Roosters I Have Known Read online

  He wound up the window. Cunliffe’s chauffeur drove away. No one said anything for a couple of minutes.

  [November 4]

  21

  Colin Meads

  Country Calendar

  The two men who had worked all day crutching his sheep arrived at the farmhouse before he did, and headed straight for the old fridge outside on the porch to grab a beer. They sat down and drank their Waikato on a couch by the back door. They said, Pinetree’s a good bugger, you’ll be right. It was spring weather, a fresh afternoon in November, a light breeze, seventeen degrees, the sun had come up at 6.03 a.m. and warmed the green King Country hills and valleys. They said, That’ll be Piney now. He came up the driveway on his farm bike. It cost him an effort to swing his bare legs out of the bike and place his boots on the gravel. ‘Crutched a hundred,’ he said. ‘Bloody near killed me.’ They said, Beer, Tree? ‘I might do,’ he said, and the bottle disappeared into his great paw – it looked as thin as a knitting needle, as small as an inkpot.

  Pinetree, Piney, Tree, born Colin Earl Meads in 1936, but who goes around calling him Colin? I called him Colin. His name sounded so official. I felt like a tax inspector come about his GST. It was nervousness, the weight of anticipation, but that was foolish. At seventy-one, Meads is still a massive figure – Pinetree, etc – and has a relaxed, almost gentle presence. He has a genuine charm, laughs often, and has soft grey eyes. A good bugger, who takes you back to a time you think of as innocent.

  Innocent rugby, when Meads played 133 times for his country between 1957 and 1971, a natural inhabitant of the Silver Fern jersey that had yet to be graffitied with a sponsor’s name. He is too lively a rooster to be regarded as a museum piece, but he stands as a kind of relic of another innocence – the New Zealand way of life, when we depended on farmers to work the land, to sell the milk and cream and wool and meat. Meads, famously, cut his King Country farm out of the bush. Everyone knew this is how he shaped his body and spirit to become the greatest, or at least the most loved, of all All Blacks. In the years since he stopped playing, he has risen, almost levitated, into a living New Zealand legend.

  All right. Steady on. It would take an army of yogis to lift Meads off the ground. But there was more than characteristic New Zealand sentimentality at play when it became news that Meads had put his farm up for auction. Something intangible was being lost. Something important was ending. It was like the ridding of an ancient superstition; the image of Meads on his farm was reassuring, a promise held in place, a stopbank against modern life. But the spell was about to be broken.

  He said: ‘That’s the way it goes.’ And: ‘That’s life, I suppose.’ Also: ‘Awwww well.’ We sat around a wooden picnic table on the porch. The shed was empty, except for a chopping block and Champ dog food. The kowhai tree was down to its last bloom.

  We talked about life on the farm. His father, Vere, took the family from Cambridge to the King Country in 1943. No electricity, just kerosene lamps and a wood stove. Meads rode the bus to school with his brother Stan and sister Joan. ‘We milked right from when we could milk. It was all cream in those days. We had to have the cows milked and the cream separated before we caught the school bus.’ When did the bus come? ‘Half-past seven,’ he said. When he got home, more chores. I asked him about school. He said, ‘School was our holidays.’

  He left Te Kuiti High School a few weeks before he turned fifteen. The next twenty years were hard and marvellous: winter tours with the All Blacks (he saved his allowance on the 1958 tour of Japan, and bought his wife Verna a washing machine), long hot summers with Stan, hacking away at scrub. I asked what they used. ‘Slashers,’ he said. ‘A lot of it was second growth. It had fire through it years before. There was some real big stuff in the gullies. We’d get up at all sorts of hours, come back when it was dark. We could come home earlier when club training started in the middle of February, end of February – that was two nights a week we didn’t have to chop till dark. We could knock off at six o’clock, have a feed, and go to club training in town at eight. And that was another couple of hours you didn’t have to spend cutting scrub.’

  To his first biographer, Alex Veysey – ‘Called him Horse. Lovely feller’ – and his second biographer, Brian Turner – ‘Different! Didn’t know till we started that he wrote poetry’ – and also to Bruce Ansley, author of a classic Meads profile in the Listener in 2001, Meads said the same thing: ‘We prayed for rugby to come around.’ He said it again at his farm on Thursday. He said it with feeling.

  Life on the farm. The time he got a hernia when he was on horseback: ‘Oh ho. Yeah. I ruptured myself. It was a racehorse. Mad bastard. I was shifting cows, and there was one who’d just calved, and she’d gone bloody crazy, and it worked the horse up, she was charging the horse, and he thought he was going back to the races again or some bloody thing, he took off, and I had to get the calf out of the paddock – we were putting thousands of ewes in there – and the only way was to get the calf up on the horse, and try and hang on, and this mad bloody horse – Sibo, his name was; he’d run second in the New Zealand Cup – drove the pommel into my guts. I managed to stagger home. I was in agony, and it wasn’t until I lay down that the pain went, and then I thought, “Oh well, she’s right” so I played rugby next day.’

  He eventually submitted to a hernia operation. What about Sibo? ‘Poor old bastard died up in there somewhere years later.’

  Crutching and drenching and shearing and fleecing and shifting the stock and whatever needed doing. In bed usually at half past eight. Booms in wool prices now and then. A couple of droughts, a few floods, but nothing too serious. He always ran beef cattle, usually Angus. Good steaks? ‘Awww yeah. Not for me to say. I only sell it. Some other bugger eats it.’

  Meads bought up more and more land, spent up large. Trying to pay off offshore loans was crippling. I asked him whether he thought he’d been a successful farmer, and he said, ‘Awww probably not. My son Glynn always told me I was trying to get too big. I thought all the most successful fellers had big properties. I probably went too far too quick. I don’t know. Properties came up around me that were for sale and I just went ahead and bought them, no matter what the price. At the time I thought it was the right thing to do. I’d still think that if I hadn’t had that trouble with the loans.’

  In 1994 he gave up the homestead to Glynn, and moved across the road. ‘We had a big discussion one night. He was living across the road from us, and he said, “Every thing I do, you’re watching me.” He said, “I don’t want to farm your way, I want to do it my way, but you’re critical of every thing I’m bloody doing.” So to cut a long story short, we moved here, which was a bit of a disaster as far as the house was concerned. A lot of work needed doing on it. I put in all the cladding, and a new roof. And we had to repile it: it was all totara piles underneath and they were rotten. It was eighteen inches out. If you overflowed the sink, the water’d race you to the front door.’

  The auction will be held on November 30 at the Waitete rugby club, but the Meads have already spent their last night on the farm. They moved to Te Kuiti in July. How’s it going? ‘Awww well, where we are it’s pretty quiet, so you don’t notice, and I come out here most mornings and give the dogs a run, and work out what I’ve got to do around the place.’

  But after the farm is sold, would he be a bear with a sore head? ‘I don’t think so.’ Then he said, ‘I could be. After about a month.’ He’d miss little things. ‘Like, the water in town is bloody putrid. The fridge is full of bloody drinking-water bottles that I get from here. I’d like to be able to keep the right to come out here and get the water, because I think it’s the best water in the world.’ The PGG Wrightson real estate advertisement is headlined ‘PINETREE’S SELLING THE FARM’. The copy reads, ‘Drink the same water as a rugby legend … You never know what’ll happen!’

  Meads said, ‘I hope it sells. We need to have an easier way of life.’

  We think of farms in daylight, but they can feel t
heir very best at night. Later in the interview, he said, ‘Everyone thinks it’ll sell, but it mightn’t.’

  At night, when the sky is hot with stars, farms can seem as vast and silent as a planet. A few more minutes later he said, ‘If it didn’t sell, I wouldn’t be too upset.’

  [November 11]

  22

  Pita Sharples

  One Big Happy Whanau

  There was a bit of chit-chat and how’d you do and a hongi thrown in from a passer-by when I greeted Maori Party co-leader Pita Sharples at his Hoani Waititi Marae in west Auckland. He introduced me to the marae manager, Sue Ngareta, and I remarked that the marae’s name, Hoani, reminded me of Hiona St Stephen’s Anglican Church in Opotiki – formerly known as the Church of St Stephen the Martyr to commemorate the savage death of Reverend Carl Völkner in 1865. Sharples and Ngareta hadn’t heard of him so I jabbered on, explaining that because Völkner was a government spy, followers of the Pai Marire, or Hauhau movement, hanged him outside the church, took his body inside, cut off the head and gouged out the eyes, which were placed inside a chalice and eaten.

  Yes, I’m really good at small talk. When I finally finished, Ngareta smiled and said, ‘We all know that sort of thing doesn’t happen in New Zealand these days, eh?’ Everyone laughed, because she had made a subtle, unspoken reference to the subject I came to interview Sharples about: the October 15 police raid on so-called ‘terror camps’ in the Ureweras.

  You could say that Sharples has made his position quite clear. His announcements to the media and in parliament have been downright strident, and provocative, and possibly absurd. Such as: ‘The raids have set back race relations one hundred years.’ As for police evidence, he said there was nothing in it. Of course terrorism charges were dropped against the seventeen suspects, he said; the bugged phones revealed only loose talk, ‘silly stuff’, no real intent. What, then, did he make of The Dominion Post flouting the law by publishing police surveillance transcripts of suspects talking about napalm and Molotov cocktails and violent insurgence? His response: ‘Irresponsible journalism.’ The worst crime, he said, was the way police had ‘turned over’ Ruatoki, and ‘traumatised’ innocent locals with roadblocks and house searches.

  Most Maori politicians are sooner or later awarded either excessive scorn or weird reverence. One of the more outlandish press remarks about Sharples was published in 2005, when he successfully ran for parliament: ‘He has become, if you like, the kaumatua of the nation.’ At 66, it’s true he has an obvious dignity and authority, and it only takes approximately two seconds when you meet him to feel that you are in the presence of someone special. He has achieved many things, wears his moral fibre without fuss, and he gives hope – this is a man who realised he didn’t smoke whenever he played blackjack, so to quit the habit he booked himself into the Sky Casino hotel, played blackjack for three days, won $2000, and has never smoked since. Short and powerfully built, he’s warm, informal, thoughtful, good fun. In short, he’s lovely.

  But on two recent appearances on Campbell Live, when given every opportunity to thunder more about the damage made to race relations, he seemed so unconvincing, so uncertain, a stubborn, muttering presence who didn’t seem to have his heart in it.

  We sat down in an office in the marae’s administration wing. I quoted his rhetoric about the police raids, and said to him, ‘Frankly, I don’t think you’ve been yourself.’ He said, ‘Oh, is that right? Okay. That’s sad. Because that is the real me. I care about everybody. I think the one thing you can accuse me of is caring. I care about everybody and anybody. That’s why I’m on this Earth, I think. To care. But when there are things that are so grossly over the top, like the police raids, then it needs hard talk.’

  Hard talk can so often whistle like hot air. Sharples compared the October raid on Ruatoki to the nineteenth-century pursuit of Te Kooti, and the armed action at Parihaka; I asked if he was the guy going over the top. He said, ‘Well, yes, in the fact there were no deaths, of course. But in terms of the trauma – they spread-eagled a woman on the floor, with her arms and legs open, they told young girls to hold their hands up so their nighties pulled up over them, they took their panties out of the drawer in front of them, and stuff like this. So, no, it’s not over the top. It’s real heavy stuff. Seventy cops for one arrest! And stopping ordinary villagers … It might be over the top because there were no deaths and shootings and stuff, but it was the same treatment of telling people they don’t count, and that’s the stuff that really hurts people. So yes, you could say it was over the top of me, but …’ And so on, back and forth.

  In another of his outbursts, Sharples had commented that his friend, Tuhoe activist Tame Iti, was arrested because the government wanted to ‘get back at him’. Was that a rush of blood to the head?

  ‘Yeah. Yeah,’ he said. ‘But it’s also from my association with police; I know they don’t like people getting away with stuff in front of them.’ Stuff? ‘Shooting the flag.’ But that stunt of Iti’s in 2005 was irrelevant to the October raid, I said. ‘It should be,’ he said. It probably was, I said. He replied, ‘Was it?’

  That exchange could have gone on all day. Who, I asked him, is Iti? Sharples said, ‘He’s a showman, an artist. Most people don’t know what he’s really like. It’s like they think Hone Harawira is a hard man. But he’s a softie! Hone’s a darling in some ways.’

  I reminded Sharples of a comment he had made immediately after the raids – that security agencies would plant evidence to gain a conviction. Another rush of blood? ‘Yeah, well, I was shocked at the time,’ he said. ‘Maybe it was a bit irresponsible on my part.’

  His colleagues in the Maori Party, co-leader Turiana Turia and ‘darling’ Hone Harawira, have called for the resignation of police commissioner Howard Broad. Does Sharples, too? ‘The party have called for it,’ he said, ‘so I guess that includes me.’ I said that sounded as though he was politely calling for Broad’s resignation. ‘The call has been made. Let it be there.’ And then he said: ‘On the other hand, I’ve written to him, and intend to have a meeting so we can move on.’

  He had described the police raid as ‘storm-trooper tactics’. Was that fair? ‘Yes, it was,’ he said. Oh come on, I said, did he really think that description was intellectually honest? ‘It’s very honest of me to say that! There they were, with balaclavas, just the eyes showing – there was a very good photo in The Dominion Post two days ago of a storm trooper, I mean a policeman, in all the gears.’

  It was interesting he saw that, I said, because it was the front-page photo that was with the story revealing the content of police surveillance tapes. But he didn’t want to talk about the actual story.

  He said, ‘I do say something! I say if there was serious criminal activity, it’s got to be pursued. But if you can’t lay charges, then all the evidence should be locked in a vault. Not produced to the public. I know it was released to validate the police, and also to feed New Zealand’s curiosity, people asking was this all bullshit or not?’

  That, I said, was a very fair question. ‘Yes, that is a fair question, but the law doesn’t matter? Publishing those tapes was just sensationalism.’

  ‘Look,’ he said, ‘there is no reason for anyone to feel afraid about terrorists in New Zealand. It’s just a couple of nutters and a few cowboys, and the rest are in dreamland. Okay, there are certainly people on firearms charges, but in terms of a war against New Zealand – no way. I just know New Zealand. We’re basically pretty happy.’

  And then he told a story. ‘Shucks,’ he began, ‘I will stand up for any New Zealander. I helped an old lady across the road. She was Pakeha and I was a student. She was two hundred years old, man. She was really old. Crumpled up and wrinkled. Cars were beeping, and I rushed into the middle of Queen Street and she clutched my arm and I took her across. And I looked at her and she was ugly as. And in her eyes I saw something that I had never seen before. I saw old New Zealand. I saw pioneer. I saw someone of courage.

  ‘Sh
e was two hundred years old, and she’s walking across Queen Street by herself. She says, “Thank you, boy, thank you.” I says, “What kind of family do you have that would dump you in town like this to survive by yourself?” She says, “Oh well, I’m on my own.” I says, “Where you going now?” She says, “I was just going to Smith & Caughey’s.” I says, “Well you can hardly cross the road! You’re shocking!” And we talked for a little while.

  ‘And I know that she’s the bread and butter of New Zealand. This is the pioneering thing, and – I don’t how I got into this – but that sort of spirit of race relations … we had something here in New Zealand that was special, and we keep avoiding admitting that there is a real strong New Zealand culture here, and we keep looking at the divisive things. It makes it difficult for people like me who are fighting for Maori equality, and yet you really don’t want to be a moaner, do you know what I mean?’

  I asked him if he genuinely thought that the police raids had set back race relations a hundred years. He said, ‘For Tuhoe at the moment, yes. But in general, no.’

  [November 18]

  23

  Richard Faull

  Day of the Dead

  All the while that Professor Richard Faull talked during our interview in his office at the University of Auckland’s School of Medicine – two days after he collected the country’s most distinguished award for science, the Rutherford Medal – I wondered what was going on in his brain. He talked a lot. Was it a blue streak, or might some other colour show up on the magnetic resonance imaging technology used on brain tissue in his laboratories? He talked without pause, quickly, often in italics. He wasn’t outraged by interruptions, merely surprised, and he waved the questions away: the cells directing the flow of his language were in a hurry, they poured on to the sidewalks and streets of his cerebrum, briskly but very politely brushing past each other on the motor-neuron pathways that led to his long, long speech curling up on my tape recorder.