Consenting Adults III

Our section was uneconomic - that was true. It had always been uneconomic. Yet it had its own history. A separate history. Granting planning consent would have absolutely no further implications for the District Plan because our section was unique. It would never be economically viable, and who wanted an uneconomic section? Apart from us ... nobody. (Which was at least morally true.)
Plus, (and here was the clincher) we had established a residential precedent (or was that a presidential recedent?). Previous owners had lived here. There had been a house on the site in the not-too-distant past. The evidence was circumstantial, but overwhelming (at least to us), so we had no real qualms about citing all the hearsay and rumour as confirmed fact. We even went so far as to state categorically that the residence had burnt to the ground in 1969. (Which wasn’t really a lie, because someone had ‘remembered’ that year as the possible year the probable home might have burnt down ... or something similar.)
So, we argued, the best use (in fact, the only use) to be made of the section, given its damnable unviability, would be to allow us to live there. It may not alter its viability, but it’d certainly alter its value ... its rate-able value.
It certainly sounded logical to us.
So we submitted our mini saga, along with a rough drawing of the type of open-plan home we were contemplating, and crossed our fingers. The decision was going to take up to three months - they needed to get an independent report, send copies of our proposal to half the population (including any landowner with property bordering on our section, or even with just a view of our section, our neighbours, the previous owners, seven famous New Zealanders with moustaches, anyone who might one day conceivably pass by our section, as well as setting up an Internet Website), produce a half-hour television documentary about our proposal, wait for submissions (and ratings), bring the issue up at a meeting of the UN Security Council, send a special envoy to China to negotiate the lifting of their veto (in return for dismantling the Human Rights Commission and the repatriation of Taiwan), write their own report, have it vetted by an international panel of economists, have us vetted by Interpol and McDonalds, find their stamp, employ PR consultants and graphic artists to redesign their stamp, resolve a demarcation dispute over who should use the new stamp, apply for a permit reference number, stamp the consent register, register the consent stamping ... then send it to us - so until then, there was nothing for us to do except uncross our fingers and submerge ourselves once again in the stagnant waters of orchard-world.
It wasn’t a thought I particularly treasured, but there were few options. We didn’t need the money, but we didn’t not need it either. Assuming we were given planning consent, there was still the whole building consent process to withstand, which made it unlikely that we’d be able to actually do anything on our property until well after the next apple season. So six months waiting around spending money could just as easily be six months earning money. Not that we were likely to earn much. Orchard work is notoriously poorly paid (in fact, according to my unofficial English-Orchardese dictionary, the correct translation of minimum wage is maximum wage), especially once a number of exacerbating factors are considered, for example the associated long-term health problems (including chronic back problems, Roundupitis, alcoholism and cerebral atrophy), the complete absence of job security (whenever possible, staff are employed under casual contracts which allow instant dismissal, unpaid layoffs at the owner’s whim and no holiday or extra pay ... to name but a few standard clauses), the absence even of wage security (hourly rates having been progressively replaced by contract rates which require a full day’s work under normal conditions to guarantee even minimum wage standards), and the general disregard for employees’ rights (while their wrongs remain punishable by extreme measures).
But poor pay and bad conditions never deterred us. We’d certainly worked in worse jobs (drilling holes in door handles is one occupation which gives new meaning to the term boring), for worse employers (the wife of a certain Bavarian restaurant owner who divided ‘her’ employees into two categories - those who coveted what was down her dirndl, and those whose lives she made a misery ... that is, us - springs immediately to mind), under worse conditions (working the night-shift making rubber chicken-pluckers on the Ramat Hakovesh Kibbutz is definitely no picnic), and for far less money (25 Punt and 7 pints - of milk, that is - per week is low even by Irish standards), yet we’d always managed to somehow come out ahead. Bad conditions were a ‘learning experience’.
No matter how poorly paid the job, we somehow always managed to put aside at least one pay packet per week. That was how we’d saved for our home. That was how we’d financed our travels. We were an efficient team - earning the wages of two people, yet living as just one. So three months of orchard work, followed by another three months picking (this time as seasoned professionals ...) wasn’t to be dismissed lightly, despite my reservations (though you certainly don’t need reservations to work on an orchard ... nor, for that matter, do you need orchards to work on reservations). Besides, if we didn’t work, we’d have nowhere to stay.
As the tedious process of thinning began, staff numbers began to swell more quickly than the fruit, and we realised the two spare bedrooms in ‘our’ house weren’t going to be spare for long. If we didn’t want to spend the next six months listening to AC-DC surrounded by greasy dishes and the smell of freshly burnt meat, with a freezer full of frozen pies, short-and-curlies plugging the shower, stubble spores in the basin and cigarette butts bobbing beneath Toilet Duck waves, we would have to begin to actively recruit.
Unfortunately, suitable applicants were as scarce as seat-belts on Saturday night. We wanted pleasant, clean and considerate people to share our living space with, but orchard workers are only sometimes pleasant, seldom clean, rarely considerate, and often barely even people! Of course there were exceptions, like us. But an orchards’ insatiable appetite for workers willing to endure the stinks and sorrows without making an outrageous fortune, means they’ll literally employ anyone, regardless of personality, hygiene standards, criminal records or work permit deficiencies. Sometimes this translates into a cosmopolitan melange of itinerant eccentrics, students and foreign ‘travellers’.
More often than not, the bulk of the workforce look like escapees from the asylum for social inepts and the terminally maladjusted. (The workforce composition follows a cyclical pattern dictated by the whims of government social policies. Because an inexperienced, married apple-picker is unlikely to earn much more than the dole, it’s scarcely an attractive proposition for the unemployed - especially once stand-downs and relocation costs are calculated.
This understandable reluctance to swap a secure state-funded income for the insecurity of a physically-and-mentally-debilitating temporary job, creates a serious deficiency in the pool of available workers. Rather than enticing legal workers by increased remuneration, orchardists dip further into the reserve of illegal workers. It’s a traditionally tolerated practice, because even illegal workers pay their taxes, and short of trucking in forced work gangs from the cities, there are never enough casual workers in the agriculture sector. Not that the idea of loading the unemployed onto goods wagons and transporting them to forced labour camps is in any way abhorrent to employment service bureaucrats in principle ... it’s the logistics which generally prove unworkable.
Gradually the balance shifts too far - illegal workers are an attractive proposition because they’re often far less trouble and far more amenable, and they don’t cost any more either. So the government responds by stemming the flow of illegal workers by demanding passports to be sent with applications for tax numbers or random inspections, and stimulating the flow of legal workers by reducing benefits, decreasing stand-downs or simply blatant coercion. Of course, there are never enough legal workers, so the rules are soon relaxed and the orchardists again dip further into the pool of illegal workers ....)
In the end we had very little (ie no) input into the make-up of our living arrangements. We returned from work one afternoon to find three strangers installed in what had been our home for the past four months. Of course we had nothing to really complain about. After all, we’d been treated amazingly well from the first day we’d turned up at the cookshop (the orchard bunkhouse) door. First we’d shared Pine Tree Corner with two friends while the cookshop had been literally overflowing with twenty-five souls, then the Clutha Road house by ourselves. But a home is still a home, regardless of the circumstances, and we somehow felt ourselves violated by this sudden intrusion.
Luckily, though, our three new flatmates turned out to be young students from Dunedin, and all roughly fitted our profile. Not that we had much in common, but Saskia, Robert and Nigel were enjoyable, trouble-free company, and the next month passed without incident. (Though in the state of mind I was in, an alien invasion would have barely qualified as an incident. I knew working was the logical thing to do, perhaps the only thing to do, but that didn’t make it any easier. The only thing which inspired me was building our home. Everything else was just filling in time, or worse, wasting time. I wanted to explore our land, to sit on our rocks and dream about our future. I wanted to start planning and digging and hammering and sawing - I didn’t want to pull apple embryos off trees! The shining future still glimmered on the horizon - the achingly close horizon, the unbearably distant horizon - but we were adrift in a dark bureaucrasea, and all we could do was tread water until the tide changed, or the currents dragged us onto its pitiless reefs.) We thinned, we ate, we slept, hot afternoons we sat in the cool Minzion spas or swam in the still blackness of Pinders Pond... and we waited.

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 ...

Chapter Two - Consenting Adults I

We now had somewhere to live. But owning a suitable property and wanting to live there doesn’t necessarily mean you’re allowed to live there ... as we soon discovered.
Rule Number One when buying a section (or anything else, for that matter) is to check it out thoroughly. Even if it all seems straightforward. Even if the owners seem like genuine people. Even if your trusty gut-feeling is telling you everything’s just plain wonderful. Because that insignificant, inconsequential dotted line running through your section might just be a paper road everyone (well, nearly everyone) has forgotten about, and it’ll be no use berating your neighbour when he turns up demanding right of way with his thousand head of cattle. Because those genuine, salt-of-the-earth people might have forgotten about the mineral rights they’d sold to the local goldmining company (not that they ever expected anyone to actually use them), and it’ll be no use issuing trespass notices when goldminers start excavating under your garage.
A title search carried out by a reliable independent lawyer should uncover any historical anomaly or troublesome technicality which could otherwise create future havoc or generally interfere with your hard-won peaceful rural existence. The more you know about the property (having it all in writing is a bonus), the less traumatic future dealings with neighbours and others will be. It’s better to be fully aware of all matters relating to access, boundaries, rights and obligations before you sign anything, than after. And no matter how many times you wander over the property, no matter how many locals you talk to, no matter how many hours you spend discussing technicalities with the owners, nothing is going to give you a clearer picture of exactly what it is you’re buying than a title search.
That’s the theory anyway. But neither Marion nor I have ever been gifted rule followers. Actually, that’s not entirely accurate. I must confess my instinctive reaction is often, still, to obey instructions to the letter, and without question. Conformity has always been my family’s catchcry, and my childhood was one of unthinking obedience to authority of any description. Do as you’re told. Don’t stand out. Conform. Yessir, nosir, threebagsfullsir... So my rebelliousness isn’t so much emotional as intellectual. I’m willing to believe most instructions are largely accurate until proven otherwise. I’m no stickler. Rather, I assume any rule, instruction, direction, command, decree or ordinance has some degree of inherent flexibility.
Marion, on the other hand, is a complete natural. Even something as innocuous as a recipe is treated with scant respect. Laws are, at most, simply rough guidelines to what she could do. Speed limits are mere suggestions. And as for those other million-and-one regulations designed to maintain order in an ever-more-complicated and chaotic world, well, they might be well-meaning, but people can’t really be expected to pay any attention to them, can they? It’s not that Marion wantonly sets out to rebel and disobey and ignore and disregard such minor impediments, it’s just that she can’t see the point.
Needless to say, we never bothered to undertake a title search. After all, our gut-instinct was ­telling us everything was plum dandy, and the Wilsons were such genuine people ... Within minutes of embarking on our very first foray into property ownership, we’d already broken Rule Number One. But at least we’d started as we intended to go on.
Perhaps, in hindsight (what a huge leap forward if we could somehow learn to make use of hindsight in advance!), we acted with a degree of arrogance. We took it for granted that if we wanted to live there, everything would somehow work out, regardless of bureaucracy, rules or technicalities. In our defence, it all seemed so right, that we were simply overwhelmed by our enthusiasm and didn’t stop to consider any other possibility. Maybe we just didn’t want to find out anything which might deter us from proceeding.
The property was zoned Rural A. We knew that before we bought the place. But, being born-and-bred city folk (not to mention foreigners in this strange land), we had no concept of what this implied, and certainly didn’t take the time to discover the legal ramifications of such a zoning. After all, there were houses dotted along the roadside the entire route from the village, so nobody could possibly object to one more house, could they?
Unfortunately, the COD Council did object. (Central Otago District Council, that is, though COD Council seems more appropriate, since there’s always something distinctly fishy about local government.) The District Plan was a simple though somewhat free-spirited creature, easily led astray by the lewd promises of slick townies. In order to maintain its integrity, the council, as its sole guardian, had opted for a strict prevention strategy ... shotgun weddings just not being their style. A Rural A zoning provided for the “erection of a dwelling house only where such dwelling is accessory to agriculture, horticulture or forestry.” And although our house would make a lovely accessory to any activity, we certainly weren’t planning on being farmers, orchardists or foresters.
We could have exaggerated a little (well, a lot) and claimed to be wildly enthusiastic about all three (which wouldn’t have been totally false, because we were certainly planning on dabbling in a bit of everything). But that still wouldn’t get us over the first hurdle. In order to get planning consent, we had to prove the property was a viable economic unit.
The first part we had no problems with. Life would be entirely viable there - in terms of quality, if not always quantity.
The last part was also a cinch. The property was certainly a unit.
It was the middle bit that was the killer. Economic? Define economic! Living there was undoubtedly going to do wonders for our personal economy - the degree of self-sufficiency theoretically attainable limited only by our own insufficiencies. In the broader sense, the COD-sense, we needed more. The ability (and desire) to provide for our needs was irrelevant. We needed, first and foremost, to provide for society’s needs. If we were to be permitted to live on our section, we needed to prove we could convert each clod of soil into sufficient wealth to meet the needs of a growing economy (calculated using the formula - dollars/arable square metres x pesticide/fertiliser quotient divided by CPI-adjusted per capita GDP + 7). Proving that, was virtually impossible.
Of course, we could have lied. The section’s not flat enough (or rock-free enough) for intensive agriculture? It is if you’re buying the ultimate hill-hugging, rock-crunching cultivator tractor from an obscure (though highly innovative) Chinese manufacturer. Five acres isn’t enough for commercial orchards or forests? It is if you’re pioneering the country’s first ginseng plantation or a new strain of hardwoods which only take one year to mature. It wouldn’t be our fault if, once we were comfortably ensconced in our new home, nothing much ever eventuated. The mythical manufacturer might just have gone into receivership (happens all the time), or those dodgy rootstock suppliers might have ripped us off (happens every now and then). Of course we’d love to discuss it further, but it’s all sub judice, you know, and we don’t want to prejudice our court case. Hopefully it doesn’t drag on for too many years ...
We could have lied. But we didn’t. We had nothing to be ashamed of, we just wanted to live there. We didn’t care about economic viability, and we didn’t understand why it should be at all relevant to our plans. Marion and I were both intelligent, creative and industrious people - we’d manage to make a living somehow. At the moment we had enough money put aside to allow us the luxury of spending the next year building our own home. We’d think about economic viability then.
Our argument was solid. We had the right to live on our property. We’d established a secure beachhead on the moral and ethical high ground. We didn’t need to lie ... and we didn’t think they’d believe us anyway.
So, despite our enthusiasm for our section and our determination to live there, unless we could prove it was an economically viable unit (which it most certainly wasn’t), we were sunk.
To paraphrase my grandfather (and plagiarise the homoeopathic tenet) - whatever causes the problem can usually cure it. (In the strict sense he was an uneducated man, having left a tumultuous schooling early to become an itinerant roustabout working the vast stations of outback Queensland during the Depression. But his varied and challenging life had fostered a unique brand of bush wisdom mixed with a common-sense approach. He was never very big on reading, and I doubt he’d ever met a homoeopathist, so I’m quite sure this maxim wasn’t consciously garnered from any secondary source. Besides, its roots stretched back to his ringbarking years when he’d ‘cured’ himself of a particularly aggressive skin rash by burning brigalow bark and rubbing the ashes into the broken skin, not only relieving the itch, but preventing any further recurrence.) Economic viability was the disease, so therein must also lie the remedy.
The council had declared our section terminally uneconomic. All traditional treatments had failed, and the prognosis was bleak. They wanted to pull the plug, but we begged more time. Our only hope lay in pursuing an alternative, homoeopathic approach. And the only thing we really had to go on, were the Deeds.

Love at first site II

How did I come to live here? Planning seems to have had little to do with it, though there were distinct moments when planning proved indispensable. Coincidence implies too much detachment and too little effort, though often coincidence seems like the only word to describe the chain of events which brought me here. And Fate seems far too grandiose, though often I have felt Fate was the only explanation for the result of so much (or so little) planning and coincidence. In reality, it was all three, plus another thousand words which only a better Thesaurus than mine could possibly do justice to.
But which thread should I pull out first?
Where did the story of finding this site, of building this life, truly begin?
Was it the day Roger Metcalf responded to the ad we placed in the Molyneux Mail and invited us to view his house down by the river? Our ad appeared on October 30, 1990, sandwiched between an ad for old-fashioned roses at $3.50 each, and one suggesting winter sportspersons should keep fit by playing golf during the summer -

WANTED TO BUY
We are looking for a place to live in
the Clutha Valley. Our IDEAL place
would be an old cottage (in any con-
dition on a few acres (if possible
with trees and not flat) either down
by the Clutha River or up in the hills,
a ‘bit away from things’.
so if you have or know of anything
like it or close to it OR just a NICE
piece of land, please let us know.
Contact Kyle & Marion
c/- Bengerview Tearooms

We were permanent ‘temporary’ workers on Con van der Voort’s orchard in Ettrick at the time - permanent in the sense that we were employed on a long-term basis; temporary in that our conditions of employment were of the no-work-no-pay variety - and in the middle of the annual lull. Pruning and tying down had finished, but thinning hadn’t yet started. Which was fine by us, because it left plenty of time available for what we considered to be our real job - finding a home.
Of course the ad wasn’t our first course of action.
We’d already been to every real estate agent from Roxburgh to Lawrence, but without success. Perhaps it was only my imagination, but after taking a tiki tour around the area with the Roxburgh agent, we began to believe the only details real estate agents listened to were those with a dollar sign in front. He showed us 10 or so properties - all guaranteed bargains! - from sprawling old villas to near-new Lockwoods, postage-stamp downtown sections to barren hillsides, some obviously for sale, others just-as-obviously happily inhabited, though our shiny-eyed guide cared naught for such distinctions, living, as he was, in his imaginary world of perpetually migrating herds of buyers and sellers. His selections followed no logical pattern, but they did have one thing in common ... a total lack of resemblance to anything we’d described. Despite our best efforts to narrow the search by pointing out any property which vaguely fitted our parameters, our quest became progressively surreal. If Windsor Castle had suddenly loomed ahead, rather than exhibiting surprise, the agent would have simply asserted he personally knew the owners were thinking of selling, and that it was exactly what we were looking for ... if we were willing to spend just a little more ...
In hindsight, our big mistake was showing at least some willingness to budge from our original “limit” of $35,000. At the time, flexibility seemed a virtue. After all, we didn’t want any self-imposed boundaries to get in the way of possibly acquiring our dream house and/or section. But flexibility is a word guaranteed to light up an agent’s face, because if you’re willing to do the house-hunting limbo, an agent is only too happy to keep lowering that bar until you’re dragging yourself through the mud. Flexibility is a weakness, and real estate agents can sniff out weaknesses with frightening alacrity. (Do once-normal people learn this skill at real estate school, or is it people with some dubious intuitive talent who drift naturally into jobs selling real estate or used cars?) In the agent’s mind, our ‘limit’ quickly became little more than a rough guideline for a possible deposit as he played upon our desire not to appear totally naive (“$35,000? Of course you realise this is going to be the next big boom area, right? All the clever buyers are looking for properties with ‘development potential’. In a couple of years you could double your investment ...”), or stingy (“It’d really break my heart to see anyone forced to sell their property for so little. They couldn’t even buy a parking space in Dunedin for $35,000 ...”), or just plain stupid (“Everyone knows there just aren’t any sections smaller than 30 hectares anymore. And you want a house as well ...?”). But in our defence, it wasn’t our fault. We were young. We were inexperienced. And, worst of all, we truly believed agents were there to help us!
Before resorting to agents, we’d tried scouting around for a place on our own, with just as little success, though with much less stress. We spent every spare moment prowling every highway and by-way and my way in Central Otago. We no longer just drove to Alexandra or Dunedin, we detoured there, eventually arriving at some unGodly hour with only an extra digit on our speedo to show for our efforts. Every drive was a major expedition, but that was nothing new. Every drive in our vomit-green Commer van (ex-Post Office, circa 1961) was an expedition. The van had been ‘converted’ into a replica campervan by someone who probably never intended it to be used as a campervan. (Perhaps it’s some indication of the general unsightliness of the machine that its previous owners nicknamed it Fugly - short for fucking ugly - a name which has stuck, for better or worse.) It had a sleeping alcove, though after one night inside Marion referred to it as “the coffin” and refused to sleep there anymore. It was fully wired with romantic lighting (two desk lamps) and conveniently-located powerpoints (behind the curtains), though we only managed to get plugged-in once (most motorcamps having strange obsessions about certificates and warrants) and promptly blew up the camp’s fusebox. In fairness, though it wasn’t built by a craftsman, it was, at least, intended to last. The owner had gone to great lengths to ensure all the fittings were solid. No flimsy, fandangled modern materials for him! He’d chosen only the best in 3/4 inch chipboard able to withstand the weight of a minor elephant herd. Unfortunately, the combined weight of the interior fittings was probably equal to a minor elephant herd, so the van was never ‘nippy’. But it did have a powerful low gear that could take us almost anywhere, and it ensured we maintained a leisurely progress. The petrol fumes leaking into the cabin encouraged us to keep our driving hours to a minimum, and we never had to worry about breaking the speed limit ... not even in the city. (In fact, if we were snapped by a speed camera, we could probably get copies printed before we’d reached the end of the main street.)
In the process of searching for anything remotely fitting our requirements, we’d become well acquainted with every nice house and/or section in the general vicinity. We’d investigated every derelict stone ruin or barn, climbing through acres of gorse, brambles and barbed wire, as well as braving dogs, bulls and irate tractors. We stood for hours scanning barren hillsides with binoculars, searching for a glimmer of a For Sale sign or an abandoned shack on which we could make an offer. At times the only thing which kept us persevering was an obscure mathematical formula which stated : no agents = no commission.
No matter how much we searched, we never found anything to compare with the house which had largely been responsible for bringing us back to this area ...
Six months earlier, towards the end of our first apple-picking season, we’d joined a few other pickers on a short tour of the local area, and had “discovered” our dream house - an old stone cottage by the Clutha, just around the corner from the Lonely Graves. At the time we hadn’t even considered living in the area, so there was really no consideration given to finding out more about it. As we headed back to Ettrick, we couldn’t help but imagine living there. It was such an idyllic location with character oozing from every stone. If we could one day find a house like that in a location like that ...
As we reached the turnoff back to Millers Flat, we halted for a few minutes to scavenge for walnuts from the two trees we’d spied in a paddock on the way. There’s no food as tasty as free roadside food (especially when there’s a sign which reads “You take my nuts, I’ll take yours!”), but in this case there was no food. And that ended our brief sojourn in Millers Flat.
By the end of the season, Marion was already talking about staying in the area.
“After all,” she argued, “there’s always work if we need it, the weather’s good, we already know a few people, and land is cheap.”
All good arguments, but I wasn’t convinced. It all seemed a little too rushed.
“We haven’t seen the rest of the country yet,” I argued in return. “And don’t you think it’s a bit far from the city? And sure there’s work, but is that really kind of work we want?”
So we decided to continue our travels through the country. But instead of resuming our tandem tour, we loaded everything into Fugly and headed west. And although we had our adventures (such as slipping backwards down a steep dirt road in the middle of a wet night after missing the entrance to a friend’s secret hide-away ...) and made some important discoveries about the van (like - our handbrake doesn’t work very well, as we began slipping backwards down a steep dirt road in the middle of a wet night after missing the entrance to a friend’s secret hide-away ... or our turning circle is somewhat wider than State Highway One ... or it’s difficult to find reverse gear when the front of the van is teetering on the edge of S.H.1 and there’s a police car approaching wondering who’s blocking the lane ... or look our gearstick is only attached by a single strand of Sellotape ...), about New Zealand (like - the relationship between latitude and barbecues ... or between rest areas and dope-smoking ... and that when a sign recommends taking a corner at 35 km/h, it’s a good idea to listen ...), about New Zealanders (like - the further north you travel, the more “Australian” they seem ... or that four policemen are equivalent to one misplaced reverse gear ... or that Keri-Keri house-sitters are expected to not only clean the pool, feed the animals and mow the lawns, but to look after the owners’ son, and be willing to pay for the privilege ...), and about ourselves (like - we don’t want to house-sit in Keri-Keri ... or we’re not team players, especially when the team is contract kiwi-picking and the team’s earnings are to be divided equally between us and every member of the extended Maori family who completed our team, from the father who spends the day slumped over the mini-tractor, the grandmother who has to stop every ten minutes to adjust her pacemaker, and the swarms of children who carry each kiwifruit to the bin individually, with their hovering mother ever-present to help ease their burdens ...), all-in-all, it was a very subdued trip. A gloom descended upon us as we left Ettrick, and it wasn’t to lift until we returned six weeks later.
Perhaps it was just a normal end-of-season downer. Every day for three months we’d circumnavigated a one-kilometre square piece of dirt which was, for all intents and purposes, our entire universe. Its four outposts were our accommodation, the orchard, the shop and the pub, and the soap-opera world of seasonal apple-pickers quietly unfolding within its borders was our entire life. Suddenly it was over. The last apple was picked. We were free. But like the wretched dog which padded dusty circles in the shed beside our house, we’d become tethered to this highway-straddling apple-factory by its specious familiarity and false camaraderie. Here life was simple, know-able. Here there were people and parties and work and conversations and laughter. We didn’t want to be alone. Being alone was suddenly unfamiliar, frightening.
Perhaps it had something to do with the strain which had developed between us as the season wore on. A strain which first manifested itself in Dunedin when we spent three weeks with Christiaan, a Dutch cyclist, and Wendy, a Canadian, having bonfires on the beach, bodysurfing in St Clair’s angry sea, cycling, eating, talking and relaxing. The first week we stayed to reward ourselves for our efforts. The second week we stayed because Christiaan and Wendy were discovering life-altering things about each other behind the closed flap of Christiaan’s tent. And the third week we stayed because we’d decided to join Christiaan (and Mads, a Danish cyclist) picking apples in Ettrick For me it was all too long, too close, too intense. For Marion it was simply heaven. For both of us, it was a presager of things to come.
Perhaps it had something to do with Mads’ death. He’d come to New Zealand for the fishing and the great outdoors, but decided to join us apple-picking. We cycled from Dunedin together (with our tandem normally cruising behind, tucked neatly into a wind shadow the size of a small lorry) and at every stop there was always a moment of surprise when only one person disembarked. He must have been a Boy Scout when he was younger, because he was certainly prepared for anything - camping, fishing, tramping, building small settlements, disarming nuclear weapons - if you needed it, he had it ... in triplicate. Together with Christiaan, we moved into Pine Tree Corner, which not only had pine trees in abundance, but also a kitchen thick with grease and bedrooms sprinkled with cherry seeds and used condoms. The previous tenants had been Kampucheans - reports varied between 20 and 30 occupants - who’d worked down the road at Parker’s berry orchard, and they’d certainly made themselves at home (the place had a distinctive Third World ambience ... right down to the charred cat skins in the burner).
We cleaned it up, and although we never managed to remove the smell of turmeric and coriander from the walls, it became the scene of much merriment. At times it was like living with two hyperactive teenagers (shaving-foam messages on the mirror, mashed potato eating competitions, and tossing every stray item into the fire with a jubilant cry of “BURN IT!”), but their antics often provided a respite from the slow and back-breaking work. There was the morning ritual of warming up the old valve wireless in time for Chicken Man, the slogans taken up with childish fervour (“Never pick the same apple twice” was a particular favourite), the familiar songs (Christiaan singing “My baby wrote me a letter” on the ride to work after receiving a note from Wendy), the poems written on apples (including Mads’ famous “Ode to Margaret in the Packing Shed” and its memorable line - Margaret with eyes like a deer in the mist ...), afternoon ice-creams at the store, the jokes and, most of all, the laughter. But eventually there was more rain than work, so Mads decided to load up his newly acquired motorcycle and finally get some serious fishing done. The West Coast beckoned. A week later we got the news that he’d been killed in a head-on collision near Murchison. There was no more laughter.
Perhaps our rather down-beat tour of the country had nothing to do with any of these. Perhaps it was all three, or simply the effects of the petrol fumes leaking into the cabin. Whatever its cause, the weight began to lift from our shoulders as soon as we made the decision to leave Keri-Keri and head back to Ettrick. We didn’t know what awaited us - would we find work, would we find a house, was the stone cottage for sale - but we knew that, at least for now, it was where we wanted to be. So we headed south as fast as Fugly could carry us.
A week later we were back in the orchard raking prunings and comfortably settled into a house which was to be our home for the next year.
A week later and Marion was off work for a month with RSI in the wrist, while I continued to rake branches ... and rake branches ... and rake branches. It was a tedious and tiring task, made all the more tedious and tiring by Marion’s absence. In her place I had Jason and AC-DC to keep me company. Hell’s Bells, Rock and Roll Aint Noise Pollution ... but that certainly was.
A month later and Marion was back at work, but not with me. She’d been assigned to the more technical task of grafting which reputedly required a ‘woman’s touch’, while us ‘blokes’ maintained our rugged progress through the endless rows of dead wood. And that’s exactly how such work makes you feel - like so much dead wood. There’s no skill involved, no potential to generate enthusiasm, and absolutely no appreciation of your efforts. In fact, among the orchard fraternity, it is almost universally accepted that employment is a battle of wits (or halfwits?). The workers are devoting most of their braincells to the task of finding newer and more devious ways of working as little as possible without the boss realising. The boss is devoting most of his braincells to the task of finding newer and more devious ways of exploiting the workers - getting them to work more for less reward, and without them realising it.
I soon discovered there was no point to working hard... but I couldn’t help myself. The days were long enough without dawdling over the work, and so I progressed through the various tasks with reasonable proficiency. I was always on time, was never sick, and was obviously reliable and capable. Did this earn me any brownie points? Of course not! I was still chastised if Jason and I were spied at the shop too soon after five o’clock (no allowances being made for the enthusiasm with which Jason finished work or the speed at which he felt comfortable behind the wheel of his suped-up Mazda, and since his was the only transport from the orchard’s farthest outposts, I had to be ready to roll at a moment’s notice ...), or if we were ‘caught’ still having smoko at 10.16 (no allowances being made for the possibility we may have wanted to finish a row before starting our break ...).
Such is the lot of an orchard worker. Working on a commercial apple orchard must be one of life’s most fruitless exercises - forgive the pun - though I must admit to being slightly biased against large-scale production of any kind. For the uninitiated, an orchard may seem like a healthier, more natural alternative to a factory, with sunshine and fresh air aplenty, birds and bees frolicking overhead, their songs accompanying you as you stroll through flowering meadows with a basket on your arm. But natural and commercial have as much to do with each other as politics and honesty. Sure there’s sunshine and birds, but it’s mostly tractor fumes and engine noise, making you wonder if you haven’t mistakenly wandered onto the set of some futuristic odyssey and Stanley Kubrick will yell “CUT” at any minute. And your first glimpse of a respirator-wearing, space-suited sprayer driver roaring towards you is a bit of a giveaway that this is not a healthy place to be (though real Men don’t bother with respirators... they just die of cancer at 40). Modern horticulture is a form of mental illness, or the ultimate practice of denial. To gaze upon a modern orchard is to gaze upon the face of insanity. Such destructive and poisonous activities undertaken unquestioningly in the name of sustaining humanity ... in the name of producing food!
As for the work itself - mundane, repetitious, dispiriting, de-humanising, pointless, hard and poorly-paid are a few words which spring to mind. Each step in the process of producing one commercial apple runs contrary to nature, and it is the successful orchardist’s task to thwart the natural processes at every turn.
The selection of apple varieties no longer has any bearing to Darwin’s theories. It’s no longer survival of the fittest, but the flashest. A new apple sort isn’t chosen because of its ability to withstand specific climatic conditions or its resistance to particular diseases (after all, that’s the duty of the chemical companies), but because of it’s potential marketability. Bananas are more popular than apples? Let’s give the consumer a banana-flavoured apple! Oranges look impressive under fluorescent lights? Let’s create an orange-coloured apple! Then there’s branding to consider. Consumers can’t be expected to eat the same type of apple two years in a row - it’s just not fashionable. And not forgetting the ever-present issue of profitability. Scarcity is the solution. Once there are enough Super Royal Delicious being produced, it’s time to start phasing them out so the prices don’t fall too low.
Once planted, the long process of deformation can begin. Unfortunately, trees just aren’t the right shape. If left alone, they’ll grow all tree-like, which can hardly be profitable. So they must be trained to grow according to the desired orchard layout - either made to run along wires like some leafy circus performer, or twisted into a perfect cross. Whichever system is used, the tree must be physically restrained by webs of ropes and wires like braces on a sweet-loving child.
Of course, although the tree has been largely civilised, its natural urges still remain uncontrolled. Every year it will break free from its shackles and, under the cover of its waxy green coat, will sprout in wild abandon, emboldened by the sun and its swelling progeny. But too soon its efforts are exposed by the cold winter, and it will again be pruned back to resemble a Christmas tree left too long in the living room.
The most futile task has to be thinning. Literally, it involves ‘thinning out’ the fruit by pulling off millions of tiny apples which are deemed superfluous to requirements. How, you might ask, could any apple be unwanted? Well, an apple tree normally produces far more apple blossoms than it could possibly support apples, based on the understanding that, under natural conditions, many of these budding apples (hhm, hmm) will fail to reach maturity, due to the vagaries of frosts, wind and generally app(a)lling (enough already!) weather conditions. Months of successful frost-fighting leaves the trees sagging beneath the fruits of the orchardists’ labour. Successful intervention requires subsequent intervention, in the form of thinning, otherwise at the end of the growing season the tree will be laden with large bunches of golf-ball-sized apples banging together like click-clacks instead of large, intermittently-spaced apples adorning each branch like shiny baubles on a trainspotter’s Christmas tree.
The only task which seems somehow meaningful is picking, so it’s probably the highlight of the orchard year. Of course, the problem with picking is it requires apple-pickers. And although the majority of pickers are wonderful people (travellers, students and generally normal people looking to make some money), it also tends to attract its fair share of life’s losers. Social retards who revel in the nicknames once bestowed upon them in jest (like Ten Bins or Black Apple), wearing them like hard-won badges of honour.
Of course my opinion is shaded by events, but it is my truth and I don’t feel any inclination to abandon it just yet. You may think, perhaps, that I have no right to judge anyone so harshly. But, as my story unfolds, perhaps you’ll forgive my bitterness. After all, I have judged no-one so harshly as myself ...
In the meantime, all this work really had nothing to do with finding a home.
The first scent of spring, thick with birdsong and blossoms, wafted through the valley, soaking every pore with new life and renewed hope. Mornings rattled awake by bogan starlings squabbling in the spouting over every shiny fibre. Days humming with dewy bee choirs scooping sunlight from vases of silky potpourri. Nights filled with rustling urgency as shifty possums feast on the first guileless leaves shyly unfolding in the garden before clambering onto the roof to tap boastful morse messages celebrating their conquest of the night. And dreams of stone cottages ...
We visited ‘our’ house every weekend. We took friends along. We took our Boss along. Nobody was spared our enthusiasm. The stone cottage was going to be ours - no matter what.
No detective could have traced the owners more efficiently, more doggedly. We were on their trail, and the scent was strong in our nose. Friends of friends of acquaintances of relatives of friends informed us the owners had bought the place as a holiday bach, and they only used it two weeks every year. Friends of associates of clients of lawyers of a friend’s podiatrist gave us a name. Noel at Bengerview Tearooms gave us an address in Dunedin. The operator gave us a phone number. We called.
Joyce, the owner, was kind, understanding ... sympathetic. She wasn’t disconcerted by our enthusiasm (bordering at times on desperation) for the cottage. In fact, our ebullience seemed to engender a sense of kinship and she invited us to visit her to discuss the matter further. We accepted her offer, and were soon sitting on her sofa leafing through photos and listening to details of the cottage’s history as well as her own family’s affiliation. Seventeen years earlier, she and her husband, Bill, had also been infected by the site’s magic. At the time the cottage had been derelict, abandoned, and they had been aggrieved by the obvious neglect. So they had bought it, and slowly restored it to some semblance of its original condition. For most of the family, it was a wonderful holiday bach, and they spent many hot Christmases together there. For Bill, it was a passion, and he was fascinated by the history not only of the cottage, but of the local area known as Horseshoe Bend, where the river sweeps around towards the Lonely Graves. Now Bill had passed on, and for Joyce, the place would never be the same.
The idea of passing the cottage onto someone with Bill’s enthusiasm seemed tempting. The thought of a couple - a family ­- living there permanently seemed somehow right. She doubted she’d ever wish to stay there again with so many ghosts of summer memories rattling through the cool, dark rooms. And the fact we were offering twice the government valuation certainly made ours the best offer she was ever likely to get. So she said she’d think about it. Said there was the rest of her family to consult first. But ...
We left bristling with optimism. How could she not take our offer? We’d look after the place better than anyone else. We’d love the place as much as Bill had. We’d fill its walls with happiness and contentment. We’d let her family visit during the holidays. We’d do anything if she just said ‘YES’.
She said ‘NO’. Her family had vetoed the idea. Understandable, but no less heartbreaking.
But after a short dive into depression and incomprehension, anger and despair, I suddenly found myself imbued with a greater sense of inevitability. The fact we had failed to acquire our ‘dream’ cottage (despite the extraordinary lengths we’d gone) surely meant there must be something better out there waiting for us. Didn’t it? And if we were brutally honest, our ‘dream’ cottage wasn’t without it’s undreamy qualities - it was close to the road (a quiet road, to be sure, but still a regularly-used one), the section was extremely small, the price we were willing to pay would have left us almost totally broke, plus there was the not-unsubstantial shadow of the possible future dam looming over the place. Surely we could find better?
Our failed scouting efforts eroded this belief somewhat.
The agent saga further undermined our confidence.
Finding a home might still be inevitable, but perhaps, inevitably, it might just have to be somewhere else.
The ad in the Molyneux Mail was our final hope. (If you’ve seen the Molyneux Mail, you’ll realise just what a slim hope it was!)
Roger Metcalf called the Bengerview Tearooms that evening. We got his message from Noel the next morning when we turned up to check for mail. We answered his call immediately, and despite giving us few details, he suggested his house might be exactly what we were looking for, so we should come out to see it.
An hour later we turned up at his front door, and I felt my heart beat a little faster... this could be it! It was definitely an old cottage (a three-bedroom villa, in fact) on a few acres (six or so), with lots of trees (it used to be a nursery), on the banks of the Clutha, and being almost five kilometres from Millers Flat on the Lonely Graves road, it certainly was “a bit away from things”. In fact, it was close to perfect ... except for two things. We’d assumed the combination of “old” and “in any condition” would really be interpreted as “something cheap” or, to use a favourite real estate phrase, a “handyman special”. Unfortunately, those had probably been Roger’s exact sentiments when he’d bought the house two years earlier. In the meantime, he’d embarked on an ambitious modernisation programme which made the Pharaohs seem like amateur do-it-yourselfers. By the time he’d run out of steam, the kitchen had been extended to include a mini-ballroom, he’d added a battery of bay windows in case the sun started rising in the south, had removed every wall with a ‘w’ in it, as well as re-plumbing and re-wiring anything older than his cat. (Despite all this effort, though, it was still far from a castle, which then begs the question - why did Electricorp offer to install a moat, free of charge, for the subsequent owners?) Naturally enough, Roger wished to be compensated not only for his substantial financial investment, but for the dreams of a prosperous rural existence which had turned sour in the process. But the $30,000 we’ll-take-it-without-a-second-thought cottage was now a $95,000 way-out-of-our-league-especially-since-we’d-want-to-totally-denovate-the-place country estate, so we had to turn him down.
As we went to leave, pausing a moment at the gate to let our regret sniff along the driveway one last time, Roger cocked his head down the road and said :
“That section on the corner might be for sale...”
Marion and I turned our heads to follow his gaze.
“...the one across the stream ... with the walnut trees ...”
Stream? Walnut trees?
“...I think it’s about five acres ... and the owners live in Gore ...”
Five acres? Gore? ..... five acres?
Roger was left standing in our dust as we drove down the road to check out the section.
We crossed the bridge over the Minzion Burn, drove past the first sheep-flecked paddock, the walnut trees ... the very same walnut trees we’d investigated during out first visit to the Lonely Graves ... then pulled up to a gate standing slightly askew by a corrugated iron shed. We dragged the gate open and walked through.
We squinted through the shed’s louvred front windows into the gloom. Inside there was a large, black car of indeterminate vintage poking its nose out from beneath an oil-stained tarpaulin as though sniffing the motives of these unwanted intruders. Apart from a web of hoses and wires hanging from a hook on the back wall, the rest of the shed was empty.
We walked over the top paddock, across to one of the rocky knolls jutting like warts from the tufted skin. From this vantage point we surveyed the rest of the section - following the border fence up the hill until it ducked into a solid wall of gorse, down to the rocky scar and the silent concrete monoliths weaving among the poplars, right down to the bridge. Behind us the road wound around the section’s border. And below us, creating the other boundary, ran the Minzion. It chuckled flirtatiously over the rocks, inviting, welcoming. It sang of a thousand hot summers, of a thousand men who had come to scour its banks for gold, of a thousand men who had drunk its cool tea, of a thousand years of waiting for this moment ...
This was it. I knew it immediately. The stone cottage was forgotten. Everything was forgotten. Here I could live. Here I could be sustained. Here I could build a life - any life.
But now wasn’t the time to dream. Now was the time to act.
We returned, reluctantly, to Ettrick. We quickly found the owners, the Wilsons, in Gore. They were a friendly couple, and suggested we visit them in Gore to negotiate. Negotiation took the form of a long chat over a cup of tea. Although they’d always lived in Gore, they’d been holidaying in Millers Flat for many years (escaping the cold, wet Southland summers). They owned a holiday bach closer to the village, and had purchased the property ten years earlier with a view to eventually building their retirement home on the site. (A plan which had suffered a major setback when the Roxburgh hospital closed, making the closest hospital more than 60 kilometres away ... a little too far for their liking.) Now they’d accepted that they were unlikely to ever build there (or even retire to Millers Flat), so were looking to dispose of both properties. The thought of someone building on the site seemed to please them, and we quickly reached an agreement. They would sell us the section for the government valuation - $7000. (The shed was valued at $4000, the land $3000.)
But there was a hitch ...
The land was currently under contract to the local estate agent. But the Wilsons had been less than happy with his service (not only had he excluded it from our tour, but he hadn’t even gotten around to putting up a For Sale sign), and suggested, if we were willing to wait until their contract expired at the end of the month (two weeks away), we could purchase the property directly from them. We naturally agreed.
Estate agents don’t give up so easy. For whatever reason (could the local grapevine really be so efficient?) the agent suddenly got around to stapling a For Sale sign to the shed door, and the next day he advised the Wilsons he had a buyer, though it was subject to the buyer’s ability to secure financing. He informed them the buyer had been given a month to come up with the money, and sent a new contract for the Wilsons to sign to enable him to continue his negotiations.
The Wilsons objected. They wouldn’t sign a new contract, and either the money was available in two weeks, or they would pursue other options. (No mention was made of our part in the scheme of things.)
Two weeks later the contract expired with no official buyer.
And so, on the 21st of December, 1990 at 12.22pm, our $7000 having been cleared and all contracts finalised, transfer number 770532 was made. The property, being Section 27, Block XII on the public maps of the Benger District, being the parcels of land containing together three acres, three roods and thirty perches more or less (together with a strip of railway land and the 22-yard strip of Queen’s Chain running along the Minzion giving a total closer to five acres), was transferred to Kyle Raymond Mewburn of Ettrick, orchard worker, and Marion Mewburn of Ettrick, married woman. (Which wasn’t our idea! On the contract we’d written orchard worker, but perhaps the lawyer was simply trying to keep the deeds consistent - all the way back to 1926!)
The section was ours! We had a home!
Now the hard bit could start ...

Love at first site

As the famous real estate motto goes, the three most important considerations are location, location, location. But let’s face it - most of the best locations are already taken, taken, taken. And there’s nothing you can do about it ...
You can stare at that concrete monstrosity with the million dollar view forever, but it’s just not going to crumble into sand in your lifetime. You can stalk the owners, spread malicious rumours about them at the bowls club, harass their poodles and pour sugar in their letterbox, but they’ll never sell, especially not to you. You can impersonate their relatives and spend an entire year of Sunday afternoons drinking swimming-pool tea and eating stale gingernuts, but they’re not leaving it to you in their will. You can expose them as War Criminals, uncover irregularities in their Building Permit, plead your case before the Human Rights Commission or the Waitangi Tribunal, prove categorically that they’re bad, near-sighted, ugly and insane, but no-one’s going to force them out of there. So leave those poor old people alone!
You can visit that deserted stone cottage on the banks of the river a million times, and you’ll never find a For Sale sign sprouting from the daffodils. You can regale friends with a million proprietary tales about the state of your rhododendrons and your latest colour schemes, but it’s still not your name on those deeds. You can fulfil the obligations of honorary caretaker with gusto, chasing cows and thieves out from the hedges, electrifying gates to keep nosy passers-by at bay, becoming personally acquainted with every tree and stone in the process, but although the sheep and birds might come when you call, you’ll still have to leave when the owners arrive for their yearly vacation. So forget about it and keep searching!
You can stroll through a hundred turn-of-the-century villas, shaking your head in despair at each one of the owner’s ‘improvements’ (the aluminium bay windows leering obscenely like false eyelashes on a corpse; the authentic laminated artificial wooden beam running uninterrupted like an express railway line across the ceiling; and the ‘burning log’ electric heaters glowing red with embarrassment beneath every Chiquita, Bonita or Enza-stickered mantelpiece), but you’re simply too late. You can find a thousand perfect building sites during a two hour stroll through the back-blocks, but no matter how much you plead with the owners, no matter how genuine your vows to live there virtually unnoticed, I’m afraid a National Park is still going to be a National Park. So stop obsessing about what might have been, and keep your eyes open for what will be!
OK, so there is no justice in the world. Of course it would have been much better for you to live on that site instead of those unappreciative, tasteless philistines! Of course it’s ridiculous that such a wonderful house lies dormant for most of the year! Of course it’s a shame you didn’t buy that little cottage before the latest owner! Of course it’s bad luck that you weren’t around just 50 years earlier! But there’s no use getting too worked up about it. Good locations are scarce, and getting scarcer every day.
Look on the bright side. Once you have found your site and built your dream home or renovated that old villa to within an inch of its life, it’ll be you who’ll be smiling at that young couple staring daggers as you shuffle down to the bowls club because that ‘monstrosity’ will be your monstrosity, simply because you were around 50 years earlier!!
In the meantime, it’s no use entertaining notions of building your own house until you’ve found somewhere to build it. Sounds logical, of course. But once you start seriously looking around for a site, the nesting instinct sets in and logic flies out the window.
The longer the search continues, the less objective and rational you become until you suddenly find yourself entertaining all manner of strange lifestyle options and complicated routines - no compromise is too great, as long as you can get your name on a deed ... any deed! The current owner’s bison herd retains grazing rights? No problems, I love the smell of fresh bison! It’s zoned rural so you’ll never get a permit? Wonderful, I’ve always wanted to live in a teepee! The bottom paddock is on the Highland Games circuit? Och, I canna think of a better way to spend the holidays than watching lamp-post throwing and bare-bottomed can-can!
You can throw away that carefully-compiled list you’ve boldly labelled “The Bottom Line” or “What no civilised person should have to do without” containing the 1764 features a section must have before you’ll even deign to look at it - including a 360 degree uninterrupted view of erupting volcanoes and 1000-year-old sequoias; no neighbours within chain-saw hearing range; essential amenities - hardware megastore, avante-garde cinema, continental bakery and 24-hour library - within easy walking distance; all-day sun; shelter from wind of every description except gentle sea breezes on those days where the temperature rises above 26 degrees; prize-winning garden and exotic fruit orchard; a resident colony of 250 bird species including kakapo and kea (though these must be of a non-destructive variety); no less than 30 minutes drive along a traffic-free highway from a crime-and-pollution-free buzzing metropolis; and it absolutely must be in a rates-free area.
Unfortunately, the ‘perfect’ section just doesn’t exist. Once you balance what’s available with your budget, you’ll be lucky if your final resting place ends up having more than two of those ‘essential’ features you were so devoted to when you started searching.
So maybe you should try going through your list and somehow trying to prioritise? After all, if you can just find a section with your two most important features, then you’ll certainly be satisfied, right? Wrong! Because determining priorities may seem, in theory, a useful and relatively simple exercise, but in practise, it can only lead to disappointment and frustration.
In theory a million dollar view might seem worth any sacrifice including that million-mile-an-hour wind and the Mongrel Mob headquarters next door (after all, gangsters like views too). But if you enjoy collapsing in front of the television every night, then you really have to ask yourself some serious questions like - Am I going to be content collapsing in front of a view, especially one without a remote? If I’m already complaining about TV repeats, then how will I handle the same view repeated over and over every night? Perhaps it might be better to have a thousand dollar view with good reception?
In theory lots of fresh air, clean water and fertile soil might seem unquestionably necessary to your future happiness, but if it’s that early morning latte and croissant at the corner bistro which sends you into raptures, or if you harbour delusions that earthworms are really just small, poisonous snakes waiting to bite people who don’t have green thumbs, perhaps you shouldn’t be straying too far into the rural wilderness.
What may seem important in theory, may not, in fact, have much relevance to your lifestyle, or to your true personality. Sure you might have always dreamed of having a small, self-sufficient farmlet in the country with a lots of children and goats, but it’s not only the farmlet which has to be self-sufficient.
Rural New Zealand is still, largely, not for the faint-hearted. It’s a cultural wilderness where nothing is ever happening, so you always have to create your own amusements. It’s an intellectual wilderness where discussions about sheep and cows are generally as satisfying as discussions with sheep and cows. And it’s a social wilderness where the prevailing personality monoculture means meaningful social interaction is limited to those three locals whose worldview extends beyond the front gate.
Although this may sound discouraging, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll have to settle for living somewhere which doesn’t inspire you. Because a section is more than the sum of its features. Your final resting place may seem unremarkable, and you may never be able to list any obvious reasons for being there, but if you feel so good there, so right, then it just doesn’t matter.
If all your planning now seems futile, don’t worry, because finding the ‘perfect’ site seems to have as much to do with planning as sheep have to do with knitting ...
After all, I ended up here in Millers Flat, and I certainly didn’t plan that!
So why am I here?
Good question.
Maybe it’s because I’ve always loved the sea. I spent my youth swimming in the warm, churning surf north of Brisbane, face all grinning beetroot red as I dragged my zinc-cream-smeared fingers through the sand to scour away the evidence of my mother’s painstaking graffiti. I used to imagine living in an old weatherboard bach, its paintwork stripped away by sandpaper days, a veranda slumped casually against the dunes, and a thick mat of stiff, bristle soldiers guarding the door against the invading Trojan sand clinging to the soles of shuffling summer feet. There’d be bonfires on the beach enticing ships to run aground on those silent pagan nights. Midnight swims to relieve those sleepless nights full of mosquitoes and sweat-heavy sheets. And all the windswept winter I’d collect buckets of sculptured fragments in wood and stone and shell carved by the prolific tide ...
Maybe it’s because I’ve loved the forest since it first embraced me with its cool indifference, keeping its secrets stashed in distant corners until I learnt the language of its silence. It teased me with sudden dark lightning bolts of movement high in its canopy and the furtive shifting of leaves in the undergrowth. Gone before jaded city eyes swirled into focus. Gone before street muffled ears sifted golden meaning from the cacophony of soundlessness. I sat by a whispering stream watching my moss-covered hut congeal in the depths of an icy pool. I dived in to retrieve it, feeling the electric shiver of contentment crawl over my nakedness to wash away the city’s numbness. This is what it felt like to be alive! Only here could I find peace ...
Maybe it’s because I once discovered paradise high in the mountains. In a velvet basin rimmed by whiteness I stared at the ragged circle of sky above, watching the clouds being shredded by a dark finger of stone, the ring of shadowy sentinels holding the outside world at bay. I tasted the snow. I tasted the air. This was paradise - a harsh, uncompromising paradise, dismissive of our frail efforts and miserly with its rewards ... but what rewards!
There would be many long lonely winters with only the murmur of the fire to keep me company, and only those stealthy nightcallers braving the climb to leave their scrawled messages in the snow. But on those bright, hollow mornings when every sound shared with the sunlight climbs towards chattering salvation high in the crystal sky, my blood would tremble through my body as I hugged another load of sappy firewood lovingly to my chest. Pausing a moment to sniff the silence, shiny eyes turning to drift casually along the veranda, I would see the familiar frozen-faced stranger reflected in the window, hear his sudden laughter rattling the icicles hanging from the eaves ...
But there are no forests here (except the cruel uniformity of the pine plantations marching unstoppably over the hillsides), only faded memories of mountains (at 1200 metres, Mt Benger is hardly more than a fold in the earth’s blanket), and the sea’s siren song is never heard here, though often I can almost catch its final notes on the cold breath of a southerly before it’s snatched cruelly away. In fact, Millers Flat is possibly the village furthest away from any sea, forest or mountain.
Maybe I’m held captive by the area’s beauty?
Technically this valley is part of Central Otago, but it’s not entirely comfortable with such allegiances - sometimes embracing Central’s stable, dry reign with oppressive fervour, sometimes succumbing to the damp advances of Otago proper, sometimes spurning them both in favour of tumultuous independence. It is a tenuous borderland. The first rocky outcrops of grey schist, wrapped in their lichen blankets, begin to poke their heads from the hillside, but it’s another 25 kilometres before they begin to dominate the landscape. The tussock still prickles the hilltops here, and threads of manuka and kowhai and cabbage tree and flax still weave their way along the steep crevasses where sheep and goats no longer go, surviving somehow despite annual burn-offs and the growling attentions of aerial sprayers.
It is a strangely muffled world which envelopes us. A pastel landscape, all muted greens and greys and browns - the wild thyme doesn’t adorn these hills with its lilac mist, and only the gorse wears its showy golden mantle with any confidence.
This is not (at least officially) a beautiful area. There are no tourist chalets or half-empty shopping malls, and nary a single half star in a guidebook. There are no postcard beauties here, no scenic lookouts or giant plastic fruit. Nothing which can be squeezed into a frame or carried away by window-weary eyes.
But there is beauty here.
It’s in the shadows and the light as they weave across the ancient hills; dewy rainbows suddenly unveiled by the parting curtains of cloud; autumn’s heavy breath melting slowly in the sun; and early morning fields shimmering with a million gossamer webs of ice. A beauty which is never static, changing with the moods of the wild, turbulent Clutha River which runs through it. A beauty measured in moments and years, not miles.
If the Clutha didn’t run free here, I would never have contemplated staying. Most of the river has long been subdued by civilisation’s unquenchable thirst for electricity, but here it still laughs and whoops with delight as it leaves the last of the dams behind and races towards the sea. Here it’s still the colour of the liquid in those tampon commercials, not yet stained by the dark waters of the Tuapeka. Further upstream it’s little more than a narrow belt of silent turquoise lakes, but here it’s still boisterous and untamed. Another thirty kilometres and it will lose its urgency, becoming sombre as it senses the end of its journey drawing nearer, with only Balclutha and dissipation into the Pacific remaining unspoken.
(Wild rivers have gone out of fashion. People have forgotten the past and grown envious of the river’s freedom, its power. They no longer understand its moods, mistaking ecstasy for menace. It’s dangerous, they say. It’s unpredictable, they argue. It must be put in its place, they shout. But it’s the gold they really crave - not the hard-won gold of their ancestors, but the gleaming golden promises of jobs and dollars and megawatts.)
But it’s not the river that keeps me here.
Nor is it the people.
Millers Flat is a small, largely undistinguished colony nesting, almost unnoticed, on the Clutha’s northern banks.
The colony’s main inhabitants are the common or garden variety of ruralfolkus simplex - a retiring creature which refrains from showy displays of any kind (except under the influence of various fermented concoctions, for which it has a particular fondness), it congregates around the colony’s main food centre (though this highly mobile species has been known to travel great distances in search of the elusive bargains which are its primary source of sustenance), and is extremely industrious, spending most of its spare time maintaining or adorning its sturdily unprepossessing nest. This species is not dangerous, but it is easily unsettled, so it is difficult to get close enough for any intensive study to be undertaken. It prefers the company of its own kind, and when approached, its familiar call of goodasgold - goodasgold - goodasgold and the accompanying head twitching, will continue until all danger is passed.
There are also small enclaves of redneckus officinalis ­(though numbers are, thankfully, much smaller than in many similar colonies) - a great, lumbering species distinguished by its bright red head and loud, booming call. Although relatively harmless, because of its innate myopia and narrow-mindedness it may quickly become irrational or even aggressive when confronted by unfamiliar species, especially those species perceived to threaten its own fragile sense of identity - eg. homosexualis flagrante, politicala radicalis var. socialistis, horticulturista organicalis, nohopa dolebludgeris, bigsmokis intellectualis, hairylegis feministis and migranta orientalis.
Finally, aggressive specimens of hoonis vulgaris occasionally halt here on their eternal migration in search of better conditions and breeding partners. Arriving mainly in pairs, they soon establish complex social structures and pecking orders based largely on their relative penis sizes and their ability to endure physical self-abuse. This is an extremely dangerous species, particularly during social interplay, so their watering holes should be studiously avoided. There is no precise method of physical identification (due to the dangers of extensive field research), but this species can normally be accurately identified by its screeching bellow - FUCK! FUCK! FUCK!.
Despite such intrusions, the colony has remained relatively constant and untroubled, mainly due to its adaptation of a survival technique used by such species as the paradise duck to avoid predation. In the duck’s case, the male will feign injury and flutter helplessly along the ground to divert an intruder’s attention while the female and her chicks seek shelter elsewhere. The male continues its charade until convinced its family is safe, then miraculously recovers just in time to elude the confused predator’s desperate lunge. Millers Flat has adapted a similar technique to enable it to remain virtually unnoticed by passers-by.
Anonymity is rare in a world where wide-eyed tourists sift through tomes of guide-book rubble searching for the flicker of gold in every insignificant map speck. Millers Flat is on the map, whether it likes it or not. So there must be an official sign verifying its existence and providing a reference point for highway navigators. And signs encourage unwanted intrusion.
By the cunning use of decoys, the village has retained an unobtrusiveness bordering on invisibility. What amounts to a virtual “mock village” has been constructed along the opposite bank - a tavern, a petrol-less garage, a string of ramshackle baches and an occasional proper house to give an air of authenticity - sandwiched between two nondescript signs assuring passers-by that they have indeed reached Millers Flat, and yes, this is all there is, not even a shop or a picnic spot, so it’s hardly worth stopping, is it? Of course they glimpse the bridge as they speed onwards, and the crooked AA fingers clenched around the lamp-post suggesting more, but at 100 km/hour, Millers Flat Township may as well read Mullet Flax Toothbrush.
Millers Flat has never been ‘great’, in any way, at any time. It’s not a village which inspires pride, nor excitement, nor even well-being. It’s just a village. Perhaps it’s some indication of the general narrowness of this valley (or perhaps the wry humour of those early pioneers) that every space wide enough to squeeze two donkeys past each other is called a “Flat”. There are enough Flats in this valley to build a city tenement - Moa Flat, Hercules Flat, Craig Flat, Evans Flat... the list goes on. Maybe it’s not totally inappropriate, because ‘flat’ seems as useful a word to describe the general mood in the area as any other.
Millers Flat was named after Walter Miller, a man of impressive stature and an infamous disregard for apostrophes. (Though perhaps, being a rather portly gentleman, he felt Miller’s Flat may have been irresistible to local wags?) Looking more like a silent-movie villain, in his bowler hat and shoulder-length beard, than a sheep farmer, he crossed the Lammerlaws in 1857 and was so taken by this minor wobble in the valley’s undulations, that he not only named it after himself, but decided to settle.
Then came the gold, and for a few years Millers Flat had it’s moment of golden glory. But the gold soon disappeared and so did most of the population. Although the dredges dragged their buckets a while longer, Millers Flat’s supporting role in the goldrush was effectively over before it had reached any great heights - the local gold-diggers’ exploits consigned to brief footnotes in the region’s history.
This cloud of “not quite” seems to hang over the village still. A sense of unattained hopes, fore-closed dreams and ‘just making do’ hovers here. Of course there are still sheep to be tended, but local farmers envy the easy prosperity of their compatriots over the hills where water simply falls from the skies. And the few apple orchards which crept downstream from Ettrick and Roxburgh, have never really felt at ease here. But then, nobody is under the illusion that Life is supposed to be easy. The most you can expect is to ‘get by’.
Millers Flat has always gotten by, somehow or another. It’s never been an important village, or a progressive village, or a village where things happened. It’s never aspired to being any of these things. It’s generally content with its lot - middle-of-the-road, middle-of-nowhere, middle-of-everywhere.
Once, not long ago, it may have dreamt of more. When it was still on the edge of the city daytrippers’ realm, they used to come here in Sunday cars crammed with laughter and I Spy searching for a fresh fruit Eldorado, drifting homeward with stomach aches and tired cherry smiles in the cool, golden evening. When it was the first stop across the border in “stable, warm, summer weather” land, the holiday crowds filled the motor camp with splashing friendships and fishing tales sizzling on the barbecue.
But the world shrank almost overnight, and once people realised they could get to where they were going without stopping, they stopped stopping in Millers Flat. The highway began to fill with angry cars - no longer casual cruising townies slaloming between roadside stalls with friendly abandon, these were cars with a mission. Cars which shot like missiles from the city at the first peal of the Friday knock-off bell (after another bruising round in the contest of life), aiming for weekend destinations their parents once invested their lifesavings to reach. Grim, driven drivers and their grimly staring passengers speeding towards an encounter with ‘fun’.
They were much too intent on throwing themselves off bridges or racing their deafening machines past blurred landscapes in areas which had never known noise before or joining sliding conga lines on the side of manicured mounds of artificial snow or just comparing solarium tans and designer sunglasses with the hoards of city refugees seeking asylum amid the crowded solitude to even notice Millers Flat hiding on the opposite side of the river.
That’s perfectly understandable. Marion and I cycled past it without giving it a second glance ... but more of that later.
The elusive question - why am I here? - remains unanswered. Perhaps it was indecision wrapped in a sticky coat of compromise which enticed me to stay. Perhaps destiny. But perhaps it’ll forever remain a mystery. This area is littered with mysteries, so perhaps it’s as good a place as any to leave mine. Perhaps it’ll be discovered one day, washed up on the banks of the Clutha, and a kind stranger will take pity on it, will drag it up the hill at Horseshoe Bend and bury it on the knoll where Somebody’s Darling and William Rigney (“the man who buried somebody’s darling”) now lie, and by the flickering light of a kerosene lamp will carve its epitaph - “Somebody’s Mystery lies buried here.” A romantic story, to be sure, though highly unlikely since nobody uses kerosene lamps anymore ...
Although the “whys” may remain forever out of reach, the “hows” are slightly clearer. Perhaps ‘why’ and ‘how’ are simply interwoven threads of the same fabric - the wefting why deftly woven into the warping strands of our actions. There are a million ‘hows’, each with a beginning and an end, each piece separate, knotted together at the ends to form a continuous chain of events. We can snip them off and slowly tease them out of the fabric without compromising the fabric’s integrity. But the ‘whys’ consist of a single strand stretching through generations. So, perhaps it’s better that I don’t try to unravel them just yet.

A long, rambling introduction

I’ve never been very good at straight lines. Nor have I ever had any affinity with angles. My sense of balance has never been a strong point. And my eyes are hardly precision tools. In fact, precision of any kind tends to give me a headache.
So I don’t know why I decided to build my own house.
I’ve never been very good at small talk, either. Nor have I ever had any real affinity with animals (though my eyes refuse to see any animal as merely a roast on legs). And my sense of smell has always vaguely objected to the smell of stock playing on the range (though I’m partial to the smell of stock simmering on the range).
So I don’t know why I ended up living in Millers Flat.

The decision to build my own home was partly financial - I was cheap. Having no professional qualifications (unless a C in Grade 8 woodwork counts for something), no tools, no insurance, no experience and absolutely no idea how houses were built (although I have seen almost every episode of Home Improvement), meant my time was less valuable than that of a one-armed koala with gum disease. The closest I’d ever come to a building site was at the Acropolis, and the only building secret I’d ever heard was how to get on ACC.
When I considered the alternative employment options (apple-picking, apple-picking or, for a little change, apple-packing), I realised I’d have to work 24 hours a day in order to earn enough to employ a single builder for a standard 8-hour day ... unless I could find a builder willing to work for apples. Unfortunately, there were no qualified possums in the Yellow Pages (maybe it has something to do with the fact they can only work at night?), which left only one person willing to work for the pathetically low wage I was offering ... me.
There was also the question of a timetable. So many details had to be sorted out. So many unknowns to be made known, most of which were out of my hands, and therefore, unforeseeable. Which made it impossible to plan ahead with any confidence. Without a plan, it was impossible to involve anyone else in the project.
Well, maybe not impossible, but I didn’t want to be reliant on others’ schedules. I didn’t want a builder to be commuting between jobs and alternating coffee breaks. I wanted a builder (or a rough facsimile of one) at my beck and call. A builder who would work flat-out when I wanted him to, yet was just as comfortable standing in the rain all morning drinking coffee and trying to stack boards together to reconstruct the original trees. I wanted a builder who was not only available, but faithful. I didn’t want his mind filled with other houses, his attention distracted by fancy mouldings and sophisticated joinery. I wanted him to be committed to my house and only my house - body and soul ... which was possibly a tad unrealistic.
Another important consideration was personality. A house isn’t simply an agglomeration of piles and joists and bearers and other pagan bewilderments, it’s a reflection of the owner’s character. But more often than not, it’s a reflection of the builder’s character. If not the builder, the architect.
That wasn’t going to happen to my house. I wanted every nail to sing my praises, every cracked floorboard to creak my accomplishments, a house that fitted like a favourite pair of jeans. No smug perfection or elaborate monuments to the builder’s cleverness, just a simple house. A house with more flaws than floors, yet whose flaws melded magically to create a perfectly imprecise whole. So I needed a builder who understood all of these barely understandable elements on some deeper, primordial, intuitive level.
It was impossible to explain (in words or even diagrams) exactly what I envisaged - what I wanted. I only knew I’d recognise it when I saw it. Each board would have to be assessed individually and in juxtaposition with every other board. Personally. Carefully. So I needed a builder willing to agree with my every decision. A builder willing to alter plans at a moment’s notice without discussing mundane issues such as structural integrity or insurance risk. A builder who would be there, rain, hail or shine with a smile on his face. A builder I could joke with, sing with and swear at without risking offence. Most of all, a builder who would see my house through my eyes. And there aren’t too many of them around!
But the main reason for deciding to build myself... (Oh my prophetic soul! Is this a Freudian slip, or just bad grammar? Of course, at the time I was too focused on the house to think about myself, and I would have doubted any personal reconstruction was required anyway!) Where was I ...? Oh yes, the main reason for deciding to build my house by myself, was that it was something I felt I wanted to do. (Of course I never intended to really build it by myself. It was supposed to be a joint effort. My wife, Marion, and I were going to build our home, together. But that was just one of the many developments along the way ...)
It had been a kind of secret ambition ever since fourth grade geography when Mister Kennedy told us our only needs were food, water, clothing and shelter. Everything else were mere wants ... no matter how much we needed them. And I believed him with the wide-eyed zeal of a new convert. After all, Mister Kennedy wouldn’t lie. Hadn’t he guided the moon landing a few years earlier, nodding his approval at Neil Armstrong’s every step as though encouraging a gifted pupil? Hadn’t he explained to me the difference between a sprain and a break after I’d hobbled from the rugby field, left foot throbbing with indignation at the front rower’s weighty clumsiness? Didn’t he know everything?
From that moment, I began to understand life could be simple. Life should be simple. We didn’t need abundance, we needed quality. Good food, clean water, sturdy clothes ... and a comfortable, warm, dry home. Not that I could have put it in so many words, or that I really thought about it in the strictest sense, but I felt something fundamental shift inside me. A burden lifted from my shoulders (well, as much a burden as any ten-year-old carried), buoyed by the realisation that life could never be too difficult, because all we really needed was four things. Four things. To make it easier, they were all things which grew in the soil or fell from the sky! How easy!
Of course, over the next ten years everyone seemed determined to dispel such foolish ‘myths’ and to discredit simplicity itself. “Life,” the Prime Minister proclaimed, “wasn’t meant to be easy,” and the whole country seemed anxious to believe him. A simple life was not only undesirable, but unattainable, because it was simply impossible for anyone to directly satisfy any of their needs.
You can’t produce your own food because - it’s just not possible; you’re not a farmer; it’ll get eaten by bugs; it’s too cold here (tomatoes don’t grow outside in winter); it’s too hot here (the chokos will strangle everything); it won’t have any taste without those chemicals; you can’t eat anything natural if it doesn’t look artificial ....
You can’t collect your own water because - it’s just not possible; that’s the council’s job; it won’t be fit to drink without chlorine/fluoride/ bleach/ultraviolet treatment; you’ll get malaria/gardia/cholera; the possums will just love to shit in your tank; it’ll be full of dust and birdshit; it just won’t taste like water’s supposed to taste ...
You can’t make your own clothes because - it’s just not possible; what are shops for?; the economy will collapse; they won’t be in fashion; they’ll look like hand-me-downs; I’d be too embarrassed to walk down the streets with you; they won’t have a label; you won’t know what size you are; everyone will think you’ve gone mad/you’re broke/you’re on your way to a fancy dress party/you’re unemployed/you just don’t care what you look like ...
You certainly can’t build your own house because - it’s just not possible; you don’t have any qualifications; you need special tools; it’s a trade and you’re not a tradesman; what do you have against builders anyway?; it’ll collapse; it’ll leak; it’s not like using Lego, you know; the roof will blow away in the first wind; it won’t look like a proper house ...
A thousand reasons. It wasn’t the individual’s responsibility, it was the state’s duty, the companies’ raison d’etre, the farmers’ vocation. Society’s sole reason for existence was to provide me with my every need! My duty was to find a job which paid lots of money so I could buy not only everything I needed, but a thousand more things absolutely essential to a normal, happy life. So many wonderful, shiny things my life couldn’t be complete without.
But, somehow, I never quite forgot about the basics.
I etched my first vege garden out of the heavy clay in a grassless corner of my father’s backyard while still at school. Not an ideal site for a garden - the soil denuded by the thirsty rubber tree which also conspired to block all but the first feeble shafts of daylight - but it was the only area not required for the activities of the local species of familia suburbialis. The entire lawn was deemed inviolate, booked as it was for such noteworthy events as summer evening cricket or kicking-a-football-against-the-fence (a perennial favourite), or for simply being a lawn. The sandy corner under the bleeding gum was reserved in perpetuity for biennial spontaneous barbecues and mosquito fencing tournaments, while the lemon tree corner was being slowly consumed by the ravages of the sacred lawnclipping hill - its musty lava flows enveloping fallen branches and bicycle wheels as it bulged beneath each Sunday morning offering. After the first rain, my garden resembled a little vegetable Venice, with the water-filled paths lapping against the rows of confused seedlings. So I scavenged some timber and raised the beds above the high water mark, and my plants responded, filling the summer with warm, tangy tomatoes and cool, sun-filled melons.
I began to learn the language of water. I snatched bubbling handfuls from roaring shafts of whiteness. I kissed myself in crystal pools, tasting the coldness. I threw my head back and captured a single droplet, its skin still warm from its journey through the sunshine. And always my tongue was thirsty with questions.
I never quite got around to making clothes.
And always, at the back of my mind, was the thought of building my own house. Not that I’d ever lain awake contemplating strategic toilet placements or ruminating over wallpaper patterns, and it certainly never grew to my-life-won’t-be-complete-without-it proportions. In fact, it was never so much an ambition, as something I’d like to do if the situation presented itself. And, coincidentally, the situation did present itself.
Of course I knew there would be drawbacks. Employing an infamously unskilled carpentric virgin was certainly fraught with risk, but there was also the undoubted excitement. As long as I remained realistic, the risk could be minimised. As long as I remained objective, I wouldn’t exceed the point of no return. As long as I was willing to accept that my workpersonship would probably fall below contemporary professional standards (though I was confident of achieving at least a late-Crustacean level of building proficiency ... not that I’d put it in writing!), and acknowledged that the party of the first part (being me) accepted no liability and retained the right to abandon aforementioned project at any time ad hoc ipso facto contrariwise ad nauseam to the party of the second part (being myself), then we had a deal. I ran the details of the contract past my honorary solicitor (of course I have no professional qualifications, but my father was a policeman) and I agreed it was a bargain. I was hired!
Of course I had my doubts, but I was confident.
It would be a huge challenge, but all obstacles could be overcome, and everything would, somehow, fall into place.
In the end though, things didn’t so much fall into place as fall apart. And though it certainly was a challenge, it wasn’t as challenging as re-building my life in the aftermath.
And my decision to live in Millers Flat? Well, there really wasn’t any decision involved. It sort of just happened ...