in 1966 when he returned to New Zealand after working as a journalist in London.
Ballantyne was a drunk – the first thing he did when he got back to New Zealand was go on the piss – but he was also, for a time, in possession of genius. His friend Bryan Reid writes in his sympathetic biography After the Fireworks:
