‘In winter,’ Deborah Humphries said, ‘the wind blows its arse off, but in summer you can’t fault it.’ Deborah and her husband Dave lived in Nelson and had whitebaited in Collingwood for years, staying with their son Callum at the camping ground. ‘Callum’s nine or ten,’ Dave said, ‘and he’s never had a summer here, so we bought this place in September.’
Callum and a gang of mates were fishing off the wharf. They scampered along the old wooden piles, their silhouettes small and sharp in the bright sun, and they looked like a Huck Finn fantasy or characters in a classic New Zealand childhood. They were characters in a classic New Zealand childhood. They’d been outside all day and had caught four yellow-eyed mullet. Deborah gave them Freddo chocolate bars. ‘Put the wrappers in your pockets when you’re finished,’ she said, ‘and not on the front lawn.’ Callum said, ‘Yes, Mum.’
Snapper in summer, whitebait August to November; Ken King left to put out his flounder net. ‘I’m 78 tomorrow,’ his mother Pamela said. ‘He’s going to take me out for dinner.’
They lived in a house on the corner of the main street. Ken had just moved back to Collingwood after teaching English in Japan. ‘Ken and his Japanese wife will have one end of the house and I’ll make do with this end,’ Pamela said. Her end was crowded with porcelain figurines. ‘Ken calls it my build-up,’ she said. There was a wonderful painting of a deer in front of a waterfall. ‘Mother bought it off a door-to-door salesman,’ she said.
Her mother had come to New Zealand from England as a war bride. It was her second marriage. Her father had survived Dunkirk but been killed in a hit-and-run during a blackout. It happened at Christmas, Pamela said, the 21st of December. She’d hung up her stocking but got nothing that Christmas. She was seven.
Pamela’s husband Doug managed the dolomite quarry on Mount Burnett. He had been fire chief during the Great Fire of Collingwood – the fourth Great Fire of Collingwood, after the infernos of 1859, 1904 and 1930 almost razed the town to the ground. In 1967 infernos took out two shops, the pub and the movie theatre, which was playing Elvis Presley’s Flaming Star. The siren went off at one in the morning. Pamela said, ‘Doug turned to me and said, “Get the kids out of the house.”
‘Oh the noise of it,’ she said, ‘the roar of it. The wind was up, and it was that cold it felt like it was blowing in off the snow.’
Her house backed on to the river. A winch in the backyard was used to haul in logs during floods. Dave Humphries had explained the law of Collingwood earlier in the day when he said, ‘The rule here is when logs come in on the flood you rope ’em in, and there’s your firewood for winter.’ Pamela said Doug liked only good wood. If a big rata came down he’d be highly delighted.
‘Collingwood’s good,’ she said, ‘but you get people who come here and say, “I love Collingwood” and the first thing they do is try and change it. There was an American who wanted to change the name of the town to Aorere. Well,’ she said, ‘he didn’t last five minutes.’ There were two museums next to each other on the main street: Collingwood Museum and Aorere Centre. Neither talked to the other or shared exhibits.
Sunday, and no one was there, nowhere on the main street, with its two museums, its pub, dairy, library, post shop, memorial hall, and café, which was for sale, asking price $155,000. Was it possible the ancient, drooling apocalyptee Howard Clamping had got it right? After the devastation of the 1967 fire, Bill Wizgell said, Collingwood is Collingwood. It will live again. But the end looked well on nigh in the deserted town on a weekend in May.
The noticeboard advised that Kent Strange had won the Collingwood playcentre raffle. Would he ever collect? Outside the playcentre, paintings were pegged on a line to dry. The school pool was empty. Collingwood looked like it did on the postcard. It was easy to find the exact spot where the photo had been taken, on the hill beneath the church. The gravel path was paved over but the cabbage tree was still there, the tide was still out – miles out, leaving a yellow, melancholic terrain. It looked vulnerable, a soft touch. But the town had recently seen off shambolic Australian mining company Greywolf, which withdrew its applications for oil exploration in Golden Bay and coal prospecting near Collingwood. Visions of some kind of economic boom collapsed, and so did fears of ecological butchery.
The spoonbills had come down from the pine tree. The day before, Department of Conservation rangers Ian Cox and Dave Homes had been out in their chopper at Farewell Spit, dealing to wilding pines – the name given to rogue stands of Pinus radiata. They used the basal spraying technique. It was dangerous, intense work, pointing a hand-held wand of poison towards a tree trunk while the helicopter hovered. A dose of Grazon herbicide and oil was sprayed on to the trunk. ‘It rolls down,’ Dave said, ‘and the bark sucks it in.’ Ian said, ‘It’s taken to every point of the plant, and so the plant grows itself to death.’
For sale: soy milk, rice milk, almond milk, hemp milk; a moveable chook run with chooks, $200; a house bus, 33 foot long, $6,000 (‘Motor good. No brakes’); services, web design, holistic pulsings (‘experience the magic of colour via Aura-soma’). But who was around to experience the magic?
Phyllis Goodall, 58, sat on the front porch of
