Waipū is still part of my life. The town has fuelled several of my works. The river comes back to me in dreams. It stands like a mysterious presence, the deep swirling waters where thousands of eels swam, the banks thick with hawthorn and willows. I don’t know who planted them. When I was young, I didn’t have the kind of curiosity that asked who had been before. The farm was ours and I was happy, that’s what I knew. I left it at the age of sixteen because there was no work up there, and I wasn’t ready to be married, though some of the girls I went to school with already were. I stood at the farm gate with my parents on the day I departed and felt that my heart was breaking. Theirs were too. My father dragged himself to the cowshed each day. My mother carried on as if all were well. The farm had been her dream, the place that gave her a presence in the world. But it went up for sale a few months after I had gone and was sold within weeks of the notice going on the gate. My mother hid in the hills that day, hoping that the buyers would go away, but it was all over. A month later she was working in a Rotorua clothing factory sewing working men’s pants, and my father had taken up work in an office. I see this as my parents’ tragedy. If I had been a son it might have been different. Not that my mother stayed in the factory for long:
After the farms she came into herself,
expert in china, the best saleswoman
for miles around, the past a good omen,
that homestead of her birth with shelf
and cupboard crammed with fine crockery
she knew by rote: Doulton decorated
with pansies (her favourite), the encrusted
Moorcroft, the eastern chinoiserie,
that jardinière enamelled with prunus
standing in the hallway. She chuckled, how
easily the names rolled off her tongue. Now
it seemed she had made some grand entrance
of her own. Her husband wore a collar
and tie to work, life a different colour.
My father retired from his office job when he was sixty because he was sure he would die young. He lived for nearly another twenty years.
The square dances and how I came to leave the farm are reflected in my short story ‘Circling to Your Left’, which opens my collection, All the Way to Summer. It is about what might have been, for them, for me. I could have been in that town still, but you know when it’s right to leave and there are times when your life hangs in the balance, depending on what you decide.
‘Flower Man’, my first story to be published in the literary journal Landfall, arose from something that happened in the last of my school days, the death of a much-loved local figure, an elderly man who supervised the end of year exams in the local church hall. He was known as Danny ‘Ferry’. He died under the magnolia tree outside the hall, after telling his students that he ‘could not go on that day’. In the story, a group of his students, in their grief, run amok and cut down the magnolia tree. This is not what happened; the tree still stands in Waipū. Nor was I present when Danny ‘Ferry’ made his exit, although a day or so before, I had sat and inhaled the scent of a flower he had placed on my desk, as he did for each student taking part in the exam. I was trying so hard back then to turn every inspiration into total fiction, rather than let the story take me where it would. I suppose, in its own way, it speaks of the breaking out of youth facing the future, tearing up the familiar behind them.
When I came to write The Book of Secrets, things changed again. It was all about research and making things as true as I could, alongside an invented story. I went to Nova Scotia, pored over documents, read everything I could lay hands on. It took me years. Tucked away in all of this was the memory of an old woman who lived alone in a rickety house that I passed each day on the school bus. She was known as Kitty Slick, although that wasn’t her real name, and some called her a ‘witch’, which wasn’t true either. I made her the central character in my novel and called her Maria, a descendant of the migration. Unseemly things happen to her, including the birth of a child who dies.
This offended her relatives and the community, and although the book sold in its thousands, and continues to sell fitfully thirty-five years later, I was asked not to come back to Waipū. That was deeply painful. I was restored to the town several years later, when locals Lachie McLean, both a farmer and a theatre director, and Patsy Montgomery, the director of the local museum, reached out to me. Lachie, a slight man with weathered outdoor skin and an elfin grin, has directed musicals in the area for five decades. His home, Birdgrove, is the oldest surviving farmhouse in Waipū, surrounded by an exquisite garden. It’s situated on the Braigh, a plain that runs between the Brynderwyn Hills and Bream Bay. Old settler territory. Patsy has been a potter; in my kitchen I have tiles she has made showing the school bus I used to travel in, the old Four Square on the corner where our groceries used to be delivered; she still sings folk songs. I was welcomed ‘home’ in a large public gathering on a clifftop one moonlit night, after I had made a conciliatory speech, in which I talked about the way fiction and reality blended together, and the way that I put myself into the heads of my characters. If there was a witch, I said that night, then it was me.
It was through Lachie that I came to play a role in the Waipū pageant, which he produces every ten years. He jokes that it is the local Oberammergau. The Waihoihoi River runs along behind the town, winding its way through banks that form a natural amphitheatre behind the old manse, with plateaux on either side. It is here that the migration story is re-enacted, at exactly the place where the settlers are understood to have stepped ashore. Waka paddled by Patuharakeke, the local hapū, come sweeping down under the floodlights, as do almost life-sized ships; on the banks straw houses are burned down in emulation of the crofts that were destroyed during the Highland Clearances. The flames light up the sky. The Highlanders leave amid keening and the music of bagpipes, as the story crosses the ocean with the crofters aboard the ship, led by Norman McLeod, then landing in Nova Scotia. All of this is in the pageant, all the way to New Zealand’s shores by which time, forty years after the migration began, the number of ships required to get from Canada to New Zealand had risen to six. They were built by the Nova Scotians themselves, in their own backyards: they were called Margaret, Highland Lassie, Gertrude, Spray, Breadalbane and Ellen Lewis.
This story is narrated and dramatised by performers on floodlit platform stages. I was one of the two narrators in 2013; the other was a man called George Mutch and our voices were thrown from either side of the river. I also played a role in the drama. In my first scene, I was walking along the main street of the town when a high school girl approached me. We introduced ourselves. ‘So you’re Dame Fiona Kidman?’ I agreed that I was. ‘So you’re the woman who made all the trouble in this town.’
I didn’t make the greatest actor. I’ve always had a secret yearning to act but when it comes to the point I freeze. Perhaps writing is an act of performance in itself and trying to do both may not work. On the night of dress rehearsal, I stood up, stared around at the assembled cast, and said, ‘Oh shit, I can’t remember all of this.’ The show was being filmed for television; the cameras stopped rolling. It came more or less right on the two nights that we played, each time to an audience of three thousand on the riverbank.
This is how I came to play myself playing myself.
In that crowd, among the music, and the fires lighting the sky, and people I had known since I was growing up, I felt an immense sense of belonging. The words of the old psalm, number twenty-three, which I was required to read at my first school assembly in the town, and which is read also at my mother’s family’s funerals, came back to me: ‘He leadeth me beside the still waters.’ If this seems too biblical a conclusion, Waipū is a town that is biblical in its beginnings. The quiet and unquiet place.
This is the other place I call home.