1
During my teens, I lived in Waipū, the Nova Scotian settlement to the south of Whangārei. Many years later I was invited to contribute to a book of essays that accompanied the diaries of the local Presbyterian clergyman, who lived there at the same time. The book, published in 2018, under the imprint of the Waipū 150 Trust, was called A Conscientious Bloody Clergyman: The Diaries of Reverend William Levack 1952–1964. This is an adaptation of the essay I wrote on the year I was allocated: 1954.
A particular day in mid-December of 1953 is etched forever in my memory. In a caravan of small trucks and trailers, my family moved to a farm in Waipū. We had come from the north, so we travelled along the back road that veers off from State Highway One and down along to what we then called North River, followed by clouds of dust. These vehicles carried all our belongings, our cows, dogs and ourselves, my mother, my father and me.
Like a lot of families, we had known some bad times after the Second World War, and money was scarce. Looking back, the whole farming endeavour seems whimsical and could have been doomed to failure from the start. My father, a bookish man, had a delicate constitution that wartime service hadn’t helped. The farm we moved to, like the one we had left, was very small, we had no machinery and none of the vehicles belonged to us. Although we would live some 8 kilometres from the Centre, as the township was known, we never owned a car or truck, or farm machinery except milking machines. It turned out to be near subsistence farming as it had been when we lived further north.
What’s more, people had said, ‘Oh, you’ll never fit in there. The Novies keep to themselves’, an off-hand reference to the early Nova Scotian settlers who had arrived in the 1850s. We hadn’t really fitted in where we’d come from either, for reasons that are now neither here nor there, but had a lot to do with class and money. But it’s important to say these things because this is an account of how good neighbours can change lives, and this is what happened to us in Waipū. We found them, or perhaps it was more a case of them finding us. It may have helped that my mother was of old Scots stock, true crofting Highlanders on her father’s side, Lowland on her mother’s, Sutherlands and Stewarts.
Of course, nobody knew this, that hot December day. The neighbours would get to know more about us later. But that evening, as the trucks moved off and left us with our unpacked bundles and hungry animals, there was a knock on the door. It was Laurel McAulay from across the road and over the paddock. She had brought a billy of soup and a loaf of bread. Laurel was a direct, no-nonsense woman who never seemed to make small talk. But in her own blunt way, she said, ‘I thought you might be in need of some tucker.’
The profuse thanks offered by my parents – my father, the Irishman, suddenly full of blarney – were brushed aside.
‘Just call out if you need anything,’ Laurel said, her eyes travelling over the situation. And then she was off.
This was a practical demonstration of a lesson the Reverend Norman McLeod, who led his followers across seas and continents to settle in Waipū, had instilled in his flock: to love your neighbour as you love yourself. It’s the second commandment, the book of Mark, Chapter 12, verse 31. In the years to come, I didn’t like everything I heard about McLeod, and thought his views on a range of topics harsh, but with this I was, and remain, in total accord. It’s a basic tenet of survival. We need one another if we are to live in this world. I never once felt like an outsider in Waipū. I would live there for only two years but they are among the truly significant years of my life.
We haven’t quite got to 1954 yet. It’s still a couple of weeks away, with the arrival of Queen Elizabeth II on her first visit to New Zealand, the Tangiwai rail disaster and Christmas to come, in between. But there was also the small matter of hay that needed to be cut, and this is partly how we became connected with the community. The farm was bounded on one side by a river. A wide green paddock swept from the little square farmhouse down to its edge. The grass hadn’t been cut for a couple of years. I believe it was brown top, brought to New Zealand in a mattress by James Fraser from the North Channel of St Anns in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. Deep and lush, more than was needed by the tiny herd we had brought with us, it was, in fact, a cash crop waiting to be harvested. But, of course, we had no machinery, and I still remember my father looking across that paddock, his shoulders lifting, then drooping in despair.
He needn’t have worried. The next morning, a group of swarthy, black-singleted men arrived. These were the McAulay men, described by the Presbyterian minister, the Reverend William Levack, in his diaries as ‘the men with jutting jaws’. They were Murdoch, the husband of Laurel, and Ken and Harold, their two sons. I don’t quite know what happened next, except that by the end of the day some arrangement had been made whereby tractors and haymaking machinery would be acquired, and a posse of helpers brought in to cut and bale the hay. I remember that week as a daze of sunlight and excitement, as more and more people arrived, baskets of food were unloaded beside the river and a sudden happiness descended on my family, in a way that had been missing. In late afternoon, before milking on other farms began, there would be a round of beers for the men. In Waipū there were those who drank not at all, or those who did so with gusto. The North River men fell into the latter category. The McAulay family had a large herd by the standards of the day, nearly a hundred cows, perhaps too many for Murdoch; I could hear him in full voice some evenings, roaring across the paddocks as milking approached and the cows were bolshie. ‘You might as well speak to Jesus,’ he would shout.
Just two days before the New Year was upon us, I found myself on the side of the street, wearing my new uniform for Waipū District High School, even though school was some weeks away. Her Majesty the Queen was being driven through the town, from Whangārei to the south. It was a hot dry day, the beginning of a drought that would last until early March. I can barely recall my sight of the Queen, just the flash of a white-gloved hand inside a black car. But what I do remember is my first meeting with a group of people with whom I would share the next two years of my school life. There was tall, fair Jennifer Baildon, daughter of the headmaster, Jennifer Gates (later Jennifer Beck), who became a lifelong friend, Alison Foote, Marina Markotich, Hector Ewen, with his halo of golden curls, Barry Connell. We would all be in the same class. In that first year at Waipū DHS, Mr Baildon taught French to the two Jennifers and me, and two boys, in the primary school cloakroom.
I saw the recently opened museum; the six-sided monument topped with the Lion of Scotland, commemorating the six ships that brought the Nova Scotian settlers to New Zealand; the white-painted Presbyterian church; the church hall, where the following year I would sit my School Certificate exams; and the manse. The hall was shaded by a huge magnolia tree, its creamy flowers shedding a lingering scent. The manse was home to the Reverend Levack, the prodigious diarist, who had come from Mauritius to preach in Waipū, with his wife Deborah, whom he called Doof, and their three young sons. Alexander, the eldest, was a year behind me at school, a dark, vivid boy with a quick sense of humour.
Just a week later, as the Queen continued on her tour and the country continued to grieve the victims of the rail disaster, Waipū had to contend with its own massive sorrow. News came through that Douglas McAulay (another branch of the McAulay clan), a popular young family man, had fallen into the sea while fishing. Four days passed before his body was found. On 13 January, the Reverend Levack conducted his funeral service. He wrote in his diary that ‘the funeral of Douglas McAulay at 1 p.m. was the largest of its kind I have ever officiated at. His wife attended at both the church and the grave. Which was very brave, but to my mind not quite right. Women, as in Scotland, should not be at the grave. Perhaps it is different in New Zealand.’ Although we were newcomers, the sense of sorrow throughout the neighbourhood was palpable and lasting.
On the farm plenty of work awaited. Mad as it sounds, there wasn’t even a cowshed on this place my parents had acquired, so building one was an early task. A slab of concrete had to be laid, all of it on the same day. My father looked morose. My mother and I stood at the ready, as he explained how we must hold the ends of a long flat board to screed the mixture as he poured it. Once again, as if they had been watching for something like this to happen, the helpers arrived. Nobody had asked them, they just came.
So we got to know the McKays and the McKenzies, whose farm shared a boundary with ours, Elliot Brown and his brother Ray, and all their families. Being neighbours in the Waipū sense was not just about hot scones and cool beers. It was about trust too; little things like leaving doors unlocked so that neighbours could pop in and borrow a cup of flour or an aspirin if they ran out, and bigger things like watching out for one another’s children and being on call if there was sickness. There was also the small matter of listening in on the party line, which many did shamelessly; the code was not to repeat overheard secrets.
My father and Elliot became friends; Elliot had a puckish sense of fun, and the pair of them bellowed at each other’s stories, some fantastical. On one occasion when the Reverend Levack visited the Browns, whom he described as ‘a complicated family’, he wrote that ‘Elliot has seen a flying saucer and is quite convinced it is a man-made thing, but what men, and from where?’ The reverend seems to have been open to a bit of leg pull. Meanwhile, my mother had been invited for a cup of tea with Julie, Elliot’s wife. She recalled the pleasure of just being able to sit in the farm kitchen with the children running about and having a relaxed and affable conversation. My mother was a naturally shy woman and it took a lot to get her to talk about herself, but there she felt at ease.
In March, on St Patrick’s Day, there was a commotion in the village. I witnessed the evidence as the school bus was turning into St Marys Road to school. In Levack’s words, ‘the lion on the top of the Waipū memorial is discovered to be draped in green and placarded “a touch of green for the blue-noses”. The children are most excited about it.’ Indeed we were and the rumour soon swirled around that the miscreant was one of the school staff who lived near the women teachers’ hostel. The finger was pointed at tall, bespectacled Fred Larkin, although so far as I know it was never proven. It’s perhaps no coincidence that the Reverend Levack refers to a teacher throughout his 1954 diary as Mr Larrikin. Mr Baildon called a school assembly and told us it was no laughing matter. None of us laughed out loud. Fred went on to marry my favourite English teacher, Eileen O’Shea, who lived at the hostel then and inspired in me a love of poetry. When I met Eileen again many years later she and Fred had had four children and good and happy lives. My history teacher, Judith Bird, lived at the hostel too. She would feature for many years in my Wellington life.
I never got to talk to the popular, ever busy Reverend Levack, although I remember him visiting the school to provide religious instruction for the primary students. I wish I had met this seemingly tireless man. His remarkable diaries list not only preaching sermons and conducting weddings and funerals, but a range of activities including dancing, singing (often), milking cows, joining the Masons, giving speeches, playing bowls, judging hat-making competitions and sailing his boat Phoebe. But, Scots Presbyterian though my mother was, my father was Church of Ireland and I had been brought up an Anglican. Despite differences in interpreting the scripture, my father and the Reverend Levack seem to have had entertaining conversations at the saleyards, and perhaps, too, at the library, which they both frequented. The minister recorded joining the library and that he paid fifteen shillings for the privilege. The library opened on Saturdays and was run by Bertha Gates, the mother of my Gates friends. ‘The country library has been staying overnight at Miss Gordon’s so there should be some new books at last,’ the minister writes. As it happened, my father helped choose books from the Country Library Service van, which was a great place to get to know the locals.
William Levack was a good sort, my father would say, adding that the man was ‘no wowser’ and seemed to like a drop. Apparently that was right, given the reverend’s accounts of his home brew consumption, and of taking his sons to help him dump ‘four dozen empty wine bottles out on the boat on the river’. Later in the year a group of us who were Anglicans went to confirmation classes. I used to go with the Hardie girls, Glenda and Barbara. We were instructed by Father Fisher, as he liked to be called, an Anglo-Catholic or High Church Anglican priest. After a meeting with him, the Reverend Levack remarks, with some acidity: ‘He was an hour late. Fellow with a head like an enormous pumpkin. I addressed him as Father Fisher, just to show these boys what’s what in the Holy Catholic church.’ I’m not sure whether he is the same ‘Father’ he had met earlier in the year, who ‘claimed to live on oysters and stout’. I wasn’t much taken with the man myself. However, my mother made a beautiful white pleated dress for my confirmation service, held in Maungatoroto in November. She toiled over that dress, hoping that it was something I would wear in the future. Of course I never did.
One of the two biggest events of 1954 was when Don ‘Gussie’ McKay (so named because his father’s name was Gus) won the seat for National in Marsden, our local electorate, a seat he would hold for the next eighteen years, later becoming Sir Donald McKay. Waipū was, and I imagine still is, true blue, as were my parents then. Don Gussie was not part of the volunteer brigades who arrived at our farm but certainly we had met him and his wife Miri (short for Miriam) at gatherings along North River. The Reverend Levack wrote: ‘Election day. Don Gussie won, and the cat had four kittens called Hill, Hosking, McKay and Vallance Independent, so we drowned Hill, Hosking and Vallance and kept McKay.’ But he hadn’t been at the McKay farm the evening before, and I had. The McAulays held an election night party and we all gathered around the radio every few minutes waiting for the results to come through. It was very late when the winner was finally announced. Someone decided that we should all go to the farmhouse and wait for Don Gussie and his wife to return from party headquarters in Whangārei. We were bundled into a car and off we went, with much tooting of horns as we drove in procession around the winding road. But winning is one thing, and talking to reporters another. It was four o’clock in the morning before the triumphant member of parliament arrived. Everyone went very quiet, and then as the car drove through the gates, all the lights were turned on and the gathered farmers sat on the car horns with siren blasts that surely must have put the cows off their morning milking.
As usual, we had gone in someone else’s car. Transport always was a problem for our unmechanised family. I was picked up every day by the school bus, chock a block with exuberant little Brown and McKay kids. Rod McKay, the youngest of Don Gussie’s four children, and Craig Brown were six-year-olds when I started travelling with them, and I could have sworn they brought a boxful of tricks every morning. Rod would become a leading figure in the community and clan chieftain, while Craig grew up and became mayor of Whangārei.
We had rural delivery for our mail, and our meat and groceries were also delivered. But as for getting around, my parents and I biked to most places. If I visited friends, or went to basketball practice at the weekend, I pedalled many miles over metalled roads fraught with corrugations. The neighbours offered rides but they must have thought us unusual. The McAulays were unfailingly kind. The brothers noticed that I had a fairly restricted social life and once they got to know me would ask if I’d like a lift into dances in the Centre or a square dancing evening. The Reverend Levack writes of monthly Scottish country dancing, apparently held in the church hall and ‘much appreciated’, but I think the square dances, in the community hall in the main street, were different, although invariably we concluded the evening with a set of Lancers. Still, I can never hear ‘Red River Valley’ without my feet beginning to twitch. I loved the calling, the circling to my left and to my right.
As the year drew towards its close, another big event was looming, the visit of Dame Flora McLeod of McLeod, twenty-eighth clan chief of the McLeods. The Reverend Levack reports months before on finding groups of neighbours gathered together arranging for the visit. As early as August, after planting ‘200 onions under [his] bedroom window’, he had, at the Caledonian committee, ‘proposed the banning of kilts, jackets and sporrans for women. The Dame Flora McLeod of McLeod is coming and I propose to put an ear-chopping display on behalf of the local McLeod.’ (This last a dig at Norman McLeod, who reputedly had a boy’s ear cut off for stealing.) Perhaps there was a hint of unease in this entry, for when Dame Flora did arrive, he nearly ‘committed the gaffe of bursting into a party which I only realised in time was specially reserved for McLeods only’, a reminder perhaps that, friendly as the locals were, Waipū came about because of McLeod and his followers, and certain boundaries had to be observed.
There was something else my father and I did with the neighbours in those two enchanted years. Some evenings one of them, usually a McAulay, would call by and suggest a trip to Ruakākā to collect scallops. This was in the days before the oil refinery, when the beach was just a long shining curve of sand, and the scallops so plentiful we would pick them up by the bucketful, enough to feed the farm dogs as well as ourselves for as long as the feast would last. I see us now, ankle deep in water, the blue skeins of twilight winding around us, and the ride home in the deepening evening, and we would all be singing.
2
Waipū is still part of my life. The town has fuelled several of my works. The river comes back to me in dreams. It stands like a mysterious presence, the deep swirling waters where thousands of eels swam, the banks thick with hawthorn and willows. I don’t know who planted them. When I was young, I didn’t have the kind of curiosity that asked who had been before. The farm was ours and I was happy, that’s what I knew. I left it at the age of sixteen because there was no work up there, and I wasn’t ready to be married, though some of the girls I went to school with already were. I stood at the farm gate with my parents on the day I departed and felt that my heart was breaking. Theirs were too. My father dragged himself to the cowshed each day. My mother carried on as if all were well. The farm had been her dream, the place that gave her a presence in the world. But it went up for sale a few months after I had gone and was sold within weeks of the notice going on the gate. My mother hid in the hills that day, hoping that the buyers would go away, but it was all over. A month later she was working in a Rotorua clothing factory sewing working men’s pants, and my father had taken up work in an office. I see this as my parents’ tragedy. If I had been a son it might have been different. Not that my mother stayed in the factory for long:
After the farms she came into herself,
expert in china, the best saleswoman
for miles around, the past a good omen,
that homestead of her birth with shelf
and cupboard crammed with fine crockery
she knew by rote: Doulton decorated
with pansies (her favourite), the encrusted
Moorcroft, the eastern chinoiserie,
that jardinière enamelled with prunus
standing in the hallway. She chuckled, how
easily the names rolled off her tongue. Now
it seemed she had made some grand entrance
of her own. Her husband wore a collar
and tie to work, life a different colour.
My father retired from his office job when he was sixty because he was sure he would die young. He lived for nearly another twenty years.
The square dances and how I came to leave the farm are reflected in my short story ‘Circling to Your Left’, which opens my collection, All the Way to Summer. It is about what might have been, for them, for me. I could have been in that town still, but you know when it’s right to leave and there are times when your life hangs in the balance, depending on what you decide.
‘Flower Man’, my first story to be published in the literary journal Landfall, arose from something that happened in the last of my school days, the death of a much-loved local figure, an elderly man who supervised the end of year exams in the local church hall. He was known as Danny ‘Ferry’. He died under the magnolia tree outside the hall, after telling his students that he ‘could not go on that day’. In the story, a group of his students, in their grief, run amok and cut down the magnolia tree. This is not what happened; the tree still stands in Waipū. Nor was I present when Danny ‘Ferry’ made his exit, although a day or so before, I had sat and inhaled the scent of a flower he had placed on my desk, as he did for each student taking part in the exam. I was trying so hard back then to turn every inspiration into total fiction, rather than let the story take me where it would. I suppose, in its own way, it speaks of the breaking out of youth facing the future, tearing up the familiar behind them.
When I came to write The Book of Secrets, things changed again. It was all about research and making things as true as I could, alongside an invented story. I went to Nova Scotia, pored over documents, read everything I could lay hands on. It took me years. Tucked away in all of this was the memory of an old woman who lived alone in a rickety house that I passed each day on the school bus. She was known as Kitty Slick, although that wasn’t her real name, and some called her a ‘witch’, which wasn’t true either. I made her the central character in my novel and called her Maria, a descendant of the migration. Unseemly things happen to her, including the birth of a child who dies.
This offended her relatives and the community, and although the book sold in its thousands, and continues to sell fitfully thirty-five years later, I was asked not to come back to Waipū. That was deeply painful. I was restored to the town several years later, when locals Lachie McLean, both a farmer and a theatre director, and Patsy Montgomery, the director of the local museum, reached out to me. Lachie, a slight man with weathered outdoor skin and an elfin grin, has directed musicals in the area for five decades. His home, Birdgrove, is the oldest surviving farmhouse in Waipū, surrounded by an exquisite garden. It’s situated on the Braigh, a plain that runs between the Brynderwyn Hills and Bream Bay. Old settler territory. Patsy has been a potter; in my kitchen I have tiles she has made showing the school bus I used to travel in, the old Four Square on the corner where our groceries used to be delivered; she still sings folk songs. I was welcomed ‘home’ in a large public gathering on a clifftop one moonlit night, after I had made a conciliatory speech, in which I talked about the way fiction and reality blended together, and the way that I put myself into the heads of my characters. If there was a witch, I said that night, then it was me.
It was through Lachie that I came to play a role in the Waipū pageant, which he produces every ten years. He jokes that it is the local Oberammergau. The Waihoihoi River runs along behind the town, winding its way through banks that form a natural amphitheatre behind the old manse, with plateaux on either side. It is here that the migration story is re-enacted, at exactly the place where the settlers are understood to have stepped ashore. Waka paddled by Patuharakeke, the local hapū, come sweeping down under the floodlights, as do almost life-sized ships; on the banks straw houses are burned down in emulation of the crofts that were destroyed during the Highland Clearances. The flames light up the sky. The Highlanders leave amid keening and the music of bagpipes, as the story crosses the ocean with the crofters aboard the ship, led by Norman McLeod, then landing in Nova Scotia. All of this is in the pageant, all the way to New Zealand’s shores by which time, forty years after the migration began, the number of ships required to get from Canada to New Zealand had risen to six. They were built by the Nova Scotians themselves, in their own backyards: they were called Margaret, Highland Lassie, Gertrude, Spray, Breadalbane and Ellen Lewis.
This story is narrated and dramatised by performers on floodlit platform stages. I was one of the two narrators in 2013; the other was a man called George Mutch and our voices were thrown from either side of the river. I also played a role in the drama. In my first scene, I was walking along the main street of the town when a high school girl approached me. We introduced ourselves. ‘So you’re Dame Fiona Kidman?’ I agreed that I was. ‘So you’re the woman who made all the trouble in this town.’
I didn’t make the greatest actor. I’ve always had a secret yearning to act but when it comes to the point I freeze. Perhaps writing is an act of performance in itself and trying to do both may not work. On the night of dress rehearsal, I stood up, stared around at the assembled cast, and said, ‘Oh shit, I can’t remember all of this.’ The show was being filmed for television; the cameras stopped rolling. It came more or less right on the two nights that we played, each time to an audience of three thousand on the riverbank.
This is how I came to play myself playing myself.
In that crowd, among the music, and the fires lighting the sky, and people I had known since I was growing up, I felt an immense sense of belonging. The words of the old psalm, number twenty-three, which I was required to read at my first school assembly in the town, and which is read also at my mother’s family’s funerals, came back to me: ‘He leadeth me beside the still waters.’ If this seems too biblical a conclusion, Waipū is a town that is biblical in its beginnings. The quiet and unquiet place.
This is the other place I call home.