I drew a pencil sketch of the two feijoa trees on the property. Both trees were hunched over; their branches nearly touching the ground. I made an inventory of the cans of cat food rusting beneath the tree. Once again, as ever, I was trying to fix the scene in my memory.
Dusk falling above the desert in Waiōuru, bright sunlight on the dazzling white shell bank at Miranda. Overheard at a party in Tangimoana: ‘Remember Uncle Vic? He fell into a sawmill.’ Fred Nyberg, the cheerful hermit of Notown, among the Māori hens and the black beech: ‘I’ve had two daughters and two grandsons die. Sad. That’s the way life is, isn’t it?’
On a Friday at 10.30 a.m. in Morrinsville, three little girls in pyjamas and slippers walked into the Pioneer Bakery; on a Saturday morning in Cromwell, near St Bathans, nine migrant fruit pickers from Vanuatu waited for the Salvation Army op shop to open – when it did they bought sheets, pillowcases, shirts, socks, and a weed eater to send home.
Three years of itemising civilisation in the last settled country on Earth, wandering from one republic to the next. So many of the towns drew into themselves, asserted a kind of independence. It was there on the peninsula of Collingwood, a long way over Tākaka Hill; it was there in the swamp of Wainuiomata, minutes over the hill from Seaview. Distance was the point of each town’s existence. In the spaces in between, in the regional qualities of silence, something was missing. Even in the age of infill housing and noise control officers, much of New Zealand seemed to be on close terms with abstraction. Was this where country music stepped in and gave it shape?
The novelist David Foster Wallace once shared an epiphany about country music: ‘What if you imagined that this absent lover they’re singing to is just a metaphor? And what they’re really singing is to themselves, or to God? “Since you left I’m so empty, my life has no meaning.” That … they’re incredibly existential songs. All the pathos and heart that comes out of them is they’re singing about something much more elemental being missing, and their being incomplete without it.’
New Zealand, the lonely country, gothic and troubled, but that wasn’t the half of it. Much more than half of it was cheerful and inventive, waiting for the tide, filling its face with fresh food, knocking about on the porch with a beer and a burnt sausage. Tremendous friendliness shimmered in the air. Great fun was to be had in the pub in Waiōuru on Friday night, in the pub in Greymouth on Saturday night, in the pub in Mosgiel on Sunday afternoon. There was even fun to be had without alcohol. Every town was welcoming, hospitable.
Three years of reading the local paper in the tearooms and the Subways. The headlines were enough: you could read them for directions. They mapped things out. FARMER CRUSHED BY COW. PITBULL STRANGLED IN DOMESTIC ROW. ACCUSED DRUNK IN DOCK. DESERT ROAD CLOSED. TRAMPER LOST. APPLICANTS QUEUE FOR 20 JOBS AT NEW KFC. MĀORI LEADER WANTS TO TAKE TROUT ‘AS A RIGHT’. WOMAN TASERED IN MOSGIEL. Three years of writing my own hieroglyphics in the Warwick 3B1 notebooks I took from town to town.
There had been the pleasure and privilege of entering the lives of strangers. I was constantly reminded of the ringing endorsement that the historian Michael King gave New Zealanders in his famous closing passage of The Penguin History of New Zealand. It was one of the last things he ever wrote. King, lively, eminently sane, died in a freak road accident only a few months after the book was published in 2003. It was an instant best-seller.
It has a happy ending. ‘Most New Zealanders, whatever their cultural backgrounds,’ King wrote, ‘are good-hearted, practical, commonsensical and tolerant. … They are as sound a basis as any for optimism about the country’s future.’
So long as New Zealand actually had New Zealanders in it, but about a thousand were jumping across the Tasman every week. The great migration to Australia sometimes made it feel you belonged to a minority – the people left behind, the last remaining Māori and Pākehā, hemmed in by tides of Pacific Islanders and Asians and refugees from Africa, the Middle East and Hollywood. Look, there’s James Cameron! The director of Titanic and Avatar has New Zealand residency. He visits Mondays and Thursdays.
I never came across anyone remotely famous. The farmers and shearers, the carpenters and carpet-layers, the birders and alcoholics, the New Zealanders, went about their business in a land of Lotto and kapa haka, Harvey Norman and Dick Smith, Sky Sports and the widening gap between rich and poor.
Three years of motels. There was an afternoon in the Gibson Court Motel in Rotorua when I did nothing more than watch motes of dust in the sunlight. Unable to sleep in the Sunset Motel in Greymouth, I got up at two a.m. and walked across the Cobden Bridge, my face as cold as the fast, black Grey River that rushed to the sea.
I wanted to see where other people lived, but every chapter is an unwritten record of loneliness. I was homesick for the house where I lived with my girlfriend and our daughter, who turned two, then three, then four years old. They came to the airport to pick me up after I got back from Antarctica. After those white days and white nights, seeing the two of them was like coming back to life in full colour.
My daughter laughed to hear the names of places I visited. Greymouth. Mosgiel.
‘What was it like, dad?’ she always asked.
I always told her, ‘You’d love it.’
Maromaku Valley veers off the State Highway just past Towai Tavern. The road leads north, winding through farmland, forest, bush, scrub
