Saturday midnight at Outram Glen, a gang of teenagers picked out by headlights: they had escaped Mosgiel’s desperate boredom to have a party on a riverbank. Malcolm and Allister’s presence was unwelcome, a drag. The men weren’t police; they were self-elected party poopers of middle age. Three pretty girls in short skirts walked by. ‘All right, girls?’ Malcolm asked. ‘Yeah,’ they said, and kept walking.
Mosgiel, with its lovely lines of poplars and bees in the azaleas, its cupcake of the day at the Aurora Café and a tray of four dozen farm eggs in the back seat of a gorgeous wood-panelled, olive-green Pinto Squire parked on Gordon Road; horsey, fresh-aired Mosgiel, cradled beneath Saddle Hill, happily dangling twelve kilometres from urban Dunedin… but crimes do occur. Last year a man armed with a machete ran off with $400 from the Mini Mart, and another villain was arrested after climbing through the roof of the ANZ bank and attempting to cut open an ATM. He was seventy-one.
Malcolm and Allister were driving away from Outram Glen and towards the Mosgiel police station for a cup of tea when their police radio relayed an update from Dunedin. There had been a report of youths kicking in a letterbox: ‘One is wearing a tartan top.’ A tartan terror on the loose in Dunedin. ‘It’s all happening,’ Allister said, ‘in the wrong town.’
Wanaka
The Stories of Others
The alarm clock rang at five-thirty in my room in the Manuka Crescent Motel and I got out of bed like a shot. Something amazing was waiting outside but the light of dawn would chase it from view. I turned off the electric blanket, switched on the bedside lamp, put a jersey and a pair of pants over my pyjamas, and ate breakfast standing up in the kitchen – the Manuka Crescent prides itself on serving guests two slices of bread and a single-serve box of Skippy Cornflakes. I blew on my cup of coffee made from a 1.5-gram sachet of Premium Freeze Dried Robert Harris Swiss Gold (‘an aromatic smooth golden roast with delicious nutty cocoa notes’) as though it were a hot coal. I was out of the room by 5.43, creeping and crunching over the driveway gravel towards the pavement, where I looked for Venus.
Martin Unwin had told us it would be visible in the eastern sky. This was during his speech about the planets. He always asked for permission to stand up and address the class. I always said yes. I wondered if he was a genius. Martin had once designed an underwater lighting system in a fish farm to prevent salmon from maturing too early, but that seemed the least of his talents.
He was 59 and surrounded by a beard. He bounced on the balls of his feet when he walked. One day, he came back late from lunch because he had walked up Mount Iron. He was a tramper and a white-water rafter. He lived in Christchurch and was about to start commuting to the back of beyond at the end of the line on the West Coast – his wife was to become sole-charge teacher in Haast.
Martin worked for the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research, and volunteered as a spokesperson for the Canterbury Astronomical Society. One day he brought in a telescope so we could stare at the sun. It trembled, and his filters made it look red. His speech about the planets was to advise the class about a rare opportunity to see Venus, Mercury, Mars and Jupiter. The planets, he said, would be visible in the hour before sunrise all that week.
I asked him at morning tea one day about his slight stutter. He said it was bad when he was young. Did he think it was physiological or psychological? He said it always got worse when his sister was around. I said I hoped he might write about that one day because I liked the way his mind worked, and was curious to read how he would write about his own life. One day he brought in an old photograph and wrote:
It’s just two wooden Ministry of Works’ huts in a bare field. The black and white photograph of the infant Lauder atmospheric research station in 1960 is faded, but sharp and clear. The empty spaces behind emphasise the isolation, the distant mountains suggest the scale.
People came. Gordon and Rima Keys arrived with their young family in 1963, after five years in Samoa and Rima’s native Rarotonga. Next winter, hoar frost filled wire-netting fences, and snow lay for three weeks. Now long retired, they look towards Lauder from their home above Alexandra. They will never leave.
Alan and Colleen Cresswell, then in their early twenties, arrived from Christchurch in December 1964. At his job interview, Allan stepped from the Alexandra airport into Blossom Festival week. ‘It’s lovely,’ he told Colleen. ‘Lots of trees, orchards, gardens – everything is so green.’ Driving across a brown Maniototo midsummer they approached their new home with mounting apprehension – where did this landscape come from? Colleen gathered schist slabs to build a rock garden. One day she added some translucent pink rocks from the next-door field to her pile. A few days later the puzzled farmer called by to ask why she wanted his salt licks. They came for two years, stayed for twelve.
Others fell in love with the land immediately. Nineteen-year-old Ruth Stillwell and her husband came from Northland to work on a station near St Bathans, from where she later joined Lauder as a part-time typist and librarian. Driving north from Alexandra into a painted land of open valleys and linear ranges she was excited. She thought, I’m going to the mountains.
The land defined our horizons, measured our days,
