We were drinking tea in the kitchen. Lance said, ‘I bet you’d like to go up on the roof, wouldn’t you, boy.’ Boy, 51, followed him to a wall where he’d stacked chairs, cupboards and various other pieces of furniture to form a ladder. At the top a manhole led to the top floor of the meatworks; just the walls were left, and gaping holes where the windows had been.
‘There was so much bloody rubbish growing up here,’ he said. ‘Trees growing out of the bloody roof! And bloody cannabis. It took me a bloody week to clear all this bloody stuff off. I brought a wheelbarrow and a shovel up here, filled it with load after load, and then I dug a big hole with the excavator and buried the lot.’
There were lids on the chutes where the big killers with knives used to dispose of offal. There were runnels for blood. Lance had put in a chimney, and a tank for his spring water. ‘Here,’ he said, and passed the hose over. It was possibly the best water in New Zealand. ‘You might be right about that, boy,’ he said, ‘and it’s been flowing like that since the day I put it in. Seven hundred and fifty bloody gallons in 24 hours, just from that constant trickle.’ He pointed to the spur of rock across the road. ‘That’s where the spring is. I dug the pipe two feet deep. Did it all with a bloody pick and spade.’
There was the river, the beach, the wharf. We looked out over the paddocks. ‘All that was bloody swamp and bog. The bloody mosquitoes would carry you out of bed, that’s how bad it was. But I’ll tell you something, boy. I’m not frightened of work. I worked like a dog on every place. I worked like a dog on the shearing boards. I worked like a dog in the freezing works.’
The sun was high and warm as we stood together in the open air. Lance pointed to the ground we were standing on and said, ‘Here’s where the killing was done.’
Lance asked if I’d ever gone inside a meatworks. I told him about the time I went to the grassy Taranaki town of Eltham. The great warrior Tītokowaru passed through Eltham in 1869 and boasted, ‘I have begun to eat the flesh of the white man. I have eaten him like the flesh of the cow.’ It wouldn’t have tasted half as good as the flesh of the cattle slaughtered at the Riverlands freezing works, which produces top-quality export beef.
I arrived on a morning in autumn. There were stretched cowhides on the walls in reception. Trucks and trailers pulled up in the yard; cattle were led out and hosed down. Inside the works, among the staff of 540 in white overalls and gumboots that had begun the day spotless but were now more red than white, I watched a cattle beast released into a narrow pen. A metal clamp seized its head. An electric plate rose up and delivered a short sharp volt. The beast collapsed; a door opened; the beast rolled through on its side and a halal slaughterman from Morocco slit its throat.
First to go were its front hooves. A giant pair of scissors broke through the bone. A hook then hoisted the two-footed corpse in the air from its hind hoof. The skin was pulled off its face and the entire hide stripped – Riverlands has a contract to supply Air New Zealand with leather for seats in business class. The head was cut off.
The foreman charged on with his tour. He’d seen it a thousand times before, and that was only yesterday: Riverlands had the capacity to butcher 1,250 cattle per day. ‘There’s our lung room,’ the foreman said. And: ‘This is the large intestine turned inside out. It goes to Korea.’ Also: ‘This is what we call the jawbreaker. He takes the jaw out, and makes it easier to get meat out of the head.’
There were tables piled high with tongues, kidneys and hearts. There were red offal and green offal. There were the cattle beast’s four stomachs – the third is called the bible, because its flesh ripples like the pages of a book. And there, too, were first-class and delicious steaks, which I ate for lunch in the Riverlands’ boardroom.
It was a memorable day. But it was even more vivid standing on top of the ruins at Hicks Bay and watching Lance re-enact where the killing was done. ‘There was a ramp just there,’ he said, pointing to the edge of the killing floor. ‘They’d bring the sheep up it. So what happens is, when you catch your sheep you dump it down against the pole there, and you grab its bloody head and pull it back and cut his throat with your bloody knee down on his head.
‘As soon as you’ve done that one, you get the next one, and put it up hard against the first sheep you’ve killed. But you can cut the head clean off if you pull the knife too hard. That’s a bugger. You want the head on so you can put the boot down on it and pull out the brisket. That’s one of the tricks of the trade, you see.
‘So after you’ve cut its throat you leg it up. You take the trotters off and hang it up on the hook and you pelt it off, and after you pelt it off you gut it out, and there’s the finished product…’
All the while he was moving along the rooftop, a small and nimble old buzzard in his gumboots and ripped jersey and black neck, miming the slit of a throat and the pulling out of a brisket – he was bringing the dead back to
