Wānaka is stupendous on the eye, a tourist mecca with papery willows and poplars in autumnal orange, an alpine lake, mountains waiting for snow – it was already so cold the lake smoked. The town’s retail and hospitality precinct was tastefully laid out facing the lake. It didn’t do McDonald’s or KFC; it did curries, interesting beers, merino jumpers. There were a lot of old people. But it was a party town, too, and every night happy groups of 20-somethings wrapped in scarves and woolly hats headed into town. Teen-somethings did other stuff. From the police file in Wanaka Sun: ‘Police called to disorder at an Aeolus Place party. A fourteen- and fifteen-year-old were detained in an intoxicated state, many also affected by the use of the party drug Kronic.’
The sun looked red and trembling through a filter, but exposed in a clear blue sky it didn’t have any warmth in it at all, and lay about like a white inert lump. The mountains were bare and dark and enormous. They took up half of the sky. The rest of the sky was just as bare. It didn’t budge all that week. It looked as hard as marble, and as fixed as the mountains. It didn’t allow anything resembling cloud or wind. I arrived on Monday, which looked the same as Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. Good. All I want from the world is for it to stay the same.
As a creature of severe habit, I value old habits, but I’m constantly on the lookout for new ones. Not only was Wānaka the same thing over and over, it presented new opportunities to do the same thing over and over. The same breakfast – toast, cornflakes, 1.5-gram sachet of Premium Freeze Dried Robert Harris Swiss Gold – in my room at the Manuka Crescent. The same ten-minute walk in bright sunshine every frosty morning to Mount Aspiring College. The same view of enormous mountains and smoking lake and blank sky.
On the corner there was a wild strawberry tree growing out of a bank. The soft red fruit fell on to the pavement. I picked up a berry one morning and held it in my open palm. I was walking to school with painter Jane Zusters. She said, ‘Look at the way it forms shadows.’ I wondered how small it would have looked in her palm, because she had such big paws.
The same classroom, Room 12, in a prefab block beside the soccer field, the same intolerable heat blazing from the radiators, and the same windows being opened to let in fresh mountain air. And the same students, arriving in scarves, hats and coats.
On the first day of class I asked them to interview each other. Beth McArthur wrote: ‘Former cartographer Jan Kelly of Wānaka says, “Retirement is a misnomer. I work very hard.” The 66-year-old writes poetry, the inspiration for which comes from the beauty all around. … Jan’s interest in natural history is brought to life in the lizard garden she has at home.’
Jan wrote: ‘Beth McArthur of Alexandra is attending a writing course so she can write her memoirs. Having been a typesetter, she now at age 66 has a small computing business doing desktop publishing. “I am adjusting to being a widow,” she said. “I’ve had a very tragic two years. My husband fell off our rock. He always said that no one would fall off the rock.” He was a merino classer, she said, very fit, very active; he called himself “the old blind guesser” because classing wool is by feel. His accident changed both their lives in an instant. “It took only a minute. Everything is different now.”’
Beth moved heavily. Lonely, she sat in the front row. Jan, clever and thin, worried about people and sat in the back row. Everyone sat at the same desks every day. The teacher’s desk was jammed into a corner.
I’d appeared at the college a few years earlier, one of six writers touring schools, libraries and town halls on a road trip arranged by the New Zealand Book Council, and remembered it as a plain and faintly depressing holding cell – the usual New Zealand high school, the familiar prefabricated misery. It was strange to return and see it given over entirely to adults. They were jolly and polite. They grunted when they bent over above the drinking taps, and squeezed their wide hips past doors marked BOYS and GIRLS. Watching them chat about woodblocks and watercolours as they nibbled on digestive biscuits and poured thermos tea in the playgrounds, it was as though they had liberated the college, civilised it. They’d also aged it. It was like a retirement home with netball courts.
The Upper Clutha Community Arts Council has staged the Autumn Art School in Wānaka for over 20 years. My role was to teach adult writing classes for a week. I loved every second of it, beginning with the first seconds when I walked from the motel to the school. The ten-minute amble felt as if I were being pulled in by the tide. It was the force of an acquired new habit, and the decision to get up before dawn on
