A Many Coated Man (6 page)

‘Tena koutou, tena koutou, tena koutou katoa,’ Paul Hurinui welcomes the people, who drift to a loose focus around the Angel Hire chairs. He stands before the officials’ chairs, facing downhill to the crowd. Seated behind him are his two fellow elders, together with the Rev Thomas, Slaven and Eula Fitzsimmons, spokesperson for Gender Plus. Hurinui, who for three years was Chancellor of the Iwitini University, speaks for only a few minutes in Maori, then changes to English to explain the significance of Tuamarina as a setting for consideration of policies to ensure greater unity and progress for all New Zealanders. He explains with a compassion as fresh as if the events were only yesterday, something of the Wairau Incident. The pressure on the Ngati Toa to sell land to the Company, the provocation by the Europeans in sending the survey team in early 1843 and the Maori repudiation of it. Then an aging Te Rauparaha interrupted at his breakfast of potatoes by the arrival of the armed party to arrest him. Hurinui says that the Ngati Toa were sitting at daybreak in two groups — heathen and Christian. He points out on the Tuamarina stream below, the place where a canoe was placed to allow the Europeans to cross. The arguments, the fighting, the deaths, make both a fine drama and a useful text and Hurinui does it well. At the end of it he gives Thackeray Thomas a shard of totara which comes from a Ngati Toa canoe.

There are not a great many Maori in the audience, but Slaven can see a group of Kurds who have come down from the Shipley refugee subdivisions on the Wairau. Most of the people here are heartland Kiwis whose accents prove that their families have been country people for several
generations. A few smoke in contravention of official regulations, but there’s no sign of more dangerous drugs. Some older people wear vinyl jackets with star signs on the back, maybe there is even an honest cardigan or two. Plaits are in again for women and pony tails for men. There are children as well, making no effort to disguise their boredom once Hurinui’s rich history is replaced by more immediate politics. They kick at the still wet grass, test each other’s strength and determination by pushing and wrestling, walk openly on the graves, even climbing the small, wrought iron surround of the memorial to stand on the cracked concrete and scratch at the names of those who were killed. One girl swings from the gum tree which overhangs the grave, and water from the leaves dashes on the concrete. Below the steep hill on which they’re all gathered and beyond the sealed road to Picton, the last of the gay riders can be seen on the side road, strung out towards Waikakaho.

Thackeray Thomas speaks next, just a pipe opener for him of some fifteen minutes to introduce Slaven. His voice sweeps over the several hundred people on the hill at Tuamarina. In his easy, fat-cheeked eloquence he slips into Maori at the conclusion of his introduction and so Slaven misses his cue. While Thomas waits, half-turned towards him, Slaven watches the gray cloud stealing across the slopes of the hills and feels the cold June air take the heat from his face. He wonders about the weather on that Saturday, 17th June, 1843, when Thompson and Te Rauparaha talked through the interpreter.

‘If you would like to speak now, Dr Slaven?’ says Thackeray with another inviting sweep of his hand towards the people still less than compact and attentive before him. There is no dais, no lectern, no table with a water tumbler even, just the roughly levelled and gravelled park on which to stand, the patches of long grass and graves downhill and the seats awkwardly angled there, and his fellows waiting to be convinced that they haven’t wasted a day. The entreaty man in a close row nods his head in agreement and support before even a word is said. Above the heads of his audience, Slaven can see the main road turn to the right towards the river and the willows which mark from a distance the
Wairau’s braided bed.
Dropping
southwards
down
the
coast,
baby,
until
the
sanctuary
of
Half
Moon
Bay.

‘We are the living people in the scene of the moment,’ says Slaven, ‘and so we are culpable. Our own frame in the long sequence is for an instant lit by time, then we too wind to the reel which holds Wakefield and Te Rauparaha, Helen and Hector, the drift of Gondwanaland, a grandmother’s face. Our turn at the front of life. Our chance to have some effect. There is an obligation that accompanies human continuity.’ Slaven watches his audience as he speaks. Three hundred or so are not much of a crowd on the hillside, with a cold, winter sky and cars coming and going on the Blenheim-Picton road. Two Kurdish boys are having a stick fight with a younger kid amongst the parked cars. It is the ordinariness of the people that catches at Slaven. Their half-acknowledged longing for a community and a search for purpose as they recognise they have no particular, or distinctive, life to set them apart. Slaven sees their ongoing, patient humanity, the inarticulate desire to be part of some corporate aim which will make reason, even rhyme perhaps, of filling their bellies with food and babies, cutting toenails, watching the broom flower on poor country as if the yellow clay beneath has been sucked into the blooms, gathering the dessicated blowflies from the window sill of the bach, improving their keyboard skills, practising the retirement speech for inclusion in the
Laystall
Gazette,
hearing at last the diagnosis always feared, winning a third division Sweepstake prize in a syndicate of seven.

Slaven has been until recently a self-contained man, but now he feels again the powerful stirrings that came upon him in the hospital and at the seminar, the flow of an implacable conviction, an imperative to speak out and a confidence that the words will come. He draws in the winter air more deeply and it bites deep within him, but the shiver he gives is in response to the grip of emotion not the chill.

‘We have lost our way,’ says Slaven vehemently, gratified by his words rolling down the slope of Tuamarina before him. ‘We have abandoned the hope of inner life.’

‘That we have,’ shouts the entreaty man in support.

‘We’ve no sense of national spiritual identity, no unity of purpose, no confederacy of care.’

‘We haven’t.’

‘Each of us has retrenched into a personal life from which we are bitter in our criticism of anything that others do. We have lost true conviviality as an aspect of life and replaced it with drunkenness in crowds, with queues, with shouting at sport together. All the forms of our participation are chosen for personal gain.’

‘Aiee,’ shouts a ginger boy at a distance as he discovers another boy beneath a green sedan and begins to beat the protruding legs with his stick. The adults are oblivious however. Those standing move closer to Slaven as an involuntary expression of support. The entreaty man sees a green aura forming at Slaven’s head and gives quick glances at his companions.

‘I dare say our group today is the biggest most of you have been in this year,’ continues Slaven. ‘We’ve grown uncomfortable with the physical presence of our own kind, and not just because of the isolation of technology. We need to re-establish brotherhood and sisterhood, to accept a common rather than a personal cause.’ After all the years of guarded living in respect of his emotions, Slaven feels a release of goodwill and compassion and something deeper, inchoate, besides. His arms lift in gestures never before natural to him, yet at the centre of his fervour is a composure which allows him to judge the responses of his listeners from their faces, to note a pair of wood pigeons scything the air in heavy flight from the bush, to calculate the pitch and resonance of his voice on a winter’s day, the pauses for effect and for the calls which come back to him.

‘Tell it all.’

‘That’s right. That’s right.’

‘This
is
the message.’

The banner doesn’t flap, but every so often seems to swell of its own volition to display blue letters — Praise The Lord — and then relax again. If anything the cloud is thicker and lower; the sun behind it less suffusing. There is no drying and the grass still untrampled remains meek with dew; the stones of the carpark still darkened. See the cars
coming from the plain pass on the smooth road below the memorial hill and vanish up the narrowing valley towards Picton. See a third row Angel Hire chair lose its back legs and pitch Vanessa Pringle onto the grave of Charles Hennessey, who had not been unaccustomed to women breathless above him in his time.

‘How long since a government has been sensitive to the wishes of a majority of ordinary New Zealanders? Put another way, how long since we as a people had a real conviction that our views were of more account than the predictions of experts, the precedents of overseas experience and the computer models of our economy? The great success of the governing elite in this country has been to spread the notion that ordinary people are never capable of more than ordinary beliefs, even in consultation with each other. We have come in our hearts to despise democracy because we are contemptuous of our neighbours and unsure of our own worth.’

‘Amen,’ says Thackeray Thomas.

‘What we have to do, it seems to me, is to give more heed to those parts of our selves and those parts of our lives which we share with everybody else, instead of always standing on our uniqueness, going on about being captains of our souls. It’s the right sort of crew that we need in this country.’

‘You tell us,’ cries the entreaty man.

‘Amen,’ say Thackeray Thomas’s sons.

Slaven talks for over an hour and a half without a glance at his notes. In his enthusiasm he advances step by individual step closer to the first row of chairs and further from the official party behind him. That Eula Fitzsimmons is meant to speak after him is forgotten, even by Eula, and the Rev Thomas, something of a demagogue himself, is enthralled by Slaven’s power. ‘We have a tiger by the tail,’ he says to Paul Hurinui who is too carried away hefting his carved stick to Slaven’s speech rhythms to reply. ‘A power is rising in the land,’ says Thackeray. ‘This man has the gift.’

The meeting may well be set to burn itself out in another hour or two; there is only so much combustible emotion stored up in three or four hundred people. But Radio Charlotte from Picton send out a van and begin a direct
broadcast for the region, part verbatim transference of Slaven’s voice from the hillside at Tuamarina, part colourful asides and descriptions. So a new and steady tide of people begins to arrive. Farmers and alternative life-stylers, town people from Blenheim and Picton. No more vehicles are able to park on the hill, or in the grounds of the small country school and the farm gates are opened on the other side into the paddocks and the new arrivals push back the cows and sheep and then move towards the meeting on the hill. The new people form a fan around the original nucleus who are rejuvenated by such proof of their prescience in being with Slaven from the start. Some of them feel on display themselves and cry the more extravagantly, ‘This is the message,’ and ‘The man speaks from the heart.’

Miles Kitson wakes from a dream of youth to walk carefully out and listen to his friend. The message is nothing to him, but the power of delivery is electric, yes, electric, and he sees some people so affected that their shoulders are tightening, drawing up. Even the children stop their play, standing with their slings and arrows to watch their parents shout, Slaven give his exhortations and the crowd swell. Something is happening. See the other world’s overlapping rim though, which no one there notices. Are there creatures trooping on the skyline, their brilliant and baleful colours glittering behind the mist and cloud.

Slaven speaks for three and a half hours and even after that must be persuaded to take a break. He rests in the privacy of his car with Miles, protected by Iago and Dafydd Thomas, has a chicken mayonnaise sandwich and a cup of tea. Paul Hurinui joins them and prompted by Slaven talks more of the fight at Tuamarina. Mr Howard the Company’s storekeeper instructing his labourers how to fire a musket while the parley goes on, Thompson the magistrate giving the order to fix bayonets, old Te Rauparaha finally at the charge. The fury of Te Rangihaeata when his wife is shot. Twenty-four European names on the humble memorial at Tuamarina, and Hurinui tells Slaven and Miles that Thompson was found with his hands full of hair torn from his head in the agony of death.

Slaven sees that Miles is tired; his head rests on the
seat and his mouth is open as he breathes. Slaven arranges for Iago to drive his friend back to the Blenheim hotel before the crush prevents his departure and asks him to keep an eye out for Kellie along the way. ‘You were good, Aldous, absolutely,’ says Miles with his half-smile. ‘You could sell anything with sincerity like that. No wonder Marianne Dunne is writing a paper for the medical journals on your case.’ Yet of all the day he’s seen he remembers best the arrival when they had the place to themselves and the intimate stories of Paul Hurinui of Ngati Toa.

Thackeray Thomas addresses the people, then Eula Fitzsimmons at last and all the time the crowd burgeons and with its growth comes a heightening of atmosphere, a strange, tacit awareness that something of significance is happening here. Some of the original supporters depart, but not many and only then if they can extricate their cars from the press and the chaos. A television crew arrives in the late afternoon when already the shadows of winter evening are moving out from the clouded slopes. The children have barely the light to gather the gumnuts which lie like the bowls of pipes around the memorial and on its cracked concrete surface. The mist presses lower and the cars turning off to Tuamarina begin to use their lights. The television crew takes footage of the people pressing steadily and insistently towards the meeting place on the hill where the Rev Thomas, Paul Hurinui, Eula Fitzsimmons and an informal Maori concert party all have their turn. Fires are started for light and warmth. The red flames leap and the sparks glitter in the darkening sky when new branches are thrown on. The fires are the particular focal point for younger people who arrive in greater numbers. They sing the old protest songs like
We
Will
Overcome
and newer ones,
Welfare
Heaven
and
Remember
Greenpeace.
Mobile caterers move in with pies, pizza, wontons, hot-dogs and kiwi juice.