Mist covered the hills, and trailed Grey River, Blackwater Creek and Moonlight Creek. The willows wore red, the oaks yellow. Above the men’s toilet in the pub there was a sign that read HOG SWAMP and a poster advertising local boxer Eric Briggs, ‘the West Coast Tattooed Man’, who ran a lawnmowing business. I was shown what sphagnum moss looks like by a guy who wandered into swamps and harvested the stuff with a pitchfork.
There were lovely elms, and thick flax bushes, and wide clumps of bamboo growing out of the marshy soil. Everything was coated by the thin black smoke and delicious aroma of burning coal – famously, Blackball is the birthplace of the Labour Party, which took place following the 1908 coal miners’ strike. Trucks from nearby Roa Mine trundled through town, carrying bags of coal dust bound for Japan.
Wootton lived in Blackball for three weeks until his abrupt eviction. He walked into Gina Howton’s general store one day with his wife. Gina asked what had brought them to Blackball. He said he had heard the shop was for sale. ‘You heard wrong,’ said Gina, but he was very insistent. She said, ‘How would you run a store with a deaf wife?’ He said, ‘Oh, but she’s very clever.’ He said he was a hairdresser. ‘He was clean-cut,’ Gina said, ‘looked like he had money. And his wife presented well. She had extremely alert eyes.’
Our conversation was interrupted when two customers walked in. It was half past three in the afternoon and they were in happy drunken spirits. ‘I feel like a rum and raisin ice cream between beers,’ said one of the men, who flaunted a mullet.
Around the corner, vigil organiser Alan Gurden was at his house bus, packing up to leave. He said he needed to get away for a week. That was a good idea. I wished the townspeople had got rid of him instead of Wootton. He was in bad health, physically and mentally; his hands shook, he was on the verge of tears, he couldn’t think straight.
He said he suffered from 1080 poisoning. He suffered from something. He was on an invalid’s benefit, got migraines and couldn’t remember dates. He had painted deranged sentences on his house bus: DEAD CARCASSES FLOATING IN THE WATER! and THEY LIE AND LIE AND LAUGH WHILE YOU DIE! The angry ravings dated from his protest against 1080 drops. ‘I issued a challenge to Helen Clark and Grey District Council. I said they were terrorist saboteurs.’
We sat underneath a cabbage tree while his black pig, Rainbow, snuffled in its pen. In helping to get rid of the paedophile from Blackball and hold the government and the Corrections Department to account, his motives were pure, he said. ‘They’re from moral correctness. It’s a personal crusade.’
And then he said, ‘How many criminal convictions do you think I have? I’ll tell you – none. There was one time when I was spoken to by the police. My wife and I nearly split up in… This is where my brain lets me down. We were living in a house in a valley with no power, the water was frozen solid in the tank, we had to get water from the creek, and we had an argument. She was very stressed. She phoned the police and said her husband tried to take away her son. So there was that one time.’
There were mutterings in the pub on Friday night about ‘hippie bigots’. I liked that term but it missed the essential point about Gurden: he was nuts.
I ran into Geoff Strong at the pub. ‘This is our town,’ he said. ‘This is where we live. This is our castle.’ He had fond memories of a group of locals in the mid 1980s who called themselves the Blackball Pipe Band. A dozen or so ‘transient punk people’ had moved into town ‘so the Pipe Band got bits of pipe and went through them like a dose of salts. All the punks fucked off’.
I got away from Strong and relaxed over a beer with Mike O’Donnell, 37, a former Greymouth punk known as Rotten. In case he forgets his nickname, it’s tattooed on his chest. Rotten was an easy-going guy. ‘Blackball has its moments,’ he said. ‘We’ve just had the Easter fair.’
The annual pub crawl was coming up. Participants would don gloves and kneepads, and crawl across the road between Blackball’s three pubs. Various games and tests of character were planned; previous challenges had included a seven a.m. dip in the town pool, coal-shovelling competitions, and a game where you drank a pint of beer, ate a bowl of dry Weet-Bix, then blew up a balloon until it burst.
The fun and games, the beautiful colours of autumn, the photos of Michael Joseph Savage behind the bar, the black-faced sheep dozing in backyards, the abandoned glasshouses covered in blackberry and rowanberry, the thick mist and the still air and the quiet days and nights – it must be a lovely place to live. The house where a paedophile hairdresser and country singer lived with his deaf mute wife went on the market for $145,000.
Blackball and Tangimoana: both were out west, isolated, bogan, gothic. So was Pātea in Taranaki, where another saga of summary justice played out in 2010. What happened in Pātea was even more elemental than Tangimoana: its central narrative was the pursuit of food.
Two fisheries officers drove to the banks of the Pātea River and seized illegal fishing nets. They told the Hāwera District Court that Pātea man Darryl Hutton – whom they identified as six foot four, with a large build and a full beard – yelled at them and said, ‘If you try to take the nets, you’re fucking dead.’ He also advised the officers, ‘This is my town, my river. We do what we want. You can take the law and fuck off.’
He made a gun sign with his hands, pointed to both officers, and
