She again brought out the custard squares and the teapot with its coat. May was a good listener, with a very keen memory for detail. The complete lack of dementia and her good physical health meant that the only thing that made her eligible for a rest home were her 95 years. She preferred her freedom. She was a little old lady but there was such a strength and calmness about her, and something else, something just as striking — it was as though she’d changed race, and had become Maori. She looked Maori. She spoke Maori place names with flair. Once a week, she said, she made herself a boil-up — pork bones, with spinach. She was a kuia, wise and ancient.
As Hughina Garnett, she was raised in Dunedin, and took a job in a clothing factory. She told the story of her conversion to Christ in a beautifully sensitive profile by Anglican Church media officer Lloyd Ashton in the church magazine Anglican Taonga. She was riding to work one day in 1937 with a friend. They spotted a booklet on the footpath. It was called ‘The Reason Why’. May’s friend read the Christian tract aloud as they cycled along. Then and there, May told Ashton, she had a kind of an epiphany; the word she used was ‘convicted’.
She studied as a missionary with the Bible Training Institute, and prepared for mission work in somewhere like Africa or Asia. But she holidayed with the Northland whanau of a fellow student, Emma Kake. It was a profound experience. May told Ashton, ‘I thought, “I’m not looking overseas. I’m not moving out of Maori-land.”’
She met Wally Chalmers when she worked as the matron of the Shelley Beach Maori Girls Hostel in Ponsonby. Wasmuth’s killing left her a widow for five years. She remarried, to Dave Mackey, of Tainui. In 1982, she started visiting inmates at Mt Eden Prison. She said in the magazine, ‘You sit with them and you just ask, “So where do you come from?” And when they tell you, you say, “Oh. I know your relations.” And you just mention some names. This is the Maori world. It’s all whanau stuff.’
I asked her more about her visits. They had ended with the death of her friend Ben Dickson, who drove her to prison. But she stayed in touch with the prisoners by phone, and had passed on a list of 10 particular prisoners to a new visitor. She said, ‘I showed him the list. “These are special people,” I told him. They were Willie Bell. Malcolm Rewa. And others, including a man called Jeremy. He sent me a card on my birthday this week. He said to me one day, “If you’d met me 20 years ago, you wouldn’t have come near me.”
‘And that’s all I know about why he’s in prison. I never ask about their crimes. Or if they did it. Willie said to me, “No one’s done what I’ve done.” People hate his insides. He hates himself. But I just sit with them, and we talk. Not about God, or religion; just talk. The only message I have is the message of redemption.’
From Wasmuth, through to contemporary monsters such as serial rapist Rewa, and Bell, who bashed three people to death in an RSA in 2001 — May’s life these past 50 years was a kind of brief history of violence in New Zealand, in Maori-land. She was so serene.
Chapter 3
The bogan ninja: Antonie Dixon
There was no hair on his head — none to speak of at least — nothing but a small scalp-knot twisted up on his forehead. His bald purplish head looked like a mildewed skull.
— Ishmael’s first encounter with Queequeg in Moby Dick, by Herman Melville
1
Dixon was mad. He was every kind of crazy, a bogan ninja, bringing down the blade of a Samurai sword in a flash of silver once, twice, then three, four, five, six, seven, eight times in a partially successful attempt to sever the hands of two screaming women on an early summer’s evening near Thames, killing a stranger with a gun later that night in Auckland and inviting suicide by cop, all the while smoking awesome amounts of P and opening his mind to exciting possibilities of chaos. He was disturbed, disordered, mentally diseased. In diagnostic terms, he was fucked in the head. There was only one question of interest at his lurid and depressing seven-week trial at the High Court of Auckland in 2005: was he mad, or bad? But the answer was obvious. He was both. He was so nasty, resolutely vicious and absolutely remorseless, but he should never have been found guilty of murder, attempted murder, kidnapping, and eight other relatively benign charges. The jury rejected his insanity defence. He got a life sentence. It was a death sentence. He needed a straitjacket, or whatever psychiatric restraints — ECT, a lobotomy — that were available in mental health units. He was sent to prison, and his doom. He killed himself in his cell. Antonie Ronnie Dixon was 40.
The state — the police, and Crown prosecution — jeered at Dixon, and said that he was a sane person pretending to be mad. The paradox is that he was a mad person pretending to be mad. When he made his first sensational appearance on the opening day of his trial, he was like a master satirist. He was a parody of a lunatic.
Queequeg’s queer ‘scalp-knot’ and blotchy pate remained the most incredible haircut in New Zealand history — if we accept the widely held theory that Melville’s tattooed Polynesian
