Consenting Adults II

Deeds are the Shortland Street of the certification world, with a thousand fleeting cameo characters but no depth - tantalising glimpses into strangers’ lives, yet always raising more questions than they answer. Myriad whirlwind plots spiralling through history, obscuring more than they reveal - leaving only faint traces of dreams and motivations which evaporated long ago.
In 1926, retired local farmer and Union Church stalwart Robert Ridd was granted ‘our’ section, presumably for his sons’ services during the Great War. There’s no official record of whether or not he thought it was economically viable, or what he intended doing here (worse luck), but whatever plans he may have had, they lasted less than a year. Or perhaps he did? The fact it passed through the hands of the Public Trustee before being transferred to his youngest son, George, suggests things didn’t quite go according to plan. It’s all idle speculation (or educated guessing), of course, but it’s not as though George wanted the land, because he wasted no time in flogging it off to Wedderburn farmer Benjamin Waller. (In fact, young George must surely have set a new land ownership speed record - his reign containing precisely those sixty minutes between 10.15am and 11.15am on 11th May, 1927!)
What Benjamin Waller actually did here also remains a mystery, but he certainly must have been attached to the place, because it remained in his hands until 1949. Did he live on the site? Was he married? None of this information is on the Deed, though again, mention of a house would have been helpful. What we do know, is that he had three sons (John, Lawrence and Norman) who attended Millers Flat school from 1927 (thanks to the Millers Flat School Centennial 1886-1986 booklet), so he must have lived somewhere in the area. It could have been here, but the Wallers are no longer answering questions.
The new owner, Norman Mosley, another local farmer, sold it in 1955 to Allan Walter, a local farm labourer, who held onto it for 13 years before passing it to a local shearer, Charles Cassidy, who in turn sold it to Edgar Wilson, a Mataura electrician. And, of course, Edgar Wilson had eventually sold it to us.
Nobody famous had ever owned it. No famous event had ever unfolded on its stage ... unless you count one of New Zealand’s earliest unsolved murders... and I suppose you could ... now that I come to think of it ...
Who murdered Yorky? may not have all the romantic undertones of that other famous local question Who was Somebody’s Darling? but it’s a famous mystery nonetheless. Described in historical reports as a grey-haired, weatherbeaten man of quiet, inoffensive habits but with a liking for strong liquor (in other words, a typical example of ruralfolkus simplex), his true identity has also never been established. (It seems rural New Zealand hasn’t changed much since the 1860’s. It’s still a popular place for nobodys who want to pretend they’re somebody else, and somebodys who want to forget who they once were. Strangers and the totally strange live side-by-side, no questions asked. The ‘locals’ are just as happy to call you Mother Teresa as Axe-murderer, it’s your choice, as long as they don’t have to call you local.) Anyway, Yorky established a tent store here on the Minzion, trading mostly with the miners from the Horseshoe Bend diggings, and had prospered sufficiently to own two horses.
In March 1863 (exactly 100 years before my birth... which must have some significance), one of his horses fell into a hole and a passing stranger helped in the rescue. (Has anything changed? The pot-holes at the Minzion bridge are still big enough for a horse to fall into... not to mention an entire wagon and bullock team! And it’s still more likely you’ll get assistance from the local “Eh? Eh?” than the AA.) A grateful Yorky invited him to stay, and they were later seen drinking together in the tent. A few days later, Yorky’s battered body was found dumped into the Minzion. His tent had been stripped, goods scattered and the horses stolen. Reports of a man riding hard towards Dunedin and leading another horse inspired Walter Miller to set off in hot pursuit. But the villain eluded him, and disappeared without trace. And so Yorky had the dubious distinction of not only being the area’s first murder victim, but being the first person buried at Millers Flat cemetery (though nobody ever bothered to carve an epitaph for him!).
Back to our mystery though ...
Our section had changed hands seven times, yet few details remained of the boxful of lives it had in some way affected. If a single somebody had lived here, or been born here, or even died here, their memory would saturate every stone... here is where she invented fire... this is the clod of dirt he threw at the Prime Minister... But what do we ever know of the lives of ‘nobodys’? Would Alexander have been so great without the man who trimmed his beard, the woman who massaged his feet, or the million not-so-great people who did such great jobs dealing with the mundane so he could focus on just being great? Who are these ‘great’ people anyway? Did they really live great lives, or did they simply respond greatly in a moment when there was no choice but to be great... or to be dead? Of course their lives should be recorded, celebrated even, but are the contents of their breakfast bowls more important than the contents of a million other existences? There can be no extraordinary achievements without a million ordinary achievements. Every life has something of value to impart - memories of joy and sorrow, triumph and despair - because each life is unique. The lives of ‘normal’ people, ‘average’ people who have lead ‘everyday’ lives, are as great, in their own way, as any life - as inconsequential as every life. Yet their thoughts, deeds, loves, sacrifices, struggles and successes are reduced to a single line on a Deed, a name on a monument, a faded photo in a yearbook and a lichen-scoured scrawl across a crumbling wedge of stone.
What did we actually know of the history of our section? Apart from the chain of ownership stretching back to 1926 - nothing. We had a few names of long departed men, their occupations (at least their stated occupations, after all, I’m certainly not an ‘orchard worker’, and I doubt Marion would claim her occupation to be ‘married woman’), details of mortgages, and the indecipherable signatures of a handful of lawyers. (Is a group of lawyers a clutch?)
But the owners, and occupiers, hadn’t passed entirely unnoticed. They had left their footprints in the soil and fragments of their lives had stuck to the wheels of local history. There was Yorky. There were rumours of a shack in the bottom paddock swept away during one of the great floods. Claims that the first electricity (in the area, of course... even local fables have limits. Though by the same token, Roxburgh does claim to have had the first unsubstantiated telephone - well, two telephones actually ­- in the country after a local station owner met Alexander Graham Bell on a ship and ... and speaking of telephones, Marion had never even heard of Mister Bell - except as the title of a not-quite-famous Sweet song in the ‘70s - until we met. For her, and 79 million other Germans, it’ll always be Phillip Reis’s amazing shower interrupter. According to the Lexicon of German Gee-Whizardry, Herr Reis - who hailed from Marion’s hometown and has a number of streets named after him, which must mean something - had already joined God’s partyline when old AG was barely out of diapers, and yet both entries proclaim them simply as “inventor of the telephone”... though in German, of course. How could they both invent the telephone? Did AGB invent the second telephone ... or the engaged signal? English encyclopedias don’t even mention Phil, which seems a tad unfair, and also doesn’t help clear up the mystery. Though, in context, I suppose it’s not a very important mystery anyway. Not as important as the first electricity which, as I was saying...) was possibly generated on the site to power a gold dredge. Others spoke of a house burnt to the ground.
It was little more than hearsay really, though some physical evidence did exist. Old clay bricks and fragments of glass and porcelain scattered like teeth where a ravenous Minzion had gnawed on its banks. Jagged fins of steel slicing through the earth like an ancient rusty shark scavenging through the silt of history. A small concrete block keeping faithful vigil beside a large hollow. Something had happened, but the witnesses remained silent. The proof remained elusive - concrete blocks, but no concrete evidence.
So, we lied ...