Most of you will know that as well as spending the bulk of our off time on a farm deep out of Napier growing up, we eventually moved from Wellington to Gisborne to live when I was in my mid-teens.
Gisborne was, and still is, an isolated town far out on the east coast of the north island. It lives in its bubble and serves primarily as a town to service the rural area, stretching over a vast part of the east cape.
What makes Gisborne somewhat unique is its isolation, which led to a “Wild West” feeling and a strangely lawless environment and the fact that the population is roughly fifty per cent Maori and fifty per cent European.
Cowboys literally roamed the streets on horseback in those days, and indeed, the further you went from Gisborne itself up the east coast, the more common that sight became. It was a lawless place in the 1980s through 1990s, and the police were more akin to old school sheriffs, meting out rough justice while gangs ran rampant.
Here is the first of some stories from growing up in a small rural town and just how incredibly different it was compared to today. Some of this will be hard to believe, but I can assure you, it all happened. I wasn’t going to write about this chapter in my life, but it all played a part on the road from urban to bucolic.
The first thing that hits you when you get to Gisborne is isolation. It’s a town that is four hour’s drive from the next small town, and to get to a significant city, it’s a good eight-hour drive. As you come in from the south, the hilly ranges give way to a massive plain filled with orchards, wineries, wheat, barley, and other crops. Surrounding the table are low hills rolling kilometres into the backcountry, mostly populated by sheep and beef farming.
The city itself sits at the conjunction of three rivers with a harbour, these days filled by thousands of cubic meters of pine logs, waiting to be shipped out. It’s your typical rural town, a long stretch of the main road that starts with accommodation, blends into industrial, and finishes with retail.
The beaches are pristine white sand and are the city’s star attraction. There are many surf breaks here, and it is well visited over summer when the population grows significantly. The coast road stretches hundreds of kilometres before it reaches East Cape, dotted with small rural outposts and hundreds of thousands of hectares of farmland.
But let’s start in the city.
In 1987 my brother and I have arrived in Gisborne and discovered two places of interest. One is a video games parlour called Cliff’s Place from memory. A narrow arcade with game machines stacked from the front door deep into the building. Beeping, jangly music, curses, and shouts pervade the smoke-filled cigarette air.
Gauntlet here, Commando there, Ghosts n’ Goblins sporting zombies in a corner, Defender marching left and right, Dragon’s Lair with its cartoonish characters, and old favourites like Pac Man still munching away.
Being hoisted out of Wellington and dumped into Gisborne was a complete culture shock. I had been at Rongotai College before moving, and while I had met a handful of Maori, I knew zero about the culture, language, and beliefs. All of a sudden, Maori were everywhere and with an entirely different dialect and accents.
It wasn’t just that, imagine my amazement when I walked into a Fish & Chip shop and the person behind the counter was European. Gisborne in those days had a strong Chinese community, but they were generally exceptional market gardeners, working the land on the flats. The Asian community didn’t work in fast food places.
The weather was hot and hard, with that harsh flat sunlight punctuated with northerlies that drove the temperature to near 40 degrees Celsius in summer. New Zealand hadn’t discovered air conditioning in those days, and many nights were spent under fans.
Near to Cliff’s Place was a pool hall. A large space filled with tables, mostly Maori patronage, and that was when we first started to make some friends. Again, the culture shock was high.
I remember playing pool with another guy about my age, not many of these boys went to school, and the literacy rate in the farming area was horrific.
He said to me, casually, “We don’t usually let baldheads in here, bro, but you seem alright, maybe cos’ you’re from Wellington, eh.”
A “baldhead”, pronounced with a bit of a drawl; sounds more like “boar head” and was a label given to white people and people of authority. Ironically, you didn’t have to be bald at all.
What I didn’t know was that the pool hall was a Black Power run venue. A lot of the prospects hung out there during the day. Because of my naivety, I had just started wandering in and playing, and perhaps because I was a rarity, not from Gisborne, it was accepted. I made some close friends.
There were different factions in the area. Mongrel Mob ran two bars on either side of town, Black Power had their haunts but were in those days being pushed back down the coast to Wairoa, the Headhunters had a presence to pick up weed shipments, and on a Friday night, the farm boys would come into town in their trucks looking for a fight. Violence was a common language.
Early in 1988, a monster cyclone came slowly down out of the pacific and sat off Gisborne for three days, just spinning and dumping rain. The city itself was flooded extensively, and the farmland was annihilated.
Most of the plains were destroyed in the flooding, and every hill you could see for hundreds and hundreds of kilometres suffered slips. It was ugly in the backcountry, where some parts saw nearly a meter of rain over the three days.
Infrastructure was destroyed, farms vanished, livelihoods were lost, stock perished, and the rebuilding effort was herculean. The region has tenacity, dating back to pre-European days, and a cyclone was not going to take them out. Neighbours helped neighbours, and the townies volunteered on farms helping with the cleanup. The community pulled together when it could have given up and walked away, which you commonly find in rural life.
After Bola, the pine industry started in Gisborne. Trees were planted in the right place to stop the level of erosion that the region had seen from ever happening again. The area needed a boost. Farming had been stopped in its tracks for a couple of years, and the freezing works, the city’s primary employer, had closed. Unemployment in Gisborne was rife, and many people subsided on welfare. Some families were in their third generation of welfare; undoubtedly, today, there are likely some entering their fourth.
I had enough of school at around sixteen. Gisborne Boys High had a couple of excellent teachers who encouraged my writing, of which I am most grateful. Here’s looking at you, Mr Ford, wearing your black bat wings, swishing around the English class while we wrote, playing early Pink Floyd on a reel-to-reel tape deck.
The school was exceedingly white and had a one-eyed view that rugby, in particular, was the only important thing. I was encouraged to try out for rugby; they made me stand on scales to see how much I weighed, my brain rebelled, and I walked out of the school hall.
Many of the teachers were baldheads in the truest sense. Authoritarian monsters who shouted, ranted, raved, and vowed that even if the government banned corporal punishment, they would never give it up.
When I left school, I went to work for a friend called David. He and his wife ran a gang of labourers that worked on the plains. The only white boy in the group I recall, I worked a few days a week.
It was tough work. Pruning kiwifruit was probably the best job because usually, you were under the vines in heat. Planting out new grapevines was a nightmare. You needed to be clad from head to toe to stop from burning, in the middle of a dusty field, with temperatures soaring into the mid-thirties. Days started early, a long drive out to the fields in an ageing Holden.
David and his family taught me a lot about Maori culture. I spent a lot of time with them in their modest house, of which they were most proud, in what was considered the worst part of Gisborne, Kaiti. It was a tight community, and they lived in each other’s houses, a lot of communal gatherings were had, and I learned an appreciation for their cooking.
Boil ups with doughboys, eel fishing expeditions returning triumphantly to smoke the tasty creatures in an old rusting fridge, paua, mountain oysters (lambs testicles), lamb tails, crayfish, stews, all accompanied by mountains of white bread and butter.
I am sure I am not going to live as long as some of my family after my Gisborne diet.
I spent some time in the backcountry, working the yards at docking and shearing times. Massive stations with thousands of stock, there is nothing like running a big mob into the yards and watching the brutal efficiency of a shearing gang in action.
Shearers had several skills in those days. Shearing itself, of course, hard work, hours a day of wrangling a sheep that doesn’t want to be turned on its back, turn them into these bundles of steel muscles, all cord.
Then there is the drinking skill. At the end of the day, many beers were often consumed in short order.
The swearing and shocking joke skills were next. Shearers had integrated swearing into language, and the air was often shockingly blue. The jokes would make Jimmy Carr blush, and I am sure if I told you one or two, I’d be arrested and banned from here forever.
Finally, fighting. After a hard day’s work, a few beers, a lot of jokes, then a good fight needed to be had. Not always, it was a bonus, but now and again, they’d square off against each other in the paddock outside the quarters and have a riotous set to bare-knuckle boxing.
Once that was done and dusted, hands were shaken, compliments were given, then dinner was had, and to bed they went, ready for another day tomorrow.
While I was adjusting to the cultural change in Gisborne City, up the coast road, Ruatoria was turning into a disaster zone. If Gisborne City was the Wild West, which we will get to, Ruatoria was the frontier.
A group calling itself the Rastafarians had started to terrorise the small town. The group consisted of ex-Black Power and Mongrel Mob members of a prominent local family.
They created a complex belief system using a mixture of religious, mystic, and Rastafarian ideologies coupled with the heavy use of weed. They thought that a spiritual leader would rise in Ruatoria or near there and might be one of their group.
You need to understand how country the country was up that way. I spent time working at Te Puia Springs in the 1990s, and when I stayed up there would go to the local pub.
There were more horses than cars in those days, and the bar was lined with a grill so drinks couldn’t be thrown at the tenders. As I recall, the only beer you could get was Steinlager. You knew when to exit the pub before a fight started because someone, in a warning a brawl was about to start, would turn their beer jug upside down on the leaner.
Some nights, an open market would be held, and on the car, bonnets would be an array of seafood, venison, other meats, and weed. You could buy weed by the handful. I met one of the Rastas there one night and had a joint with him. It seemed the polite thing to do.
He sucked this massive joint down after knocking me out, like some kind of vacuum cleaner. He told me that he would smoke until he passed out, “because that is when God touches you.”
The Rastafarians in Ruatoria decided that the land had been illegally taken in past times and set about trying to get rid of the white farmers there. They cut fences, stole stock, took horses, poisoned tanks, and then set about on an arson spree burning down haysheds, houses, and the combined police station and courtroom. They also grew a large amount of marijuana.
The police had trouble managing this and getting convictions. And then things got worse. One Rasta beheaded another, a young man befriended them had “the Devil beaten out of him,” a horse died after a public display of cruelty, and three of the members were jailed for kidnapping a policeman.
We’ll come back to this story in another part because it didn’t end there, and it is a fascinating tale.
On the other side of the coin trying to manage this unruly rural city were the sheriffs in the town. Their form of policing wouldn’t be seen today, and in those days, you did not want to mess with the law.
Hemi Hikawai was one of my customers in my early twenties. He was a giant of a man at six foot three, had a wicked sense of humour, and it was jokingly said that he had solved as many murders as he had suffered complaints. He solved a lot of murders. I had a huge amount of respect for Hemi, he was like the city’s superhero, and we knew he waded knee deep in the carnage.
The police often were judge, jury, and executioners. A “good slapping” was often the result for shoplifters and minor crimes. When a child went bad, mum would ring the police, and they’d dish out another “good slapping.” Perversely, it worked, and they were reasonably well respected.
One night, I remember walking down the main road with a friend who shall remain nameless when he shouted “pigs!” at a passing patrol car. They backed up, jumped out, gave us a good thrashing, hopped back in their vehicle and drove off. Needless to say, we never did anything like that again.
It was rumoured that the police caught one miscreant late at night and made him run naked down the main street with the cop car following, lights and sirens on.
The police drank at a local place called “Touch of Class” and “The West Inn.” They were not to be trifled with and were generally very hard-drinking bastards with a sense of humour.
I had a good friend in the police there some years later. He’d pull his patrol car up in my drive on a Saturday night and watch the rugby with me over a few beers, his police radio on and windows open so he could hear any calls that he needed to respond to. It was that kind of town.
Rural New Zealand in the 1980s and 1990s, especially Gisborne, was a world apart from city life. There is more to tell, but I need a Double Brown for now.
I hope this has been interesting; I know a lot of you would have grown up in similar circumstances and places. I’d love to hear about those experiences of growing up rural.