Warrigal's Way (18 page)

24

We flew into Auckland on a cold, wet Wednesday. All the way across the Tasman it had been bright and sunny as the plane flew above the clouds. But when we sighted the coast it was overcast and the pilot's weather forecast was for sixteen degrees and raining. He was right. It was freezing. Crikey, I didn't want to get on the plane in Sydney, until my missus shamed me into it, and now I didn't want to get off. It felt like the Antarctic.

We went aboard a bus that was going to the terminal in town, where at least it was warm. We ended up on the footpath outside the terminal down by the waterfront surrounded by our gear and blue with the cold. I left the Goddess guarding the gear with chattering teeth while I went on a mission for coats or jerseys one inch thick. Every second shop was a ladies shop which only seemed to sell thin underwear, but after searching every doorway for what seemed like miles, I finally found an Army Surplus store. I got a Navy pea jacket for myself and a pure wool coat for Jenny for a laughable price. I got a cab back to the depot, just in time to give Jenny the kiss of life. We asked a cabby to take us to a decent motel, and we ended up in Mission Bay, a few miles around the harbour from town, and one of
the prettiest places you would ever want to see. The units were heated, and compared to Sydney the price was a steal.

After we had thawed out and eaten, Jenny and I looked in the car section of the newspaper for a set of wheels. It was incredible. Cars that vanished from Australia twenty years ago were priced as if they were Rolls Royces. I thought we'd had a windfall when we changed our money, picking up twenty cents on every dollar, but things were obviously dearer in New Zealand. Every time we saw something in the paper that looked decent it turned out to be a junk heap—the result of Kiwi tinkering. Most of them were right stuff-ups. I reckon the first car we bought was the taxi we used to look at the junk—he loved us.

Westfield Meatworks were advertising for mutton butchers, so I asked Jenny if she would mind looking for a car, while I saw if I could get a start out at the gate. She was agreeable, as long as I didn't go crook about what she got.

I went to see Keith, the manager of the motel, to find out the best way of getting out to the meatworks. He told me it was easy. “Just catch any bus to the depot in town, and the ARA Transport run a bus to the works. Leave here about half past six and the bus will get you there around seven or a quarter past.”

“Thanks mate. I appreciate it.”

“No problem. How are you going with getting a car?”

“Just about given up. Geez, we've seen some junk.”

“Look, call in and see Barney. He's got the shop on the corner. He told me his brother-in-law wants to sell his wife's car because it's getting too dear to run two.”

I went back up to the unit and told Jenny, and she said she'd have a look at it tomorrow.

As Keith had said, it was easy to get to to the works. At the personnel office nothing was new—same questions and answers as at home—and I scored a job on number two chain, flanking. The work was easy—more boring than hard—and the butchers were like those at any works, a
good bunch of blokes. I had a small Maori feller called Ian on one side, and another Maori called Ted on the other side. Ted was a big happy bloke and he and Ian took me under their wing and showed me the canteen, the locker rooms, the showers. We chattered away about Australia, and particularly Melbourne as they had both done a season at Angliss' in Footscray. They wanted to know what the rest of the country was like, as they were both going back to do the season in Queensland. I asked them lots of questions about what to see in Enzed. They told me about so many places that I thought we were going to have to be there for the rest of our lives to see them all.

We knocked off at about half past three and I went down to the store and handed in the gear, then went to the pay office and collected thirty-eight dollars sixty. I thought that was great. The bus ride home was interesting and I admired the driver's skill in threading this huge bus through the traffic. He was a big happy Samoan feller. Coconuts, Ted called him. Ted said that the Samoans and the Maori didn't really get on, but he seemed a nice enough bloke to me.

Jenny was in the unit when I got there.

“Don't keep me in suspense,” I said. “Did you look at the car or not?”

She laughed out loud. “Yep!”

“Yep what? Yep you bought it or yep you didn't.”

“Yep I bought it. Guess how much?”

“Give me a break. Tell me what we've got first, then I'll guess.”

“Well, it's a 1952 Humber in spot condition, full rego and full up-to-date warrant of fitness, and its name is the Blue Streak. Way out, eh?”

“And you want me to guess? Well, I reckon about ten dollars twenty-five!”

She threw a pillow off the sofa at me in mock anger.

“Hang on. I'll just look in on Sharon, and I'll show you the car.” We walked over to the parking bays directly opposite
the unit. As Jenny had said, it was a king—well-preserved, no dings or scratches, excellent paint and bodywork, everything worked and the inside trim was in mint condition. It was about medium size, bigger than a Morris and just smaller than a Holden. It had a four-speed gear box, but Jenny said that first gear is a crawler, you know, for steep hills or dragging a trailer.

“It drives as sweet as a nut, and handles like a Mercedes Benz,” said Jenny. “I took it for a run up the Bay this afternoon and it's no problem in the traffic. I'll take you out to the meatworks in the morning. Now come on, how much?”

“Kiwi car, Kiwi prices, I reckon about four or five hundred as it's in real good nick.”

Jenny looked at me, her eyes shining. “They asked me to make an offer, I offered a hundred dollars, and they said ‘done'.” She laughed. “Is that alright?”

“Jesus, girl, you excelled yourself. You are now the official family car buyer,” I said, grinning happily. (She was also a much better driver than me—she had more patience and could handle the traffic better.)

“I took it out to the testing station in Grey Lynn before I paid the money, and it went through with flying colours,” Jenny told me as we went back to the unit. We had no idea why it was so cheap, but it was a little ripper. When I wasn't working we had a look around Auckland. It was a pretty place and reminded me of Sydney, with the main business area built on the harbour, the main street leading down to the wharves and ferries, and the suburbs spread around the bays of one of the prettiest harbours you could see. It was a boatie's paradise—no wonder the Kiwis are good yachties.

I got about three weeks work at the meatworks and then we decided to move on. My wages had paid for the rent and the car, with a bit left over, so we thought we'd head north as Jenny reckoned that was the warmest part. It was pleasant
driving along, the heater going and the motor humming like a contented bee.

Jenny was driving and I was holding Sharon on my knee, or trying to. Have you ever tried to hold a restless toddler? She was like a greased eel.

We decided to drive straight through to Whangarei, the capital of the province of North Auckland, and the birthplace of the country, and of half the famous All Blacks rugby union players, according to Jenny. The countryside consisted of farms and lush rainforest that swept right down to the beach in places and was really hilly.

Whangarei surprised me with its size. It was quite large and ranged from flat land down by the wharf to gullies that spread up over hill tops. We went to a suburb called Tiki Punga, overlooking the city, where Jenny had relatives. We stayed a couple of days at her Auntie Kahu's place and met every Maori for miles, and virtually had to sneak away, otherwise we would still be there.

We had a week in Whangarie and then headed back through Auckland. Jenny drove, and as I sat in the passenger seat watching the people and the countryside go by, I had the silly idea that I might see Mum. I knew in my mind I was just dreaming, but at least I was in the same country as she was, and you never know. After seeing how big Auckland was I wasn't going to hold my breath. But an impossible dream couldn't hurt.

After an overnighter in Auckland we set off again. We ended up in Rotorua, Jenny had been there before but she wanted me to see it for myself. About ten miles out of the place, there was this awful smell I thought all the rotten eggs in the world had emigrated to this place. The stink was incredible. Even Sharon was saying “Poo” and holding her nose.

“Stop here,” Jenny said. We were on a straight stretch of road with scrub on either side, and there was steam coming out of the gutter on the side of the road. “Carry Sharon,
love. Don't let her run around here. And come and have a look at this.”

We walked over to the side of the road and I saw an incredible sight. Just a short distance away was a pool of boiling mud, which was fizzing and popping, and alongside it was a pool of water that Jenny said was so hot you could cook a meal in it.

Jenny told me that a lot of the houses in the area had these hot pools in their back yards, and the Maori women cooked the vegies in wire baskets in the pools. They also used the steam vents for heat in the houses in winter. They just got a plumber to hook it up and Bob's your uncle.

We hired a van in the caravan park in Rotorua and had a good look round the place. We did the tourist route to Whaka, an area which, as well as having all these pools of boiling water and mud, had this huge geyser, which went twenty or thirty feet in the air when it went off, about once an hour. There were Maori guides to show the tourists around, and there were a bunch of kids on the bank of a creek who dived for ten-or twenty-cent pieces thrown from the bridge over the creek. They didn't miss many either.

We went out to Rotomahana, and took a boat trip over a lake to see the sunken village. You peer down into the water, and there are all these old Maori buildings that look just as they did when they were on dry land. They say the village sank during an earthquake. (New Zealand is the home of ripper earthquakes, and I thought, one shake and I'm off home! Even the locals called them the Shakey Isles.) We also discovered little bath houses scattered all around the place and they were bliss on a cold Kiwi night.

We left Rotorua for Taupo and drove for what seemed like endless hours through pine forest. The people at a garage we filled up at told us it was the biggest pine plantation in the world. It would have been a big pull of course, I just nodded my head and looked wise.

We bolted down the road to Wellington at the breakneck
speed of forty miles an hour, the old Humber going like a bolt of blue lightning.

We passed snow-capped mountains that looked as cold as a camping trip to Cooma with no tent and one blanket in the middle of July. As soon as I saw them my blood started to freeze and my foot on the throttle got heavier. Wow! Forty-five, now we're humming.

We went through Palmerston North and the smaller towns to the south like a paper bag on a windy day, and reached Wellington at about seven in the morning.

We found a handy shop doorway to lean the Humber against as we had decided to risk a walk. Going up the street, with Sharon between us holding our hands, looking for a restaurant or somewhere to have breakfast, I noticed a row of hitching rails.

“This must be Tamworth's sister town,” I said to Jenny.

“Don't be silly. They're not for tying up horses,” she said.

“Well, what else could they be?”

She just gave me her real wise look. As luck would have it, up the road came a Kiwi cop. He had a coal scuttle on his head and looked like Noddy's mate. I asked him what the hitching rails were for. He told me a story that you'd get the Darwin yarn-spinner of the year award for if you told it at home.

He said that Wellington was in the path of the roaring forties, and what we would call a cyclone, in Wellington is just a bit of a blow. But a big blow, ninety miles an hour or so, can blow you off your feet, so the council erected these rails for people to hang on to and pull themselves up the street against the wind. That's what he said, and I still don't know if he was having a lend of me or not.

The next day after a great breakfast we headed for the South Island Ferry Terminal.

At about seven o'clock we got in line to drive aboard the ferry: us, a railway train, trucks and heaps of cars. Jenny started feeling sick before she even got on the boat and was
pasty-faced and moaning by the time we got to the passengers lounge. But she handled it with her usual flair, sat down in one of the seats, popped a seasick pill and didn't move until we got to Blenheim on the other side. Sharon had a ball. She and I wandered all over the place, and the skipper even let us have a quick look on the bridge. She won over the ladies in the canteen and had no shortage of lollies and biscuits for the rest of the trip. Finally I went to sleep in the chair next to Jen, with Sharon curled up on my lap. We docked just before daylight and I had to carry Jenny down to the car. She woke in the car about half an hour after we got off the boat and reckoned it had been a terrific trip.

25

We were travelling down the east coast, the sea on one side and mountains on the other, and the sun just coming up. We stopped in a little place called Nightcaps for breakfast and rested for a while, Jenny took the wheel and we drove through to Christchurch, a beautiful city the centre of which is built around a cathedral in a big square. There were parks and gardens and the river Avon ran through the town. We spent four days having a good look around, and then left for Dunedin.

We didn't realise what we were letting ourselves in for. We left the plains country around Christchurch and started climbing the foothills of the Enzed Himalayas—the road was that steep. I got the car in first gear and Jenny got out to walk alongside. The old Humber was getting tired and there was a slope up ahead that went straight up.

“Get in, love,” I said. “I'm gunna have to turn around and attack this one in reverse.”

“Why are we going backwards?” asked Jenny, laughing.

“It's the lowest gear we got. If we don't make it this way we're not going to get up it at all,” I said through gritted teeth. As we staggered to the summit, the radiator was whistling and blowing great gobs of steam. So we pulled over onto the apron to give us all a rest, and to let the Streak
cool down enough to top it up with water. We didn't have to wait long as it was extremely cold up there—we were all rugged up and still going various shades of blue. Finally, when the radiator was just gurgling I gave it a bellyful of water and set off again.

Whereas the side we just came up was straight up, this side was straight down! With my right foot rubbing blue smoke off the brake pedal, the wind whistling through the grill, the body making creaking noises as we flew down the other side, I was making motions with the steering wheel like I was in control, but for most of the way down we were in Kamikazei mode. A total silence reigned for quite awhile after that hill.

“You know, I don't think we should come back this way, love. Do you?” said Jenny later.

“I dunno, love. We'll see.” I didn't have the heart to tell her I thought this was the only road.

In our further ramblings we also found a place called Taylor's Mistake. It was a large bay with sandstone cliffs on the eastern side, and the locals had cut into the sandstone and made rooms for beach batches. The way they had carved and decorated the fronts of them, there was an old English pub next door to a Russian dacha or a classic Greek structure with colonnade and entablature. They were magnificent.

We found South Island mussels and big fat pipis, which we gathered up and cooked on a sheet of tin over a fire. They were delectable. We spent a lot of happy hours at Taylor's Mistake. A local told us that the beach is quite well-known for having the first recorded shark attack in New Zealand. Jenny had just come back from a swim and was quietly freaking out at this bit of information. I had no fear, as I did all my swimming in the bath tub.

Jenny decided that our next stop should be Invercargill at the bottom of the South Island. I was told that the place was on the edge of the Arctic Circle and that we were
guaranteed to see all four seasons in one day. Oh yeah, I thought. Kiwi humour again. In fact, their hottest day was a four-coat, six-underpants and two-pair-of-jeans day. We rented a place that going by the rent must formerly have been occupied by royalty or millionaires. But then again, it could have been the unrestricted view over the railway yards that made it so prestigious. Not everyone has the chance to listen to or ponder on the sheer artistry of putting a train together all night!

Luck smiled on me and I got a job butchering mutton at the Alliance Meatworks. It was good money, although I didn't really have to work as we still had a good kitty. But a quid comes in handy, so I left Jenny and Sharon to it and headed off to make the family fortune.

I got a fortnight in before the missus threatened me with divorce or slow torture. So I said, “Look, if you don't like the place, just tell me.” She threw a shoe at my head, so I knew straightaway something was up her nose.

“I'd bloody kill you if I could get out of this stove,” she said. She and Sharon were sitting with their hands and feet just about buried in the oven.

“Does this mean you want me to give up a wonderful, well-paid job and move north again?” I asked innocently.

“If you don't, I'll pawn the wedding ring and throw myself at the nearest truck driver going north,” she threatened.

So next thing we were on the road, peeling off our clothes layer by layer as we got further north.

I fell in love with the west coast—the wild rugged hills and the steep rocky coastline. One day we were meandering up the coast when we ran across a truck broken down at the side of the road.

“G'day. You need a hand or something?” I asked the bloke who had his head stuck inside an ancient Fargo truck. All we could see were a pair of black shorts with white skinny legs in gumboots.

“Yeah, thanks mate, but I'm alright. Just tying a wire on the throttle link. She gives up now and then.”

That's how we ran into Bruce. Three-quarters of the west coast knew Bruce. He was a well-mannered thoroughly nice bloke, a professor of something or other, who got sick of trying to pound knowledge into young idiots. So he walked away, bought himself fifteen hundred acres of bush, and stocked it with a hundred sheep who promptly went feral. That didn't worry Bruce as he was busy cleaning out a cave to live in while he built a couple of humpys. The first had one room, the second had two rooms and was beside the creek for convenience. Then he built his two-bedroom house.

Pulling his head out from under the bonnet, he said, “She'll be right now. Come up the house and I'll put the billy on.”

I looked at Jenny, and she gave me a nod and a grin, so I said, “Lead the way.”

Well, I tell you, mate, this bloke was a human bowerbird. The whole place was absolutely choc-a-block with junk. He had little passages running from the table to the other rooms, but the junk was packed from roof to floor. You name it, it was there. He plonked two pannikans down in front of us and asked, “You on holiday?”

I gave Jenny a quick glance and she was sitting looking at the none-too-clean mug Bruce had put in front of her. I wish you could have seen the look on her face. The closest description I can get is if you imagine the matron of a hospital finding a dead dog in one of the wards.

Sharon was having great fun chucking great heaps of junk around. Jenny went to grab her but Bruce reckoned she was alright.

“I might be able to put some work your way,” he said. “Have you ever cut flax?”

“Flax? I never even heard of flax,” I said, bewildered.

“A leafy bush, growing up and down the coast. I'll show
you in the morning,” he said, taking it for granted we were staying the night. “I'll show you the humpy. It should be okay for the night. We'll give it a good clean out tomorrow.” He took a torch off the table and went out the door, me following after him and Jenny bringing up the rear, climbing into my back pocket raving about snakes. I was carrying Sharon and all I could do was tell her that she was the bloody Kiwi and she ought to know there were no snakes in New Zealand, hoping the bloke that give me that mail got it right.

The humpy was a major disaster. Six batallions of the Chinese Army would have no hope of getting my wife through that door. There was one room about twelve feet square, one wire bed of the grape-picking kind that I knew so well, a dirt floor and open hearth fire, and a sack over the window that gave it a sort of homely touch.

Sharon and I slept on the bed and Jenny slept in the car. In the morning Jenny was very luke warm, not at all impressed with my skill at boiling the billy over the open fire for tea and a wash.

“Are we going to stay here?” she said in her best regal voice. “You love it! Admit it! Anything to do with scunging around the bloody bush.”

“Well, I dunno. See what Bruce comes up with,” was all I could say lamely.

“Well, my lad, it'd better be bloody good, or we're off! Right?”

Jenny had hit the nail right on the head. I thought it was heaven—a beaut creek full of watercress right alongside the hut, yabbies like an MCG crowd at grand final time, pigs, deer and Brace's sheep in the bush, wild cattle too, he told me, the beach about five minutes away, the rocks smothered in oysters and mussels, blue cod that just leap onto a fish hook, and big flat pipis about three inches long. I could bait a double hook, set the line and in five minutes
have a couple of cod or butterfish ready for the pan. Bruce had a smoke house and was an artist at smoking fish, and they just melted in your mouth. He had a good vegie garden in as well—lettuce, tomato, cabbage, beans and peas, and silver beet. It was a bushie's heaven and Sharon took to it like a duck to water.

Bruce turned up at about ten, so we had a cup of tea then jumped in the Humber and drove about a mile up the road.

“That's it,” Bruce said, pointing to a flat area covered in clumps of leafy green bush with big flat leaves about five foot long on average, and a woody seed stalk in the middle of the bunch. I thought it would be much like cane to cut and I was right. The knife Bruce had was exactly like a cane knife, but about three-quarters of its size.

“We can get thirteen dollars a ton at the mill in Greymouth,” said Bruce. So we worked out a deal. I would cut and bundle it into ninety-pound bundles, for ten dollars a ton, and Bruce would pick it up and cart it into Greymouth, twenty miles up the road.

I spent the rest of the day with the file and oil stone doing up the knife and helping Jenny get the humpy livable. We cleaned out Brace's washhouse and scrubbed the copper, and I chopped a huge pile of kindling and firewood before Sharon and I could sneak off to do some fishing.

I was up at day break, and it felt good to be working the kinks out. It was the same as cutting cane—cut three long leaves, lie them on the ground at about two ends and the middle, then take an armful of leaf and swing the knife. It cut easily, but was full of brown sticky stuff that oozed out of the cut end. After about three arms full I was introduced to the black Kiwi sandfly that lived in the flax. It was a tiny thing with sharp teeth, and there were millions of them. I got totally chewed up and spat out in about ten minutes flat and danced about scratching like a demented baboon all day. I noticed, though, that wherever the brown gloop was
the flies left strictly alone. It was sticky and smelly but better than being eaten alive, so I rubbed it all over any exposed skin. It did the trick, but a swim with a bar of soap in the creek was essential every night when I knocked off.

The job got easier and with a good rhythm I could cut about three ton a day. Bundling took the time. Jenny came down to give me a hand, but the sandflies put her to flight in about two seconds flat. I was averaging forty to fifty dollars a day, which was a fair sort of brass, if I say so myself.

On the home front Jenny was enjoying it now that things were organised. She even got Bruce wearing clean gear, and he shaved and looked spiffy when he went to town. He reckoned the sheilas at the flax mill started winking at him. We were eating like kings. Bruce lent me a single-shot shot gun, and I got a pig off the back porch as it was nosing through our rubbish, and two deer and a sheep out of the kitchen window. Bruce was busy smoking some of the meat, and what he didn't smoke I salted down. With pork, beef, venison, mutton and a heap of blue cod, our larder was full and healthy. Bruce bought a bag of flour and a big tin of milk powder in town, and the water in the creek was so cold that I dug a tin into the bank. It kept our butter perfectly. All this, plus oysters and mussels, and we wanted for nothing.

Bruce told me you could eat the fat green pigeons that sat on the tree outside the hut, so every now and then when Jenny went to town I would clobber two or three and have them plucked and ready to cook by the time she got home. They are the best tucker your could ever rub across your teeth. I told Jenny they were young pheasant, or she'd have gone right off at me. She casserolled them and you had to shut all the doors and windows while they were cooking or you'd have had the whole world lining up for tea.

One night we encountered the weka, a fat little native chook, sort of a speckled brown colour, a bit like a mallee fowl. The door on the humpy didn't reach the ground—there
was a five or six inch gap under it—and this night Jenny shook me awake at some ungodly hour and said there was something in the room.

“What is it?” she quavered, grabbing me in the grip of the forty-legged centipede.

“Christ woman, I don't know. Light the bloody candle,” I said grumpily. The fire had burned down to embers, so Jenny lit the candle and I could see it was a bird of some sort. I leaned out of bed and had a grab at it. I missed and it gave a bloodcurdling screech that sent Jenny straight back under the blankets, candle and all. It was pandemonium—Sharon was yelling, the weka was squarking and I was chasing the thing all around the hut in my underwear in the freezing cold. I finally caught it and took it outside and wrung its neck.

I plucked it next morning and Jenny roasted it in the camp oven. I have eaten all sorts of chook but nothing even comes close to that weka. Bruce told us that there was a five hundred dollar fine for knocking them off, so that was our first and last weka.

We stayed with Bruce for a month, and I worked every day. Bruce would get the cheque from the mill and divide it up as soon as he got home each day. Jenny kept the money in a milk tin and sat on it like a clucky hen and gave me a terrible time about having so much money in the hut. I kept telling her “Who's about to knock it off', but she just yelled louder in my ear. So I decided to take a day off and go to town with her. I wanted to have a look at the flax mill anyway. I told Bruce we were going into Greymouth to bank our money and he was horrified.

“Put your money in a bank! They're all bloody crooks. They'll feed you a line of bull and in the blink of an eye it'll be gone. You mark my words.”