Family at the Moerewa Tigers rugby league clubrooms in Simpson Park, where Harrison Williams and his wife Meri, both 71, sat sipping beer as Dave Bristoe took the microphone and announced the prize-giving after the day’s round robin seniors’ tournament between teams from Moerewa, the Far North, and the Ngāwhā Corrections Department.
‘We’re not doing player of the day or any of that Pākehā bullshit,’ Bristoe said. Everyone who had played that day was given a ticket. The winning ticket would be taken out of a hat. First prize was a water blaster. ‘We’ve also got prizes of $20 meatpacks from G & H Meats in Kawakawa,’ Bristoe said.
He started raving. He’d had a skinful. ‘There’s some good shit in those packs. We’re not gonna say, “Here’s your prize, cunt, now fuck off.” We’re gonna say, “Good one, cunt.” Yeah.’
Family, wholesomely, on the Maromaku Valley farm of Jared and Kaelin Going, and their daughter, Lijana, eighteen months. I visited Jared because he had been the landlord to the man without family: Stan Stuart, the tenant in a shack on Mormon land.
‘He only ever paid the rent in cash,’ Jared said. ‘He was reliable as. I’d forget when it was due but he’d always show up, almost to the minute. We’d have a little chat and then he was off. You’d say, “What’re you doing today, then, Stan?” He’d say, “I’m going home to read a book.” And then he’d leave to do just that.’
Jared’s father Sid Going had performed the funeral service. ‘Stan was the first person to be buried at Towai Cemetery for 50 years. It was a real big funeral, would have been a hundred people, easy.’ I imagined the bowed heads, a Bible passage read out loud by an All Black legend. I tried to imagine the meaning that people took from the outsider and misfit in Maromaku Valley. ‘Everyone liked him,’ Jared said, ‘but no one knew him.’
But someone did know him: the woman whose name and number he had written down on a piece of paper next to the word SISTER. I asked Jared Going for her details. On Sunday morning, at a large lovely home in the suburb of Kensington Heights in Whāngārei, I called on Shona Nash.
Her husband Neville boiled the jug. Their children were visiting for the weekend – Matt, a fashion design student, and Rachel, who had been up most of the night with her restless baby. They moved around each other with the easy, casual affection of a typical New Zealand family; the ghost of Stan hovered at their side.
Shona brought out a folder. It was marked STAN’S AFFAIRS. It included his birth certificate (November 1, 1928), an ancient reference from an employer (‘I have always found him to be an honest and obliging boy’), and a winning Lotto ticket from 2004, when Stan pocketed $5,885. ‘Stan’s girlie magazines,’ winked Neville, when he showed me two 1974 copies of Australasian Post, kept in a box with encyclopaedias, and cowboy magazines that included a 1973 copy of Old West. ‘No fiction,’ boasted the cover.
Stan, propped up on top of his small bed with the bright light of the Far North falling through his bedroom window, happily reading true stories about prospecting in El Paso, a ghost town in the Ozark Mountains, running whiskey, lassoing a bear… What would he have made of the story about Russian exiles in British Columbia who formed a religious cult, lived on fresh or sun-dried fruits and vegetables, and staged acts of public nudity to protest the government’s demand that their children attend school? The lonely reader, dreaming of sagebrush and six-guns, angry bears and naked Russians – and playing a minor role when violent New Zealand reality came to his door one night in November 2006.
Two young Dutch honeymooners had parked their campervan in a car park at Haruru Falls near Paihia when they were seized by two men armed with a shotgun. The couple were handcuffed and driven around Northland; $900 was taken from their ATM card; the woman was forced to swallow sedatives, and raped. ‘Despicable in the extreme,’ said the judge, sentencing the main offender to preventive detention.
The couple were dumped on the roadside by Towai Cemetery. From there, they called on the closest house: Stan’s. ‘The couple knocked on his door, but he slept through it,’ Tony Wall wrote in The Sunday Star-Times, ‘which is possibly just as well as he is not set up to cater for visitors.’
Tony had gone inside Stan’s shack. I was still outside on the porch, peering through the windows, even as I visited Shona Nash at her nice house in Whāngārei. The girlie magazines, the winning Lotto ticket – the cardboard box contained the few remnants of his life. The rest belonged to Shona’s memory.
When her parents lived in Ōamaru, they had taken Stan in as a boarder. He was eighteen. He got a job on the railways. This was before Shona was born; she was the youngest child in the family. When she was three, the family moved to Whananaki, a seaside town in Northland. The amazing thing – Shona couldn’t explain it, it was just something that happened – was that Stan came too, and continued to live with the family. He took a job as a rural delivery mailman. His folder included a Kodak snapshot of a baby-blue mail van, dazzling in the sunlight of a Northland summer day. Shona grew up and moved to Whāngārei; Stan moved to nearby Maromaku Valley and worked at the freezing works until he retired. He never married.
‘He was a very clever, very intelligent person,’ Shona said. ‘He could tell you anything about anything in the world. He was like an encyclopaedia. That’s what he’d read, encyclopaedias, things like that, as well as his cowboy
