And there, at the end of the line, was Tangimoana, pop. 290. It was sandy and there weren’t many streets. It smelled of pine needles and sea salt. A ginger cat stretched itself on a white windowsill; an old man stretched himself on a bicycle. There was one guest staying at the caravan park, an old divorcée with pleading eyes. There was one telephone box outside the town’s one store, the Country Shoppe, which had closed down.
A river-mouth town, a fishing village. The tide was unusually low that afternoon. It surprised the skipper of an aluminium boat tauntingly named No Worries. He’d got a good catch of gurnard, crossed the bar back into Tangimoana, but as the tide streamed out the motor wouldn’t catch, and the boat had to be roped and pulled back through mud to the boat ramp.
The light in the sky began to pale. The sand was sketched with driftwood, great crates of the stuff, lying white and sun-bleached, as smooth as bone. It was a classic west coast beach, with big rollers crashing on the shore and gouging out the dark sand. A family of three parked at the boat ramp. A little boy leaped out of the car, and immediately kicked and chased a rugby ball. His mother wore a T-shirt that read TWATZ UP DARTS. The surf’s muffled collapse, the warmth of the sun, No Worries… I drank in the sight of bar-tailed godwits legging it through the low tide and happily dozed off, resting my head on the sand.
A brief history of Tangimoana, part one:
March 15, 1965: A swordfish is washed ashore on the beach.
July 13, 1987: The decomposed body of a nineteen-year-old Massey University student is found in the dunes. It has been there for several weeks. ‘No suspicious circumstances,’ say police.
August 16, 1990: The decomposed body of a 30-year-old man from Bulls is found in the dunes. It has been there for four months. ‘No suspicious circumstances,’ say police.
October 25, 1993: Clothed in a bra, jeans and socks, the body of teenager Michelle Dermer is found in a Tangimoana swamp, eight weeks after she was last seen leaving a friend’s house to walk 100 metres to her home. ‘Suspicious circumstances,’ say police.
They interview several persons of interest, even her brother Jason, who is in prison serving a life sentence for killing a student and burying the body in a shallow grave in Lindis Pass. The cause of his sister’s death is ruled accidental.
January 13, 2010: A pilot whale is washed ashore on the beach.
The chronicle of death on the beach was courtesy of Ron Gardner, 81, the first person I talked to in Tangimoana. He was walking along the pavement. That sentence needs completing: he was walking along the pavement by himself. His wife Joan had died six months ago. ‘I’m just on my own now,’ he said. ‘The neighbours keep an eye on me. I got a pushbike. I try to keep fit.’
He was fit as a fiddle, slim, with a good straight back and working man’s hands, but he was lonely. In fact, his heart was broken. He lived life as a full-time widower. How was he coping? He said, ‘Not very good.’
We walked back around the corner to his house. ‘There’s Joan,’ he said. He pointed to a photo of her on the card prepared for her funeral. There were photos of Ron’s two brothers. ‘They’re both dead now. That one had his own fishing trawler. He picked up survivors off the Wahine in it.’
Ron and Joan had raised their family in Wellington. When Ron retired, he bought a caravan. ‘We went all over the place.’ Where to? ‘Well, we got as far as Foxton.’ He heard about a section further up the coast at Tangimoana and bought it that same day. There were two houses on it: a yellow stucco bach, which his son’s family sometimes stayed in, and his own modern home. He’d stacked firewood for winter. The contents of his fridge were milk, butter, eggs, three bottles of beer, and an enormous jar of mayonnaise.
He found Joan’s scrapbook of news clippings about Tangimoana. A friend had started it and later passed it on to Joan, who kept it up to date by snipping the few stories about Tangimoana from The Dominion and Manawatu Evening Standard. As well as reports about decomposing bodies, there were a lot of stories about the building that had made Tangimoana famous.
The US spy station had opened on August 18, 1982. Ron’s scrapbook contained numerous newspaper stories quoting government officials denying it was a US spy station. The denials kept coming, even after 1984, when peace campaigner Owen Wilkes revealed it was a US spy station. That same year Listener journalist David Young wrote, ‘It has a high-frequency, direction-finding (HF-DF) antenna array, which acts like a giant vacuum cleaner, identifying and sucking up radio communications traffic within 3,000 kilometres.’
No it hasn’t, responded government officials, somehow keeping a straight face. It was an X-file played out as pure farce. For years, the worst-kept secret in New Zealand was the existence and operation of a US spy station, its sophisticated HF-DF antennae array on non-stop listening alert in the unlikely seaside village of Tangimoana.
The Americans had chosen the site in Tangimoana because of its obscure location on government land, and also because its iron-sand base offered a low ‘noise floor’. The spies could listen in on top-secret yap in perfectly silent conditions. They, too, had come to Tangimoana for the peace and quiet.
Good for them. Was it good for Tangimoana? Intelligence-gathering among the quiet iron sands, electronic interceptions
