One Good Tern Deserves a Plover

I have endured some good-natured teasing from friends and acquaintances this week over a photograph of myself and Sylvia that appeared in Tuesday’s Guardian. If you did not see it – and I hope you didn’t – it shows us ankle-deep in the Ashburton River, dressed in gaiters, tramping shorts and (in my case) my daughter’s wide-brimmed school sunhat. Sylvia is peering through binoculars at an imagined point of focus somewhere off to the right, while I gesture wildly with out-flung arm, like Michelangelo’s Adam straining towards God.

A nineteenth century portrait artist would have painted out the river and invested the pose with a heroic Byronesque quality. In reality it was more like one of those satirical greeting cards. I imagine the caption: “after being lost for weeks in the wilderness Sylvia and Peter were astonished to see the same costume-hire shop they’d started from.”

Let me say that the photograph had a more serious purpose than simply to display us as objects of ridicule. We were on the Ashburton river to help with the Royal Forest and Bird Protection Society’s annual bird count. I must also add that the photograph is completely fraudulent. At that time our involvement with Forest and Bird had been all of five minutes. We turned up to help with the bird count purely on a whim only to find ourselves hustled into the limelight by Ashburton’s merciless paparazzi.

Neither are we ornithological by nature. Any interest I had in birds was extinguished by a childhood in poultry. My father kept hundreds of hens, to whom I was enslaved as egg-collector, muck-raker and slaughterer; an experience that scarred me for life. Sylvia, growing up in the shadow of Liverpool’s docks, believed wildlife existed only in picture books until she came to New Zealand.

But we are fond of the outdoors and we joined the bird count mainly for the pleasure of spending a day strolling down the river. My expectations of actually counting birds were very low. Years of tramping have taught me that there are few birds in New Zealand’s great outdoors. There is a gulf between the iconic image of New Zealand as a country teeming with exotic bird life and the reality of bush and mountain landscapes where nothing moves or twitters except the occasional wood pigeon or fantail.

Like many who enjoy the mountains and bush my imagination has been captured at times by stories from early settlers in New Zealand describing vast flocks of wildfowl, forests shaking with birdlife and the deafening peal of the dawn chorus. A childhood hero was Richard Henry, New Zealand’s first genuine wildlife ranger, who fought the rising tide of rats and stoats in a doomed effort to save the kakapo of Dusky Sound.

For years I foolishly allowed myself to believe that the decimation of our native birdlife was firmly in the past. The publicity attached to heroic “snatched from the jaws of extinction” stories of the takahe, the kakapo and the Chatham Islands Robin suckered me into believing our wildlife’s darkest days were over.

Only recently, when I realised it has been years since I saw tui on Banks Peninsula, did I discover that life for our native bird populations is as bad as it has ever been – and often worse.

And we – humans – are the problem. We’re not always the immediate cause of birdlife decline - I believe the tuis of Banks Peninsula were devastated by the big snow of ’92 – but our activities, especially the destruction of habitat and food sources, are behind all the disasters.

Nowhere is this more true than in Canterbury where only tiny scraps of indigenous habitat remain and native birds eke out a poor existence on the fringes of highly modified environments. Efforts to revive and extend native ecosystems, creating ‘islands’ of bush and wetland that enable remnant populations of birds to connect, are taking shape and need urgent support.

With all this in mind we were delighted to find that the Ashburton River bed, while not exactly teeming with birdlife, is home to more varieties of birds than I imagined. By the end of the day I had recorded 19 species of birds, some in quite large numbers.

I enjoyed myself. I can now tell a tern from a plover, a stilt from an oystercatcher. I know that blue herons are really called white-faced herons and that a dotterel is not a thrush.

I discovered too that on a fine spring day, with wildflowers abundant and the sound of birdsong in the air, the Ashburton River bed possesses greater charm than I imagined. It will never become a tourist attraction but it’s a fine place to spend a little time, even in a silly hat and gaiters.

You Can’t Stop the Music


I am fond of amateur theatricals and, while there are many incidents in youth that determine the course of a life, I can chart my direction from the moment when, at the age of thirteen, I stepped onto a stage in a pair of white satin pantaloons and a powdered wig.

At a time in life when my peers were chasing a muddy ball around the Tuatapere domain I chased song lyrics and dance steps in the local Memorial Hall, under the measured baton of Mrs Phyllis McClymont, the chemist’s wife.

I was an accidental actor. I found my way into the Memorial Hall through neither audition nor an unquenchable desire to lift the coattails of fortune. No, I owed my lucky break to chicken manure.

I had been barrowing chicken manure on a bleak winter afternoon from our henhouse, across the back paddock, over the road and onto Mrs McClymont’s strawberry patch. Piano music tinkled as usual from the lounge. This was the most tastefully appointed room in Birch Street, perhaps in all Tuatapere. A warbling soprano voice rose above the notes of the piano.

As I slewed past the lounge, my face straining against the ammoniac reek of my barrow, the music stopped, a window opened and Mrs McClymont’s blue-rinse-haloed face appeared.
“I need you,” she commanded.

And that was that.

When I told my parents my father seemed completely unsurprised at my elevation to stardom. He had tremendous faith in chicken manure.

The show in rehearsal was The Gondoliers by Gilbert & Sullivan. I fell at once deeply, passionately and everlastingly in love with G&S.

The music that has profoundly influenced my life has always found me by accident: my sister’s boyfriend reaching blindly into a wardrobe stuffed with LPs and pulling out Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks; the father of a girl I was madly in love with at 21 playing a Mozart piano concerto on a blue harpsichord. Gilbert & Sullivan took me completely by surprise - courtesy of a barrowload of chicken manure.

A hundred and thirty years or so after their invention it is easy to deride Gilbert & Sullivan’s comic operas.

It’s not so much that they’re old-fashioned. The stories, littered with orphans, babies switched at birth and forced marriages are no different than most Hollywood romantic comedies. The language is stilted rather than archaic and the costumes wouldn’t look out of place at a high school lipsync.

It is the style that outs them as a throwback to an earlier age. They seem as ponderous and declamatory as a traction engine, their humour laboured and their pathos, well, pathetic.

That they are constantly reprised is due to just one thing – the music. The music is fabulous - sly as a courtesan, exhilarating as big surf. My family hates it, of course. To them it is all tiddly om pom and fa la la la. And, yes, it is those things, but allow yourself to sink beneath the frills and the music is deep and rich and full of surprises.

And it is fun to sing because, when stripped bare, it is simply a collection of great tunes. Gilbert & Sullivan were the Lennon & McCartney of their age, producing a catalogue of hits which wove themselves so deeply into our collective subconscious that even now their imprint remains. Few people would not raise at least a flicker of response to the Major-General’s patter or Three Little Maids From School.

Not that I understood all this when I set foot on the stage of the Tuatapere Memorial Hall. Back then it wasn’t the tunes that grabbed my attention.

It was the girls. Yes, there they were, real girls, tucked away among the dowagers, the pirates, the footmen and the minor nobility that populate the world of G&S.

My role in The Gondoliers was to be the Lord High Drummer Boy – this is why I had been summoned by Mrs McClymont. My hopes of impressing the girls soared as I dressed in satin bloomers and powdered wig, only to be dashed on the rocks of choreography.

The girls, you see, were the famous ballet troupe from Blackmount – a district so remote it barely figured on the map but nevertheless produced beautiful and talented ballerinas. My task was to dance a fiendishly complicated Spanish Cachuca with these maidens.

I worked strenuously but I couldn’t do it. The girls twirled effortlessely about me, clacking their castanets and flashing their eyes disdainfully while I plonked around with my half-roll of puppy fat and two left feet.

Mercifully the experience, although it put me off myself for a while, dampened my enthusiasm for neither girls nor G & S.

Next month I will once again sing Gilbert & Sullivan on stage, in the Mid-Canterbury Choir’s winter concert at the Tinwald Hall on Saturday 15th September. We will sing a selection of music from four operas: Pinafore, The Pirates of Penzance, The Mikado and, happily, The Gondoliers.

I am delighted to rediscover this music after 30 years. It is like meeting an old friend.

Privacy No Problem for Digital Natives


According to Frieze magazine 75% of old or unused computers in America remain in the possession of their owners. They live out their days in cupboards, under stairs, in basements and garages.

I suspect the same is true in New Zealand. Do you have an old computer in your wardrobe? I do. And I have a shed full of them at my school.

Old computers are hard to throw away, not because they once cost a lot of money or that we shrink from adding to the trash mountain. We may tell ourselves we’re keeping the old computer to give to daughter or son when they leave home, but we know the last thing they want is a machine boasting Windows95 and possessing the memory capacity of a goldfish.

No, we hang onto our old computers because of the ghosts in the machine; the files that, like the adolescent tattoo or the packet of poems to a long lost lover, would make us squirm with embarrassment if they were revealed. In the wrong hands those files could frame us, defame us or publicly shame us. They could be used to steal our identities, strip our bank accounts, force us from our jobs and destroy our good standing in the community.

Sure, we could crank up that old machine and erase the files from the hard drive, but CSI has taught us that a shadow, an imprint, is always left behind and can be smoothly retrieved by a 12 year old hacker.

One thing I am sure of: the old computers of America and New Zealand do not belong to anybody under 30. They are the property of ‘digital immigrants’ like you and me, the generation for whom ICT was the unexpected complication on our journey, the mob of sheep that blundered into our headlights which we are wildly swerving to avoid.

Like a person who learns a second language late in life, our generation may acquire fluency with computers but very few of us ever gain the deep intuitive understanding that enables us to master the technology. I would never fiddle with the settings on my computer or cellphone as I see my daughters doing for fear that I’d become wedged in some tiny, dark corner of cyberspace and be forever lost.

Our children, the ‘digital natives’ who wear computer technology as comfortably as our grandmothers wore fur coats, have not only mastered this new language, they have also acquired distinctly different views about privacy. They seem delighted to display themselves and their lives in full view of the techno-public.

I was made aware of this by two recent experiences. The first was at the function Sylvia and I hosted for our daughter and her friends prior to the Ashburton College ball. We were struck by their eagerness to have themselves photographed. When I was 18 a photograph was something we shrank from. Photographs could embarrass and incriminate. They could pop up at your 21st and totally spoil the party or, at the very least, land you in trouble with your current partner.

Our children have shrugged off this restraint. They love being photographed and use all the resources at their command to publish their images: attaching them to emails, flicking them to friends via cellphone and posting them on the web.

The second experience was a job application. A teacher applied by email for a position at my school. Along with her CV and application form she encouraged me to visit her website, lodged on MySpace. MySpace is one of several interactive web-based platforms for capturing friendships. They enable users to talk, trade gossip, share stories and photographs.

My reaction to this young woman’s website was pure digital immigrant. I was embarrassed by her personal diary, by the photos of people with their heads down toilets, by her frank revelations of dreams and desires. I was intrigued to read her correspondence with the principal of another school to which she was also applying for a job. It was, simply, too much information.

I suppose the willingness of digital natives to live their lives in public springs not simply from the enabling technology. It arises from the ‘bare it all’ mentality of reality television and coffee table magazines.

But it puzzles me. Do the people who publish the intimacies of their lives on MySpace or Bebo really understand that the information is therefore in the public domain, accessible by anybody who cares to look? Or do they see it as a private transaction between themselves and whoever logs on?

To a digital immigrant it seems fraught with peril. You’ll never catch me revealing myself so publicly.

Me and Tommy’s One-Night Stand


From where I stand the Celtic Rugby Clubrooms look like they are on fire. Thin grey smoke streams from under eaves and through a solitary vent in the roof. Bright light flickers yellow and orange through streaming windows, and a loose window frame vibrates to a steady bass thump.

The Celtic Rugby Club is not on fire. This is the Ashburton College after ball party, and I am at the scene as one might be at the scene of a good-natured football riot. The centre of the event is a heaving, pulsing mass of human energy but here, just a few metres away, a sort of objective calm holds the bystanders.

Not that we’re gathering to seek autographs or admire the outfits. We are a safety net discreetly wrapped around the event; a cordon of parents, youth workers and security men whose job is to mop up the drunks, calm down the hot-heads and make sure everybody gets home safely at the end of the night.

There’s not much to do. The kids have arrived, divested of their ball gowns and tuxedos and hauling a small distillery of alcohol (cans only – no glass). They have produced their tickets and disappeared into the now-pulsating club rooms. An orange quarter-moon has set demurely over Allenton, leaving the stars in command of the sky and us below, stamping our feet and hunching deeper into our jackets. As the frost settles on the footy pitch and around my ankles I resign myself to a long, dark, cold and uneventful night.

Then I meet Tommy.

Tommy is one of three large Pacific Island men assigned to our small group to earn us a little respect from erstwhile gate-crashers. We stand together in darkness at the entrance to the car park.

I ask Tommy where he’s from.
“Wellington,” he replies.
I am taken aback by this answer. “No,” I want to say, “I mean, where are you from? Which sun-washed outpost of the tropical Pacific does your brown skin hark to?”

Tommy senses my query and guides me to safety. His parents came from the Cook Islands and he was born here, in Wellington. It is a simple whakapapa and a generous one, forgiving my small-town ignorance.

Nevertheless, I am startled by my presumption. Tommy, the child of immigrants, is as much a New Zealander as me, except his parents came from the Cook Islands, which makes him a Pacific Islander, whereas my parents came from Holland, which makes me a kiwi.

As the long night passes Tommy tells me his story. He came to Mid-Canterbury five years ago with the first group of meat workers brought here by WINZ and CMP. I remember their arrival – the sudden influx of street-wise Maori and PI kids into our schools.

“They brought us down for a week’s trial. We all stayed in the motels across the bridge and it went pretty well. I said to them, ‘can you promise me two things: a job as a slaughterman and a house?’ They reckoned they could, so I signed up there and then. My wife was up in Wellington. She said, ‘if you think it’s a good thing, we’ll come down’.”

Tommy never looked back. “We couldn’t believe it down here. There was so much work – we were never out of a job. In my first off-season I worked for a farmer at Dromore, on the lambing beat. I didn’t know anything about farming but he showed me how to mother an orphan onto the ewe. I told him, ‘all my working life I’ve been killing lambs and now I’m keeping them alive!’ ”

We pace in the darkness at the back of the clubrooms. I notice a small movement against the iron fence and call Tommy over. He shines his flashlight over the fence. “Come on out of there,” he says softly. A young couple emerge from the shadows and, under the beam of Tommy’s torch, walk guiltily to the front of the building. Tommy talks quietly to them for a moment before one of the youth workers escorts them away.

Tommy rejoins me in the darkness. “Thought they’d try to get in, I suppose. I hope someone gives them a lift home.”

Moving to Mid-Canterbury was a culture shock. “We were living in Methven and when we walked down the street people would say hello to us. We’d turn around to see who they were talking to, or we’d look at them to see if they were having us on. Where we come from you just don’t say hello on the street.”

“Now we’ve moved to Ashburton to be closer to the works. We’ve got a lady in the bank who’s helping us save a deposit for a house. She says ‘don’t buy anything until you can afford it.’ You know, up in Wellington nobody would ever think like that. None of us would think about buying a house. The PIs up there, we all spend the money. But it’s different here.”

“A lot of my family are down here now; my brother, and my uncle and others. We’ve got a culture group and COGs is helping us set up an incorporated society. We’ve got a church. When I go back to Wellington I tell them they should come and visit me at home. ‘But you are home’ they say. ‘No I’m not,’ I tell them, ‘my home’s in Ashburton’.”

A group of partygoers spills out of the clubrooms and is shepherded towards the courtesy vans. I ask Tommy if his teenage daughter is here. “No. She’d like to be but I don’t want her near the drink.”

We get busy as the party closes, the courtesy vans fill and we tidy up the strays. I move inside to help with the cleanup. As I leave I notice Tommy and one of his mates supporting the last young drunk of the evening. I pause to watch this large man, an immigrant to our community, gently lift the partygoer into a van and fasten his seatbelt.

Old Mugs Chase Auld Mug
16th June 2007


Headline writers around the country have been celebrating Emirates Team New Zealand’s win in the Louis Vuitton cup. “Airline Snatches Handbag!” is our favourite.

But celebrations have quickly soured with the Auckland City Council’s declaration that it no longer has room to host the event should Team New Zealand return with the Auld Mug.

Since New Zealand lost the cup in 2003 the Viaduct Basin on Auckland’s waterfront has been turned into upmarket apartments. Boatsheds and bleachers have vanished and the display case that housed the trophy now holds a model of a proposed motorway.

Auckland mayor, Dick Hubbard (nicknamed ‘Cereal-Killer’ by Council staff), holds little hope of the event returning to Auckland. “Frankly, we at the Council can’t imagine how we’ll accommodate the America’s Cup back in Auckland. The waterfront’s full. The only place we could redevelop is the container wharf and you saw what happened last year when some bloke suggested building a rugby stadium there.”

Mr Hubbard admitted that the prospect of Team New Zealand regaining the America’s Cup had never occurred to him. “Personally, we at the Council thought they were crap last time and couldn’t see them getting within a bull’s roar of challenging the Swiss. We were quietly relieved. After that last regatta we’d had enough of America’s Cup sailors with their skinny arses and blond tips.”

But the story is about to get messier. In an exclusive interview with The Ashburton Guardian’s Valencia-based yachting reporter, a source close to Team New Zealand has revealed that Auckland City Council staff have suggested to Grant Dalton and Dean Barker that they deliberately lose the final to avoid embarrassing the City of Sails.

The source, who can’t be named because we invented him (should we strike that out? Ed.), describes emails from Council staff offering strategies for losing races.

“Basically, they just lifted our ideas from the last campaign: you know, like losing the mast or filling up with water or putting all the fat guys on the boat at the same time. Basically anything that will slow us down but look like an accident.”

Dalton’s response has been swift. In a circular to crew and supporters he condemned the actions of Auckland officials and threw an invitation to other New Zealand towns to host the next America’s Cup should Team New Zealand beat Alinghi.

“Auckland sucks,” seethed a bellicose Dalton. “They argue about raising water rates but can’t provide a decent bit of water to hold a boat race.”

The prospect of hosting the next America’s Cup has excited local politicians throughout New Zealand. Councillors from Coromandel to Cromwell, with one eye on the forthcoming local body elections, are launching sub-committees and feasibility studies in an effort to lure the glittering prize to their district. Even being land-locked is no deterrent. Ohakune, in the central North Island, has formed a yacht club while the Hanmer Springs Community Board, in what must be the most poorly researched America’s Cup bid in history, has offered to build a new golf course.

In a further exclusive the Guardian can reveal that Ashburton District Councillors are also keen to get in on the act. At a series of late night meetings in Mare O’Malley’s woodshed Councillors have been putting the finishing touches to an America’s Cup bid that will stun both local rate payers and the yachting world. Our reporter, embedded in the hard drive of the District Engineer’s laptop, reveals a startling self-confidence among our leaders that their bid will succeed.

“Mid-Canterbury has a fine sailing tradition,” mayor O’Malley is reported to have said. “I regularly play with boats in the bath.”

Planning has advanced to the stage of selecting a local venue. Early discussions centred on the domain duck pond until ‘Commodore’ Councillor Holmes scuppered that plan with a few photos of America’s Cup yachts and some technical advice.
“They’re quite big,” he asserted.

Other venues were discussed and discarded, including the Rangitata Diversion Race (“too narrow”), Lake Hood (“too flat”) and the Ashburton river (“too upmarket”).

Eventually Councillors decided to construct a purpose-built America’s Cup lake as part of the new swimming pool and sports stadium. That project will be fast-tracked to be completed by mid-2008 should Team New Zealand win in Valencia. With Councillors favouring a downtown waterfront the preferred location for the lake is the block of land between Burnett Street and Walnut Avenue, running from West Street to the top of Alford Forest Road.

Funding for the project will be a one-off special rate of $37,000 per household. Councillor Beaven complained that this would be hard for low income households. His objections were dismissed. “People can either get in behind this bid or start cheering for Alinghi,” growled Councillor Holmes.

The America’s Cup final has just got a lot more interesting.

The Eels of Ellesmere
Saturday 7th April 2007


Clem Smith pulled 74 tonnes of eels from Lake Ellesmere between early February and mid March. Today however he has just ten, in a small sack he retrieves from tea-coloured water by the boat ramp at Fisherman’s Point.

He drops the sack on the gravel and the children crowd around the writhing slick of eels, delighted and disgusted. The eels are handed around – large eels, small eels, green and silver and purple as deep as aubergine. The big ones are females, Clem explains, filled with eggs and ready to swim to Samoa where, with their smaller mates, they spawn and die.

A hand from the back of the group – how big is the biggest eel you’ve ever caught? Clem is thoughtful. He has a photo, he says, taken in 1959 of himself with an eel twice his size. “Of course, I was smaller then myself,” he grins shyly.

The eels are returned to the water where they quickly vanish. Children drift off to skip stones across the water or fossick among the debris at the lake’s edge. Their beach combing is purposeful – a teacher-inspired scavenger hunt that could win them valuable group points. One boy drags an ancient neoprene diving boot from the mud and holds it aloft. “That’s not what I need” – he consults his list – “what I need is a sock.”

Since January I have travelled daily to my new job at Southbridge School. I am enjoying the experience, although it is a little unnerving to cross the Rakaia and leave behind the familiar networks of Mid-Canterbury. I have discovered there is a membrane, permeable but nevertheless real, that separates our side of the river from the wider world.

I am also discovering another corner of Canterbury that I have never before explored. This school camp at the corner of Lake Ellesmere opens my eyes to new perspectives that are all the more startling because they lie within the scope of familiar landmarks. There is Banks Peninsula, the Torlesse Range, Mount Hutt and, far off, Mount Peel – all familiar but slightly different from this new angle.

The daily experience of driving a few kilometres from the main highway brings me to understand a poverty of experience.

The journey of my life has been traced, by and large, along the narrow strip of State Highway 1. From a Southland childhood I ventured up the road to spend my student years and early working life in Dunedin, followed by a decade each in Christchurch and Mid-Canterbury.

Some of my earliest memories were formed along this route. I recall the Kilmog as a rain-drenched gravel road viewed from the back seat of the family Volkswagen in the early 60s. I bought my first twin-cone ice cream at Ashburton’s Snowdrop dairy in a breath-taking sprint from the railway station while the Southerner paused, southbound, about 1974.

And in all these journeys I have hardly strayed from the narrow path. I have explored no more than half a dozen of the countless side roads along a hundred kilometres of main highway north or south of here. I have not the faintest idea what lies behind the main streets of Dunsandel or Temuka. I presume not much, but I am poorer for that conceit.

If it were not for my new job I would probably never have visited Southbridge or spent these few days at the corner of Lake Ellesmere. I am glad I did – it is country that needs a few days to appreciate.

Like much of the Canterbury coastline it is not pretty. The land is laid bare, its ribs of gravel and sand exposed by low, knife-edged winds that fillet the best of the soil and vegetation, leaving a hard scrub of box thorn, lupin and gorse.

The lake itself is slumped and flaccid, sprawled like a victim. The settlement at Fisherman’s Point seems, at first glance, to echo the mood of the lake. Its fifteen or twenty houses appear to have long since lost their battle with the elements. Damsel flies swarm thickly around the water’s edge and the scrubby farmland is home to half-wild pigs and a scatter of malnourished cattle.

But a closer look reveals small treasures. Ngati Moki marae, where we stayed, lies in the elbow of a spring-fed stream that is as fresh and clear as mountain water. The gullies are moist and fruitful, filled with raupo and flax and a rustling busy-ness of waterfowl.

There is a muted but tenacious narrative in the broken dinghies and tumbledown shacks, and a more ancient story in the earth ramparts of the old pa.

If all this is to be discovered on one side road I begin to imagine what I may find if I explored others. What mysteries and pleasures lie behind Waikouaiti, Clinton and St Andrews? What undiscovered hinterlands lie within this strip of island I call home?

Perhaps it is time I found out.