Gisborne - Looking for light in the new millennium

By MICHELE HEWITSON

The one-hour flight to Gisborne aboard the cigar-shaped Metroliner is a flying experience which does not include so much as a packet of peanuts. It cramps your legs as much as your style. Still, as views from the air go, it's worth it. On a perfect winter's Wednesday, the little plane sweeps in over Poverty Bay, rich in picture-postcard prettiness.

At Gisborne Airport the signs ask you to remove muddy shoes and gumboots, and to accept God. The waiting taxi driver is wearing very dark wraparound shades — and a wide, wraparound smile. No need to pop the boot to put the luggage in: the key's hanging off a string. It's a very Gisborne touch, showing a sort of old-style trust big cities lost decades ago.

Gisborne could be forgiven for having lost that trust in recent times.

It's a small city of 45,000 which wanted to make a big splash with its millennium celebrations. Just not quite in the way it did, with the biggest show in the country flopping belly-up. David Bowie never came, although Kiri and 135,000 did turn up to see the First City to See the Light.

But it is as the city synonymous with misread cervical cancer smears and Dr Bottrill that Gisborne has made the splash nobody wanted. And those bleak headlines just kept getting bleaker: in June a locum anaesthetist was revealed to have reused syringes; errors started showing up in prostate cancer test procedures, and last month the Tairawhiti Healthcare board was sacked by the Minister of Health, Annette King.

"Gisborne, first to see the light — if you're lucky enough to be alive that is," a supporter of the women affected by misread smears told the pre-inquiry hearing.

Gisborne's public portrait was not always painted in such sombre shades — and, indeed, behind those dark headlines there are small splashes of real vibrancy.

It has always been isolated — a rarity among New Zealand cities, it is not on the way to anywhere anyone needs to get to — but through the 50s and 60s it existed as a service town for the landed gentry who worked the fertile plains of Poverty Bay and the hilly sheep and cattle country which reaches to Ruatoria in the north; Wairoa in the south. Land blocks supported not only wealthy landowners, whose children were sent out of the area to board at Wanganui Collegiate and King's and Woodford House, but live-in managers and
workers and their families. Now farms are increasingly mechanised. The children of the wealthy are still packed off to elite schools, but the face of the labour force — if not the faces of the population; 50 per cent are Maori — has changed. In the past five years the freezing works, a major Wattie's processing plant, and Best Friend Pet Foods — industry which employed hundreds of locals — have either closed down or left town.

Perhaps the best place to go to discover what the old, white face of Gisborne looked like is to poke your head inside the quaintly named Poverty Bay Gentlemen's and Ladies' Club (the membership admitted women as associate members in the late 60s but couldn't quite bring itself to let the ladies go first). A Gisborne landmark, the club building has stood on the corner of Childers Rd and Customhouse St since 1898.

With its gracious balconies and sagging roof, the club has an aura of decaying grandeur and an aroma of boiled meat. On a Thursday lunchtime not one of the 160 members has rolled in for a G & T or a game of snooker under the gaze of the glassy-eyed stuffed stags' heads. Marty van der Velde, the ebullient manager, seems like a gentleman who has wandered into another era and is still figuring out what he's doing here.

He's been manager since 1996 when he "gave it [the club] a year." He won't quite admit to having fallen in love with the old building and its history — "It grows on you" is the most he'll own to — but he shows it off with the pride and pity he might afford an ageing and once celebrated ancestor.

There are problems, he says, in keeping the aged one alive. Not least that of those 160 members; only four are under the age of 40. And in a region with such a large proportion of Maori, the club has no Maori members.

"That's not to say," van der Velde sighs, "that we don't want Maori members. We just haven't had any new members." He thinks people may be put off by the elitism attached to a place which was once referred to as the White House, where "Gisborne is run from." He waves a hand at a wall lined with photographs of past club presidents, "I'm sure that lot were the snobbiest lot you'd ever find. We can't afford snobbery like that any more."

Well, no. Not when you're chasing members in a region with the highest unemployment rate in the country.

One place in Gisborne where, no doubt, the odd club member has found themselves sitting next to one of the have-nots is the Odeon picture theatre, where "Ma" Raey Wheeler is as much a local institution as the Poverty Bay Club. This is the theatre (now a multiplex) where Sir Robert Kerridge started his career and where Wheeler has seen, she reckons, three generations of Gisborne kids grow up.

Locals still talk about getting "growled at" by Ma Wheeler for putting their feet up on the seat in front. She's notorious, too, for taking on Mongrel Mob members bent on smuggling booze into the pictures. They call her The Dragon, which she doesn't mind, and Ma Whistler for her habit of whistling at people attempting to sneak in without paying.

A founding member of the Gisborne Development Board, the first woman member of the Poverty Bay Club and a former district councillor (for eight years), Wheeler believes Gisborne doesn't actively promote itself enough. It should sell itself as the ideal retirement spot for Aucklanders, she says, pointing to its climate, its beaches and beautiful golf course by the sea; a modern townhouse sells for around $100,000. She also says Gisborne has never made enough of Captain Cook's first landing here in 1769.

That may well be because Gisborne has honoured Cook since 1969 with a statue of a captain — standing on the top of Kaiti Hill with stunning views of the harbour and city below — who turns out not to be Cook at all. He is, it is believed, an unknown Italian admiral.

In front of Gisborne's district courthouse stands a memorial of a different kind to that first landing. A carving commemorates Te Maro and Te Rakau, the first two Maori to come into contact with Cook, and who, relates the accompanying plaque, "met a nasty end as a result."

You might say that local Maori are still recovering from that first, fatal meeting. Of the 13,264 registered unemployed in the East Coast region, almost 50 per cent are Maori. Although such figures are not unique to Gisborne, says Lindsay Scott, regional commissioner for the East Coast for the Department of Work and Income, they do indicate the realities of the district.

"If you are unemployed you are more likely to be Maori, you're more likely to have low educational qualifications, and little or no skills — and all these things are true of Gisborne." What is unique is that the region with the highest unemployment rate in the country can't find — or attract — the right workers.

A local joke is that if a company wants a CEO, they have to recruit on the beaches, where they might find a high-flying business person who has a briefcase under one arm and a surfboard under the other. Isolation, despite its occasional charms, also works against Gisborne: the scope of industry is narrow, the dependency on the local market high. Transport and freight costs are high.

Work opportunities here are largely seasonal and as fickle as the weather, on which the horticultural industry, which employs the casual labour force, relies.

Forestry is the great hope for the region. Or it should be. Down on the wharves where the freezing works used to be, an ex-administration building has become a restaurant which offers tastings of local wines and cheeses; the old stock yards are now stacked with logs.

Across the Taruheru River the Tairawhiti Development Task Force is hearing submissions from local boards and representatives on the future of the region.

Deputy Prime Minister Jim Anderton, in the driving seat of the initiative, is here. As is the new Minister of Maori Affairs, Parekura Horomia, the Tolaga Bay boy who started his working life as a printer at the local paper, the Gisborne Herald. The big news of the day is the announcement that a computers-for-schools drive (donated from Government departments) is under way. Anderton says the worst computer-to-kid ratio in the region is one computer for every 30 children. The goal is to provide one for every three schoolchildren.

The forestry sector — Gisborne's great green hope — presents a frightening scenario for those children, living in a region whose roading infrastructure is already under pressure: by 2025 they can look forward to 130 trucks an hour hurtling along the roads.

Which indicates a big problem, says Lindsay Scott. "At the moment it [the timber] is being hauled down through the roading system or hauled over the wharf as whole logs or chips. The 'job-rich area' doesn't appear to be coming to fruition as it should."

The forestry analogy is picked by Dr Pat Ngata, Tolaga Bay's much loved GP and public health advocate. "We're good at growing things here," he says. "People, raw materials, the forest. But we don't add value to it as it goes past. The raw product, the logs, go past here, they go somewhere else to be processed — they don't even fall off the truck." Gisborne's biggest export, he says, are its people.

"Most of the human potential from areas like ours goes elsewhere to realise its potential. You send people away to be educated, they go overseas to use their talents and it just leaves us, the home people, bereft of knowledge and expertise." Ngata was himself sent out of the district to be educated, to St Stephen's College, then Otago University. Why did he, 10 years ago, return? "I'm not going to die anywhere else," he says. And because "people look at me and say, 'You're bloody mad.' I am, but I'm absolutely optimistic."

At Tairawhiti Polytech — if you're looking for those splashes of colour to illuminate the recent darkness of Gisborne's history — the rewards are already hanging on the walls. At the polytech's Toihoukura School of Visual Arts and Design the work in its gallery is vibrant and cutting-edge. Jim Anderton bought two pieces on a recent visit.

Walk back from here, down the main street and past the Dispensary Bar (no beanies, no steelcaps, no gang-related tattoos, the dress code instructs; it's been closed for months). Go over the bridge across the Turanganui River, down by the port, and you come across one of Gis-
borne's better restaurants, the Wharf, where lamb fillets with pumpkin and feta mash feature at a big-city price of $24.

On the wall behind the wharf eateries is a mural made up of hundreds of glazed tiles, each one a colourful self-portrait by a child from the region's schools. Wiremu Hohepa's portrait is one tile along from William Brown's. The hopeful faces of Gisborne's next generation?