An awesomely amazing time spent going down every metal roadin Northland, and surfing in desolate, awesomely beautiful spots like Henderson Bay and Whananaki South. I become obsessed with a book by Jane Mander called The Story of a New Zealand River,
written in 1920. I picked it up at the Kauri Museum in Matakohe. It
explains so much of the New Zealand psyche from the point of European
settlement. I decide to make the search for Pukekaroro – the Kaipara settlement
in which the book takes place – my mission in life. Based on the descriptions
in the novel and a handy map of Northland, I make my attempt. It was fruitless,
save for a guesstimation that a particular State Highway 1 bridge near the
turnoff to Maungaturoto by the concrete factory may indeed span over the particular river I was looking
for. I finally get some local input at the Maungaturoto Hotel. Walking into the
beer-soaked tavern I ask a couple of old men where I can find Pukekaroro. They
kind of look at me like I’ve lost my marbles. Anyway, a few minutes later I was
on a metal road, high up on a ridge overlooking a large tidal river.
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| The scene now at Pukekaroro. No kauris, just farmland. |
As I took
in the sweep of crests and valleys surrounding the river, I felt a real kinship
with the women of the novel, and Jane Mander herself, who pulled no punches in
getting to the dislocating core of what it must have been like for the first
British settlers coming to this land. I could identify, in a way, with what
they would have faced and how, coming in fits and starts, they would have dealt
with each other’s varying degrees of familiarity with New Zealand and their
methods of coping once on the ground. It was a kind of healing journey in which
I began to understand just that little bit more my own New Zealand experience
over the last 6 years. I also began to understand just how different New Zealanders are to Canadians. It marked the beginning of an interesting time for me, when I actually started to see New Zealand as it truly is, and not just as the beautiful, natural playground filled with affable, affluent people that I’d built it up to be.
I went on to Kaiwaka, once
a major Kaipara logging town that also features in the book. These places are
now among the struggling and declining. I left a part of myself in the Kaipara,
and on a clear day I can see its western coast from Muriwai Beach, where I
currently reside. Muriwai is not unlike the beach that features in Jane
Campion’s The Piano, a film that
rocked my world when it came out, and rumoured to be based on the Jane Mander
novel.
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| The Piano It's not surprising that many of us hit a wrong key when we first encounter something new. |
One of my favourite excerpts from the novel is a rather
withering (and post-colonially ironic) cultural critique of Auckland via the
alibi of the nineteenth-century boarding-house:
“Ah, a sort of fifth-rate Bloomsbury atmosphere, with
everything, from your soul to your washing, under the eyes of the landlady. I
know. Demoralizing! It would take the sense of adventure out of anybody. And I
should imagine that a New Zealand boarding house without English service would
be like a bed without a matress.” (Jane Mander, The Story of a New Zealand River, 52)
The experience of dealing with recruitment agents and others
with respect to my employment prospects in New Zealand rather bore out the
sentiment. At the end of the day one should keep in mind that there are many
self-declared “gatekeepers” in New Zealand (aka Auckland), most of whom are
less than one generation off the farm. Their attitude is incomprehensible if
you come from, let’s say, an “older”, “more advanced” society, or can’t point
to a single farm-labourer on any branch of your family tree until, say, prior
to the Industrial Revolution.
Nevertheless, I did not understand my own snobbery or
feelings of alienation in New Zealand until I read Jane Mander’s The Story of a New Zealand River. Still
less did I undersand (barring some personality quirks) my New Zealand man one iota. Falling in love with a Kiwi in Toronto
was the easy part. Arriving in New Zealand, all those years ago, decked out in
my corsets, stays, and heavy floor-length velvet skirts with my trousseau of post-colonial
standards and expectations was another.
From my personal journal:
“Moving to New Zealand from Canada represents ‘dropping
out’, much like moving from Toronto to BC is ‘dropping out’. From Toronto one culturally
‘upgrades’ to New York or London. One does not ‘upgrade’ by moving to Auckland
or NZ. One falls, ever so gently, down a colonial shaft, the final blow
cushioned by perks like surfing, spectacular views, and a laid-back lifestyle.
But one endures a ‘come down’ in every other respect. It is the reason why, in
negotiating restaurant menus, in dying of cold and critters in damp,
uninsulated and inadequately heated houses, in dealing with wrong-headed PR and
business practices, in suffering the silly attitudes of the nouveau-nouveau
riche in various rustic settings, one feels like a total alien, on the one hand
insulted and on the other amused by people who would be absolutely eaten for
lunch in New York or London … or even in Toronto. Of course I’m talking about a
certain ‘class’ of NZer here. Canadians are rather more secure regarding their
spot in the cultural food chain. Mostly. Unless you’re talking Yorkville,
Rosedale, North Toronto, or the Beaches. But all the collective OEs in the
world won’t change the tragic, antipodean poseur
… permanently engaged in a fight for first-issue ‘overseas’ magazines and the
latest ‘manchester’ that no longer comes from Manchester. As one acquaintance
from a very, very old culture put it: a nation of adolescents with an
adolescent identity crisis.”
The true moral of the story, and the last words, are fittingly provided by Jane Mander:
"She had learned, perhaps too soon, that lives are not finished performances, or any series of rounded-off experiences, but a flow of endings dovetailing into fresh beginnings, of abortive experiments, of searches, of reachings out after alluring signs, of retreats, hurts, and disillusionments, the whole apparently bound by a cohesive thread, sometimes lost sight of, a thread that seems to lead somewhere, but about which no wise man will dogmatise." (Jane Mander, The Story of a New Zealand River, 477-8)
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