In 1994 he gave up the homestead to Glynn, and moved across the road. ‘We had a big discussion one night. He was living across the road from us, and he said, “Every thing I do, you’re watching me.” He said, “I don’t want to farm your way, I want to do it my way, but you’re critical of every thing I’m bloody doing.” So to cut a long story short, we moved here, which was a bit of a disaster as far as the house was concerned. A lot of work needed doing on it. I put in all the cladding, and a new roof. And we had to repile it: it was all totara piles underneath and they were rotten. It was eighteen inches out. If you overflowed the sink, the water’d race you to the front door.’
The auction will be held on November 30 at the Waitete rugby club, but the Meads have already spent their last night on the farm. They moved to Te Kuiti in July. How’s it going? ‘Awww well, where we are it’s pretty quiet, so you don’t notice, and I come out here most mornings and give the dogs a run, and work out what I’ve got to do around the place.’
But after the farm is sold, would he be a bear with a sore head? ‘I don’t think so.’ Then he said, ‘I could be. After about a month.’ He’d miss little things. ‘Like, the water in town is bloody putrid. The fridge is full of bloody drinking-water bottles that I get from here. I’d like to be able to keep the right to come out here and get the water, because I think it’s the best water in the world.’ The PGG Wrightson real estate advertisement is headlined ‘PINETREE’S SELLING THE FARM’. The copy reads, ‘Drink the same water as a rugby legend … You never know what’ll happen!’
Meads said, ‘I hope it sells. We need to have an easier way of life.’
We think of farms in daylight, but they can feel their very best at night. Later in the interview, he said, ‘Everyone thinks it’ll sell, but it mightn’t.’
At night, when the sky is hot with stars, farms can seem as vast and silent as a planet. A few more minutes later he said, ‘If it didn’t sell, I wouldn’t be too upset.’
[November 11]
22 Pita Sharples
One Big Happy Whanau
There was a bit of chit-chat and how’d you do and a hongi thrown in from a passer-by when I greeted Maori Party co-leader Pita Sharples at his Hoani Waititi Marae in west Auckland. He introduced me to the marae manager, Sue Ngareta, and I remarked that the marae’s name, Hoani, reminded me of Hiona St Stephen’s Anglican Church in Opotiki – formerly known as the Church of St Stephen the Martyr to commemorate the savage death of Reverend Carl Völkner in 1865. Sharples and Ngareta hadn’t heard of him so I jabbered on, explaining that because Völkner was a government spy, followers of the Pai Marire, or Hauhau movement, hanged him outside the church, took his body inside, cut off the head and gouged out the eyes, which were placed inside a chalice and eaten.
Yes, I’m really good at small talk. When I finally finished, Ngareta smiled and said, ‘We all know that sort of thing doesn’t happen in New Zealand these days, eh?’ Everyone laughed, because she had made a subtle, unspoken reference to the subject I came to interview Sharples about: the October 15 police raid on so-called ‘terror camps’ in the Ureweras.
You could say that Sharples has made his position quite clear. His announcements to the media and in parliament have been downright strident, and provocative, and possibly absurd. Such as: ‘The raids have set back race relations one hundred years.’ As for police evidence, he said there was nothing in it. Of course terrorism charges were dropped against the seventeen suspects, he said; the bugged phones revealed only loose talk, ‘silly stuff’, no real intent. What, then, did he make of The Dominion Post flouting the law by publishing police surveillance transcripts of suspects talking about napalm and Molotov cocktails and violent insurgence? His response: ‘Irresponsible journalism.’ The worst crime, he said, was the way police had ‘turned over’ Ruatoki, and ‘traumatised’ innocent locals with roadblocks and house searches.
Most Maori politicians are sooner or later awarded either excessive scorn or weird reverence. One of the more outlandish press remarks about Sharples was published in 2005, when he successfully ran for parliament: ‘He has become, if you like, the kaumatua of the nation.’ At 66, it’s true he has an obvious dignity and authority, and it only takes approximately two seconds when you meet him to feel that you are in the presence of someone special. He has achieved many things, wears his moral fibre without fuss, and he gives hope – this is a man who realised he didn’t smoke whenever he played blackjack, so to quit the habit he booked himself into the Sky Casino hotel, played blackjack for three days, won $2000, and has never smoked since. Short and powerfully built, he’s warm, informal, thoughtful, good fun. In short, he’s lovely.
But on two recent appearances on Campbell Live, when given every opportunity to thunder more about the damage made to race relations, he seemed so unconvincing, so uncertain, a stubborn, muttering presence who didn’t seem to have his heart in it.
We sat down in an office in the marae’s administration wing. I quoted his rhetoric about the police raids, and said to him, ‘Frankly, I don’t think you’ve been yourself.’ He said, ‘Oh, is that right? Okay. That’s sad. Because that is the real me. I care about everybody. I think the one thing you can accuse me of is caring. I care
