Growing pains and survival instincts
It’s a tale of two strikingly different Southland towns – one with attributes and issues, the other with issues and attributes. Michael Fallow looks at how Mataura and Te Anau are coping with the winds of change.
It’s a black-and-white memory. The singlet’s black, the gumboots are white. Inhabiting them is one Jon Gadsby. By all means, sing along.
We don’t wear tuxedos in Mataura
Fancy city clothes are never seen
We ain’t got no comforts in Mataura
’Cos we like living rough and bein’ keen.
And I’m proud to be a scourer from Mataura
Place where life is good and livin’s free
A bloke can wear his singlet in the lounge bar
Singing God Defend New Zealand . . . and DB.
Ah, they don’t mutate them like that any more. The McPhail and Gadsby riff on old Merle Haggard’s original tribute to an Oklahoma town retains its sense of proud defiance as befits Mataura, a town that doesn’t get a lot of external respect compared with, say, Te Anau.
Te Anau’s possessed of prettiness and popularity and has the growing pains to prove it. Mataura’s possessed of – well, it’s unprepossessing. It’s a heartland town that has spent time in coronary care.
It was founded on three industries in the 19th century, but the paper mill and dairy factory are gone, and a stock food plant with it. And like so many places, the post office and bank are goners.
The great survivor is the Alliance meat plant still standing stoically. You can’t miss it as you drive through – which people so often did, noticing as they went that the housing stock wasn’t flash.
People had moved away; absentee owners bought up lots of cheap houses. Half a dozen years ago, of the 750-odd homes close to 200 were owned by outsiders, rented out, and in many cases scarcely well maintained.
In the words of former community development worker Jo Brand, the town was limping along and disconnected. Ten years ago, she acknowledges, it wasn’t seen as a very desirable place to live.
Here’s where we could airily add recent headlines about a gang presence, and the mirth that greeted the news that the town was getting Eastern Southland’s first set of traffic lights. Joke being that the introduction of three colours would brighten the place up.
Moving on up
As it happens,
Mataura also has evidence of a strengthening pulse. ‘‘It’s a wonderful community,’’ says Brand. ‘‘We’ve got each other’s backs.’’
Concerned government agencies had been going to meet to decide how to intervene, but then realised the town had already formed a taskforce.
The locals created lists of what they wanted to see in the town. With some grants from community and government funds, and a great deal of local initiative, facilities arose almost defiantly.
‘‘We started with celebrating and identifying who Mataura is first – not buying into what everyone else was telling us we were or weren’t,’’ Brand says.
‘‘We’ve got services. We’re half an hour from the sea; we’re an hour and a half from the skifields. [There are] three major airports within an hour and a half from here. And you can still afford to buy a house, even on your own.’’
Figures back her up. We’re talking about median house sale value of $124,950.
Thing is, that’s not part of a downward trend. Far from it. Property analysts CoreLogic recently assessed the 50 New Zealand places with the fastestrising values and Mataura came in ninth with an 18.8 per cent annual increase.
Young families are showing up, says community board chairman Alan Taylor.
‘‘It’s home ownership rather than just some rental.’’
There are also older arrivals, who are relocating because they
realise they could live mortgagefree and have a bit of spare money to boot.
The school’s roll has, of late, risen by about 30. The town has a new childcare centre.
The old town hall is restored, a new community centre is set up, derelict buildings have been demolished and parks and recreation areas created.
Businesses are showing up rather than departing, and gross domestic product growth and employment rates have been trending up in the past three to four years.
Significant progress hardly gets more necessary – or overlookable – in a community of Mataura’s size than the $1.4 million that the Gore District Council is spending to bring the town’s drinking water up to national standards.
As for the song’s ‘‘living rough’’ lyric, signs of cultural life can be found in the redevelopment of the town’s cluttered and undistinguished museum to an interactive, modern standard that made it the joint best project winner of the 2015 New Zealand Museum Awards.
Elsewhere, it is not only exultant young cyclists but also entire families who have felt the gravitational pull of a pump track for cycling adventurism.
And the presence of the Mongrel Mob and methamphetamine use?
The message from police and civic leaders is that Mataura is no different to any other community in New Zealand that wants to be safe; drug use is across all demographics and what’s needed is widespread, multi-agency, invested-public vigilance. Which is what’s been happening in Mataura.
The shoulder season has been getting shorter and shorter.
Ebel Kremer stands outside his Te Anau home, turns 360 degrees and it’s mountaintops all around him. ‘‘The air is clear. It’s quiet. It’s beautiful. It’s still.’’
Yes, that’s still how it feels when you stop and inhale it, but Te Anau certainly hasn’t been holding still. It’s a community working really hard to retain the relaxed vibe that distinguishes it from the likes of Queenstown.
Tourist and economic growth is really putting on the pressure.
‘‘The building that’s going on in Te Anau is incredible,’’ Kremer, a local community board and Southland District Council member, says.
He was talking to one of the town’s 15-odd builders the other day – that’s not counting the ones that come to town, do their jobs, and clear off back to home base – and the guy had 25 to 30 new houses on the go that week.
‘‘I had a job for my builder, talked to him yesterday, and he said: ‘I won’t see you for seven months. And it’s only a small job,’’ Kremer says.
‘‘Restaurants, contractors, farmers – they’re all looking for staff. Businesses can carry people over instead of letting them go. People have disposable income.’’
The shoulder season has been getting shorter and shorter, and even winter itself – once a time of virtual hibernation – is becoming increasingly brisk.
It’s good to have these growing pains, Kremer says, and it’s a source of satisfaction that the town is increasingly exerting a gravitational pull on New Zealanders themselves.
At the high end of the market, you’ve got land values between $300,000 and $400,000 before you put a million-dollar house on it.
Balancing act
But what about the workers? There’s no denying that the availability of staff accommodation is itself affected by the bustling Airbnb market that more than a few locals have hooked into.
The community board has some land, mercifully, and is sizing up how it can zone some of it for higher-density housing.
But infrastructure issues run greater than that. Kremer, with his district-wide councillor perspective, knows that his own town doesn’t exist in splendid isolation when it comes to local and central government resourcing priorities.
Its case is strong and hence, he says, the likes of the extra $3 million in government funds announced for necessary work on the massively pressured Milford project, and the $5m for Te Anau’s sorely needed wastewater upgrade.
Finding income where you can hasn’t been without its controversies. Since we raise it, Kremer acknowledges that the town’s locals have emphatically rejected personal use of the userpays toilets located by the lakefront, though tourists scarcely bat an eyelid at the cost.
But he would point out that more recently built toilets, away from the lakefront, are free for all. That’s the sort of balancing act that needs to go on.
Meaningful connection
The Southland District Council has of late been acknowledging that with widespread issues of aging infrastructure, tourism pressures and demographic issues throughout the district, some difficult discussions with communities lie ahead. The term ‘‘courageous’’ was even used.
It’s not that everyone gets identical resources, because circumstances aren’t identical. But there are basic needs and every community is entitled to have these met.
District council community and futures group manager Rex Capil calls this the difference between equality and equity.
Under the first approach everyone is dispensed an equal share of assistance. Under the second, assistance may be dispensed in different proportions, with the goal of more evenness in the necessary outcomes.
Kremer cites the strength of Te Anau’s connectivity with the wider southern matrix.
It’s not all about what some people think of as the umbilical connection between Te Anau and the international attraction of Milford Sound.
Those who wish to experience Fiordland as more than a passing blur en route to that destination would find Te Anau becomes a gateway to a lake trip to glowworm caves, or a jaunt to the coast and the magic of Doubtful Sound and of walking tracks, and a host of other southern communities from Tuatapere and the Hump Ridge track to Invercargill and Stewart Island and the Catlins. These are communities whose fates intertwine.