He was infamous for his protest in December 2008 against the launch of a 1.5-million-dollar tourist houseboat, Discovery 1, at Mercer. He said the owners had failed to consult his iwi, Ngāti Naho. Joe and ‘several accomplices’, according to the Waikato Times, pitched a tent on the riverbank directly in front of the boat’s path. This caused great embarrassment to Tainui elders, who were on hand to bless the boat. The owners waited until the tent was packed up, and launched Discovery 1 a few days later.
Drinkers at the Last Post said, ‘Watch him. He’s full of bullshit.’ But he had charm, humour, eloquence, and possibly even a point. On the tremendously pompous website of the Ngāti Naho Iwi Development Trust Board, where he is referred to as ‘hereditary chief, by right of whakapapa and forum votes’, he lists the trust’s aims and objectives. They include honourable intentions – ‘To assist whānau in hardship … To encourage education’ – but also: ‘To apply for funds … To seek, accept and receive any donations.’ Joe refused to be interviewed or photographed. His visitors, he said, needed to have a complete understanding of Māori history in Mercer, or Te Paina, as Māori called the place. He said he had come from a tangi and needed silence to restore his soul. His soul seemed to be flexible, because he then said he would talk for money.
About 30 or 40 minutes passed in this manner. He was good company, but it was so cold standing outside on his peculiar estate, even though the fog had rolled away. He said, ‘What’s the time?’ It was getting on to two. He said, ‘The fog’ll come back at half-past four.’ He was right. It was so thick that the only way of seeing the river was to stand at its edge. As soon as you took a step backwards, it had gone.
Winton
The Goodness of Swedes
Graeme Ingils advertised himself as the strangest man in the Southland town of Winton, pop. 2,700. He had painted enormous and very angry signs on the front and side of his battered wooden house. They made for interesting reading in the otherwise perfectly normal country town. Here, near the bottom of New Zealand, a 20-minute drive to the last petrol station in the South Seas, was anarchy and a lot of paint. I walked across the road from my room in the Paramount Motel to speak to the author.
A head poked around the corner of his house and shouted, ‘Shut up!’ His two lanky English pointers barked at the high metal front gate. The head disappeared, the dogs kept barking, and then Graeme emerged from the front door. He was small and hairy and his eyes weren’t right. I shouted, ‘I’m interested in the signs!’ A smile showed through his close grey beard.
He opened the door of one of seven car wrecks that didn’t keep down the weeds in his yard, and ordered the dogs inside. They lay down on the back seat. He said, ‘Shut up!’ They stopped barking. He approached the gate, folded his arms and said, ‘Well, I had a head injury in 1986.’ This signalled the beginning of an ancient mariner’s tale. Before he got any further I said, ‘Are we going to stand here and talk at the gate, or do you think I could come in?’ He apologised for his manners and opened the gate. It was tied together with rope. Graeme had the look of a man who was falling apart at the seams.
The wealth of Winton gloated beyond the front and back of his rotting house. His hopelessly overgrown backyard looked over the yards of the town’s biggest employer, the sawmill, which smoked day and night, while the greatest prosperity sailed past his front gates – Fonterra milk tankers, their precious cargo sloshing back and forth, pouring money all over Southland.
Graeme had nothing. He was on a sickness benefit. We sat down by the front steps. ‘I can’t invite you inside,’ he said. ‘It’s filthy.’ The front steps were filthy. Graeme was filthy. Two dead motor mowers, one on top of the other, were heaped in a corner of the filthy porch.
The city of Invercargill was only 30 kilometres south on State Highway 96. Guests at the Paramount Motel were just across the road, reading terrible novels and smoking in the sunshine outside their rooms. It all felt a long way away; it was like looking back at childhood.
I was in shadows. Graeme relented and said, ‘Okay, come inside.’ I wished I hadn’t insisted.
The air was fresh and clean at Winton’s most famous addition to New Zealand history, the cemetery, where a headstone marks the death of Minnie Dean. The only woman to be hanged in New Zealand lived at ‘The Larches’ at the north end of town. The bodies of two children and a child’s skeleton were discovered on her 22-acre property after police dug up a freshly laid flower bed. Dean, the so-called ‘baby farmer’ who took in illegitimate children for a fee, was hanged on the morning of Monday, August 12, 1895, at Invercargill gaol. She had woken at four and requested her last meal: a nice hot cup of tea.
The Press Association reported: ‘Hundreds of people assembled outside the gaol, and stopped three hours without breakfast. … During the execution, a boy fell from the roof of a building on to the ground, a distance of 30 feet, fracturing his skull.’ Dean was hanged at eight. Her body travelled by train to Winton. Her husband Charles – ‘feckless and dull of intellect’ a typically balanced report described him – picked her up on his horse and dray. On the way home he stopped in at Top Pub for a drink.
It
