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.