Huia Short Stories 10 (17 page)

She felt the wrist begin to enlarge and turned around to see she was holding his penis.

‘For God's sake, Terris! Don't you think of anything else?'

‘You grabbed me! I didn't touch you,' he said with mock indignity.

She stood up and, still holding his manhood, pulled him into the bathroom and turned the shower on.

‘This hurts you more than it hurts me,' she said, pushing him inside, ‘but it's for both our goods.' She walked out and closed the door. It was a cold Kaikōura shower that blew no one any good.

The University of Whakatu

Horiana Robin

I grew up in Whakatu in the 1970s and '80s. Ours was a community built around the largest freezing works in the Southern Hemisphere. In gigantic white letters, the words WHAKATU MEAT WORKS LTD loomed over our neighbourhood and our lives like a heavenly blessing, and we worshipped and sacrificed at the altar of this red brick and steel giant. Day and night the giant belched and farted gases, moisture and organic odours as it gorged itself on cattle and sheep. Its conversations were made of animal bleats and moos, human laughter, shouts and waiata at Christmas. The Whakatu freezing works provided the rhythm to our lives.

Our house was one of the first built down Ngaruroro Avenue. All of the houses down our street were paid for by Whakatu wages. Our school was about a mile and a half down the road from Whakatu, and we all went to school there. After school we'd hang out in groups, going from house to house along our street, playing and fighting and trying not to get growled at by each other's parents. It was a safe neighbourhood, where everyone knew each other because they all worked at the Works. The scariest thing for us kids was Mrs Bristowe and her Alaskan husky dogs. She had six of them. Beautiful things, they were, and beautifully terrifying too. The front of Mrs Bristowe's house caught the noontime sun, and she would sit on her light blue narrow porch guarded by her garden gnomes and a short brick fence while her dogs lay regally around her, because she was the alpha dog. The thing was that, if you forgot to cross the road when you approached Mrs Bristowe's house, you were in for one hell of a scare that would scar you for life. I should know. Up to the brick fence all six dogs would leap, and the barking of those dogs would send you stumbling onto the road like a crab, and scuttling to the opposite pavement. The dogs would then shut up, pleased with their humiliation of you, or sometimes Mrs Bristowe called them off.

We were an economically thriving community, with a dairy, a garage, a post office, a well-patronised butcher's shop and a Credit Union building. Whakatu was also a caring neighbourhood. My parents and others established the first Whakatu Youth Club. The juvenile delinquency of Whakatu at the time surpassed that of communities like Omahu and Camberley. The Whakatu Youth Club provided support and activities – we had many outings as kids. We went swimming a lot, picnicked and played at parks, and visiting Fantasyland was always a favourite. We had some awesome times. As we got older, our parents started organising trips away. We went sightseeing and swimming in Taupō and Rotorua, watched an All Blacks game and the Ngāti Pōneke kapahaka in Wellington, and even got to the Chateau and tobogganed our bums off. We always had plenty of sponsorship and meat from the freezing works for our trips.

My dad's whānau were known as the ‘Royal Family' at the Works, because apparently if you were one of my whānau and had an interview with ‘Uncle Dave', you were pretty much guaranteed a job. Starting the very next day, in a lot of cases. Recently, I was at a tangi for one of our Whakatu whānau when one of the speakers talked about the favouritism that had been shown to my whānau at the freezing works. He reckoned that as a young man he had an interview with Uncle Dave one time, and Uncle Dave said to him, ‘What, boy? You're a Tomoana! Get back to your own freezing works.'

My parents were also busy sports people. Dad played rugby for Whakatu Works, and both my parents pulled in the Works tug-o-war teams. On Sundays after a rugby game, Whakatu players and supporters would meet up at the Whakatu hall to celebrate their victories with lots of drinking, boasting and raffles. Me, my brother and our cousins would try to steal packets of chicken chips from behind the bar, and we'd go and scoff them at the park. We'd then walk around the block a few times until it got dark, then go back to our place, watch some TV and fall asleep. Mondays were usually absentee days for us kids because our parents were sleeping off their hangovers. Yep, they worked hard and they played even harder.

Once us kids stayed with our grandmother because the Whakatu men's and women's tug-o-war teams were competing at a national tournament in Nelson. Both teams were unbeaten Hawke's Bay champs. The men's team remained that way during the tourney, while the women's team came a devastating second. My mother said that they lost to a team of little Pākehā women because that team had better pulling technique, not better power or stamina. They had the time of their lives in Nelson. Legend had it that they hired a bus to take them on a pub crawl to celebrate the men's victory. The bus was the loser of this outing – not because of the alcoholic spills and empty bottles rolling on the floor, but because of the strong winners who had managed to pull half the seats of the bus from their bearings. Lucky for them, the bus driver was also their coach, and as the only sober and responsible member of the team he wasted no time in reimbursing the bus company with a heavy cheque from the boys. Another story from that trip concerned the strongest mate in the team, who made the mistake of falling into a drunken stupor. When he woke, he found himself bound in ropes and left outside the team's motel rooms. The boys wouldn't untie him until they were absolutely sure he couldn't get out of them by himself and that he wasn't going to rip them to pieces when he was released.

We had Christmas parties at the Whakatu hall when we were kids. We'd play games, eat junk food till our teeth ached and receive Christmas presents from a real Santa. These Christmases were supported by the boys and girls of the Whakatu Works, and we excitedly indulged in them. The Works boys and girls had established a Christmas tradition of their own; they'd stop the chains at the Works and sing Christmas carols for an hour or so. We could hear them singing while we played at the park or brought lollies from the shop, or from the open windows of our houses. They were moving moments. One year, Whakatu hosted a very famous entertainer, the legendary Prince Tui Teka. The boys found a pair of white overalls big enough for Tui (well, nearly), some gumboots and a hard hat. Prince Tui walked up and down the chains, lending his voice and his humour to the men. That was a major highlight for many of the workers for years to come.

When I was growing up, these were my role models. The freezing workers. My whānau was all at the works; they had flash cars, flash clothes, nice houses and holidays. They seemed very settled in their way of life, and although it wasn't said out loud by the adults around us, it was felt by us kids that the freezing works was to be our destiny also, because what else were we going to do? Who else would pay us that kind of money? ‘You don't have to stay at school,' we'd say. ‘Come a get a job at the works! You don't need qualifications to get on the chain – the sooner you can start, the better. You'll have a good paying job for life.' Whakatu wasn't just a big meat industry or the biggest employer of Māori in the Bay; it was a way of life for its workers. It was a place where men loved and fought each other; it was a place where they socialised and entertained. At Whakatu, men found a brotherhood, a camaraderie that they knew was special. It was a place of acceptance. To many workers, Whakatu was their religion, their marae, their home and their family.

It was 1986 when the Works closed. I was fourteen. A couple of teachers kept asking me if I was
ok
. The change at home was early and drastic. Mum and Dad just seemed quieter. I heard my dad tell my mum about the shitty way the boys had found out about their redundancy. A lot of the freezing workers had been doing what they always did on payday after work. They were at the local, downing some brown glasses. My dad said his sister walked in and told everyone that they had just lost their jobs; she'd heard it from one of the bosses. As she was the youngest of four siblings who all worked at the Works, people turned to my dad for clarification – but he was just as confused as everyone else by her unusual announcement. Nobody took her news seriously, and they carried on drinking. A couple of hours later, the publican turned the news on and there it was, the story of the day: ‘Whakatu closes …'

An atmosphere of disillusionment and hurt descended on the pub like a dark rain cloud. The wider community reverberated with the aftershocks of that announcement for years to come. Never had an economic disaster like that hit the Bay before. Hundreds of workers had just been displaced, along with their families – all in a moment, it seemed. It was devastating.

At home, my parents had two novelty piggy banks standing by the fireplace. Two tall tin cans that were in the image of beer cans. Mum and Dad had always tossed their spare coins into these piggy banks. Now, my mum got a can opener and prised these tins open. She used the coins from those piggy banks for bread and milk and luncheon for our sandwiches. My father used his redundancy monies keeping ahead of the mortgage and the household bills. I remember my parents contemplating a move to Australia for work. Many of our neighbours had already gone. Whole families relocated – not just overseas but north, south and everywhere in between within the country.

The butcher shop was the first local business to go, followed by the post office, the Credit Union building and the garage. Then the buses stopped operating, forcing our parents to carpool us to our various schools. The only ones left in our community were the elderly, the optimistic and the staunch stalwarts like my parents, who had always been closely involved with their marae, church and various community organisations. A few centres had sprung up to help support the physical, mental and economic welfare of ex-workers and their families, but some ex-labourers just couldn't handle the change, and had already slipped into a vacuum of addiction – especially alcoholism. Some ex-Whakatu boys suffered broken marriages and depression, and sadly there were a few suicides and premature deaths. The halcyon days of economic boon had certainly gone bust, and we remained a broken community for a long time. The Youth Club continued, though, and my baby brother enjoyed many outings. These outings became fewer and plainer because we had less money, but our parents' resolve to manaaki the tamariki was still strong.

I hated being a teenager, not only because of the usual teenage angst of pimples and hormones, but mainly because I hated my family's poverty. I never joined sports teams or cultural groups because I knew my parents just didn't have the money to buy uniforms, equipment or fees. I stayed at school right to seventh form, though, because my parents told me to. When I suggested I could get a job instead of going to school because I was sick of having no money, my parents would say, ‘It's not a waste of your time finishing school – you're too young to get paid well for anything. Stay at school.' I did reasonably well at school, I was glad when my last day arrived. With a skip in my walk and a faded and graffitied uniform, I walked out of the school gates feeling relief. I went on the dole when I turned eighteen. Feeling like a famished refugee from Africa, I had money to spend on myself for the first time in a long time. I bought myself clothes, shoes, make-up – girly things – and went partying heaps. I was drunk on selfish liberties. It was a break.

Since the closure of the Works, my parents had worked odd jobs here and there. And then one day my mother started working at the local Kōhanga Reo as a Kaiāwhina. She was totally transformed through that mahi, and it affected us in a big way too. We'd always gone to the pā for hui and that, but we'd never been educated to be Māori. We'd never been surrounded by Reo Māori or Tikanga Māori, because our role models, our world view, our language and our aspirations were all mainstream and labourer-based. We'd never been exposed to any Māori consciousness – just a mainstream consciousness. Because of our mum's involvement in the Kōhanga Reo and her passion to learn her Reo, we were all awakened to the fact that we had a Māori language, Māori voice, Māori values and pride. We learnt that we were so much more than what the Whakatu freezing works could offer us – we were Māori. It was an epiphany.

For the last couple of decades now, we have gone from strength to strength as a whānau. We all went back to school and learnt our Reo first, then we carried on and got degrees and teaching diplomas. My father, who worked on Number One Chain for ten years, is now principal of the school that we all attended – but it is now a Kura Reo. My mother is the deputy principal there. My brother and I have trained as high school teachers. Our teaching subject is Te Reo Māori, and we all strive to advance Māori education and Māori children. In other ways we affect our extended whānau, marae and community by just being Māori. Eight years ago, we moved from Whakatu when my parents brought a 17-acre apple orchard. We all live there today with our partners and all of our children. When we have our squabbles, our mother always reminds us that we should live together because it's a Māori way of living and it's a beautiful way to live, especially for our kids.

Our property backs on to our awa, the Ngaruroro, and if you look to the south, you can see our maunga, Kahuranaki. A few paddocks over if you want to jump some fences is our marae, Kohupātiki. We experience our pepeha every day. It's a life and an attitude that we could never have imagined for ourselves thirty years ago in Whakatu.

I like to think that if Whakatu had stayed open, we would have been living a different life – not a bad life, but not a rich life either in terms of being Māori. The fact that it closed led us and others on a path of educational opportunity and a journey of development and growth as Māori and as whānau. There are no regrets about that.

If someone were to ask me now, ‘What was it like for you and your family when the freezing works closed?' I would say, ‘It was the best thing that ever happened to us.'