Singing! Ballantyne himself said of Sydney Bridge Upside Down: ‘It was meant as a Gothic joke.’ Whatever that means. It’s a creepy, brooding, harrowing book, full of screams and scones, threat and sex. ‘Not a single thing in the novel is original,’ Patrick Evans marvels in The Penguin History of New Zealand Literature. ‘Least original of all is the novel’s sad, last-childhood-of-summer feeling, whose lamenting note sounds through so much New Zealand writing – but in Ballantyne’s hands everything is new and intense, made over as if being explored for the very first time.’
It’s a summer of sensual childish delight – the passionfruit vines choking everything in their path, the pots of rich sticky plum jam, the precious bottles of home-made ginger beer. Harry and his friends play in caves and on the wharf. Things only appear innocent. Things are not right. Harry’s neighbour makes one of the most dazzling speeches in New Zealand literature:
When people first came to Calliope Bay, what troubled them most was loneliness. I don’t mean the people in the very old days, the first one or two who farmed in the district before there was any sort of settlement. I mean those who came to build the works, then those who came because there were jobs for them at the works, then those … who came to help pull down the works. All these people were very lonely for a time. They seemed so far, far away from everything. No part of the country, of the world even, seems so far away as this. And when people are faraway and lonely they often behave curiously, this is well-known.
The speech is a warning. Calliope Bay is falling apart. There is a mysterious house without windows, also a broken-down windmill. Most potently and savagely, there are the ruins of the meatworks. Ballantyne sent the book in drafts to Frank Sargeson, who loved it, noting, ‘It’s a very brilliant idea using the meatworks ruin as a kind of Mrs Radcliffe’s castle.’
The meatworks is the star of the book, its metaphor of death. Harry plays in it and says, ‘You can imagine all the big killers busy with their knives. … Even now, when you walk across those concrete floors, you can imagine stains, and some days I’ve heard squeals and groans below me and I’ve thought this is not the wind I can hear.’
Death and sex and loneliness, distance, madness, cruelty, the slowly drained cargo of ginger beer – the whole book is an electrifying New Zealand classic, timeless. It doesn’t matter when it was written. When it was published in 1968, it sank like a rock. It was reissued in 2010 and sank like a rock all over again.
‘First I’ve heard of it,’ said Lance, the tenant of a metaphor. I wandered inside the ruins for those three days, happy and delighted to be there, a pilgrim on a literary pilgrimage. I wasn’t the first. Stephen Ballantyne told me, ‘James Ashcroft, artistic director of Taki Rua, went to Hicks Bay for his honeymoon last year for the same reason.’
Calliope Bay, Hicks Bay – it was all the same. There was the wharf, which appeared to have bullet holes in a sign reading HAZARDOUS AREA. WHARF COLLAPSE COULD ENDANGER USERS. VISITORS USE AT THEIR OWN RISK. The pilings looked as weak as twigs. I walked out to the edge, over the deep water where boats had once been filled with meat bound for England. Shags roosted in a tree hanging on to a cliff, and dived in the sea. A thunderstorm was approaching; violent waves pushed and jostled each other as they attacked the shore.
There were the remains of the tram tracks, and a long dark cave, possibly the one Ballantyne had Harry Baird play in. I crawled inside the dank cobwebby hole, touched the ferns that grew on the floor, and listened to the sea boom low and deep.
There was the bridge stained with blackberries, and the Wharekāhika River, which ran past the meatworks, took its blood out to sea.
And there, more than anything, looming over everything, were the ruins of the meatworks. They were immense. It was impossible to know what you were even looking at because there was so much going on – big fat black pigs snorting at your feet, chickens and roosters scratching in the dirt, a trailer full of pumpkins, and the sheer size of the ruins. Timber and machinery took up the ground floor. Lance had fashioned a kind of apartment on the first floor. It used to be the sorting room: he slept where the offal was stacked, bathed where the livers were separated, cooked where the lungs had stopped breathing.
There were rough strips of carpet on the concrete floor in the kitchen. The rooms went on and on – there were a couple of empty fridges and one with a flounder in it. Everywhere there were thick columns of reinforced concrete. The pillars and arches and high roof made the place feel like a castle, or some kind of demonic cathedral. But it was just Lance’s home.
He bought it in 1984 for $25,000. He’d been farming nearby on a 21-year lease from Māori Affairs. ‘I had to go somewhere when the lease ran out. I certainly wasn’t going into town. Luckily I heard about this place. I had a mate tell me about it. I thought, this’ll do me.
‘There’s 69 acres. I own the lot, right down to the beach. I cut it all up into seven paddocks, planted all the trees you can see. It was a total bloody shambles when I come here, but it didn’t worry me. I had all the know-how and gear to bloody knock it into shape. The other buggers that had
