Landscapes of legendary tucker
David Slack says hordes of house-hunting Aucklanders could be salvation for the heartland.
Once, a very long time ago, you made your own fun on a Sunday. You had to. Nothing was open. Not a pub, not a bottle store, not a bar, nothing.
Sometimes in the afternoon we would drive over to Makara on the rocky Wellington coast to whack a golf ball around nine shabby holes. Hung over, surrounded by sheep.
The best part for me was the crayfish roll from the dairy. Perfectly ordinary filled rolls, but loaded with fresh crayfish and I don’t care what you paid for yours at the French Cafe, this was better.
‘‘Can you still get them?’’ I asked Twitter this week. ‘‘No, there’s a cafe there now,’’ my friends said. Everywhere there’s a cafe there now.
These are a few of my favourite things. Fish and chips at Mangonui. Whitebait fritters in Mokau. Cheese rolls wherever it’s freezing. Steak pie in Bethlehem. ‘‘The gigantic $2 eclairs at Johnny Nation’s in Ohakune,’’ said Twitter, ‘‘you should see them!’’
And the sandwich bars of Ngaruawahia. Yes, Ngaruawahia. A town so tragic you wouldn’t stop there to relieve yourself, according to some people.
I like Ngaruawahia. I like stopping there. You can buy a magnificent fresh roll for the price you paid in Auckland in 1985. And as you sit there eating your wrap and your savoury pie you can watch New Zealand pull over in their Kenworths and Corollas and Jeeps to use the extremely well-appointed toilets. Not everyone’s a commentator.
The gas station does well, the restrooms do well, the sandwich bars do well. How’s the rest of town doing? It’s not Lambton Quay. There are empty shops. There are $2 shops. It looks like every small town these days. Not what it was.
But it’s still there, and so is Makara and its cafe, and the locals call themselves Macaroons, apparently.
You can’t sustain an entire town economy on an eclair or a filled roll but they can help, a lot. Your legendary food is your emergency locator beacon, buried beneath 30 years of economic rubble, letting us know there are still people alive under there.
Can we rescue them? Will $5000 from Paula Bennett do it? Can Labour Green come up with a better idea? It’s not a high bar to clear.
A friend suspects the Government has a cunning plan: just ignore the housing crisis and watch it drive enough Aucklanders to Huntly and Dunedin that you’ve earned yourself a regional development boom without doing a thing.
Maybe hordes of Auckland exiles will solve the problem. Or maybe it’s true what experts say: people all over the world are flocking to the huge cities and emptying out the towns and villages.
I like Ngaruawahia. I like stopping there. You can buy a magnificent fresh roll for the price you paid in Auckland in 1985.
I watched a fascinating TED talk this week by Leo Johnson. You may know his brother Boris. This Johnson is all fired up about sustainability. His book describes how we may yet avert environmental doom and create marvellous new cities.
I’d be exaggerating if I said I wholly grasped his argument but he says the cities of the future could be moulded by ‘‘the people’’ rather than ‘‘The Man’’. Sign me up. What’s The Man done for any of us lately?
Leo Johnson is especially excited about Barcelona, where they’re designing an entirely new way of life for city people. You might make your own power and distribute it, you might make your own food in the city and distribute it. You might make all kinds of stuff and distribute it. You’d be able to get your hands on all kinds of technology to do it. We could be microproducers, all of us. We could all get the chance to make something, to contribute, to be a working part of the economy. The way it used to be.
He imagines new cities like this starting from scratch and thriving. It’s still capitalism, but not the one that crashed and burned the global economy then got the poor taxpayer to prop the whole sorry mess up so they could pick up right where they left off.
Was this all just nonsense I saw on my YouTube, or is it real? Let’s see what James and Metiria and Andrew and Annette make of it.
Meantime, keep those whitebait fritters and eclairs and cheese rolls coming, smalltown NZ. Help might be just a TED talk away.