Splendour in the baked grass
There is often more to a summer holiday than beaches and animals, writes David Slack.
Our daughter was three the other day and is now 17 and once again we’re on holiday together. Holidays are when I look around for something interesting to show her.
So much of it has been entirely, predictably conventional: the beaches, the camping grounds, the dolphins, the pandas. But then there’s the other stuff.
I took her to the location of my first heart attack. I took her to a murder trial involving methamphetamine and a deeply troubled man and a samurai sword. I took her to a conference to show her people watching PowerPoint presentations. We took her to a miner’s museum and discovered someone’s preserved thumb in a jar.
Why? Well, the miners would cut off their finger then put in a jar of formaldehyde and present it to get their compensation. Or perhaps your question is: ‘what was I thinking?’
Reality, in a word. Something beyond the popcorn and the Disney princesses, an introduction to the wider world. Although now and then we got more than I bargained on.
The preserved finger wasn’t in the plan. It’s just that Waihi is a very gothic place, even when the sun is shining, and on its dusty shelves you will find the truth of a miner’s life 100 years ago.
That holiday started at overcast and just kept getting darker. Clouds, building to torrential rain, then my brother rang to let us the know our house had been burgled. As far as he could tell, only one thing was missing and that was the TV our little girl would watch when we let her, because TV’s no good for you.
We explained to her we had to go home to make the house safe because someone had broken in and the one thing in the whole place they had taken was her little TV. And that was when she threw up on the brand new carpet at the motel in Waihi beach.
The night was dark as we piled into the car, darker as we came through gothic Waihi, and the rain grew to a torrent, and then something came bursting out of the dark and across the road and I did not swerve and there was a dull thud and when Mary-Margaret asked what had happened I did not use the word cat, because this is how we shield our children from more than they can cope with, even those of us who take them to murder trials with samurai swords and P.
Reader, in all sincerity I was just taking her and her friend to see the justice system in action. I was as surprised as you to discover the defendant was Antonie Dixon.
There are houses, fascinating derelict houses, all over New Zealand that you will discover 10 minutes after you turn off the main It was empty, rotting, two stories of splendour, once a grand family home, disintegrating on a Wairarapa hill under the blue summer sky, a Wyatt painting in a sea of baked summer grass, utterly abandoned. A tragic beautiful ruin. road. The columnist Joanne Black wrote a long time ago about the way you see a decaying house in some remote place and say: ‘we could buy that for nothing and do it up and live there’.
Ever since, whenever it happens to us we say ‘‘that’s a Joanne Black house’’ and our imagination starts because I can always imagine living somewhere else and Karren loves to look at a house and imagine what you could with it.
This holiday when we took our daughter to Stonehenge Aotearoa, which is surprisingly mystical for what is essentially a vast amount of poured, boxed concrete, we discovered the best Joanne Black house ever.
It was empty, rotting, two stories of splendour, once a grand family home, disintegrating on a Wairarapa hill under the blue summer sky, a Wyatt painting in a sea of baked summer grass, utterly abandoned. A tragic beautiful ruin.
We speculated. Was this all that was left of an enormous station? Where were the trees? Had there been a family disaster?
My sister in law had the answers. It was someone else’s Joanne Black house, a magnificent old building relocated to the spot with grand plans and dreams of restoration. Then a family came apart and the dreams died on the hill.
Life can be where your holiday daydreaming takes you and that may be nowhere at all, in the end. But somewhere outside the Kardashians and Instagram and all that confection is where you find your happy place in this world.