By MICHELE HEWITSON
We are bumping through the hot, sticky dust and clouds of midges in a Department of Conservation van, heading towards the wild north of Great Barrier Island.
"We" is me and Jim Flack, DoC's community relations man on the Barrier. He is very amiable, which is just as well because on the Barrier DoC is about as popular as a cop in a dope patch.
We stop to look at a colony of endangered brown teal. There are 1000 left; two-thirds of the population hang out on the Barrier. How nice, I say, peering at one. "That's a mallard," he says.
It is unlikely that Flack's job description includes indulging in ridiculous conversations. But, as I say, he is extremely amiable and so this is what we are doing. This conversation - and I really should stress this - began at my instigation and is about which endangered bird we would most like to eat. But only if they were not endangered, of course.
You tend to have mad conversations on the Barrier. It takes your mind off the treacherous roads, for one thing. Also, you don't have to be mad to live here but nobody will take much notice if you are.
When I phoned Flack to ask if he could take me round the island, he said, sure, as long as I didn't mind being seen in a van with DoC written on the side. "Will we get shot at?" I asked. He laughed at that because he's a good guy, is Jim.
"He's a bullshit artist," said the taxi driver. I'm not allowed to tell you the name of the taxi driver. The night before he told me he was the only taxi driver on the island.
On the way back from a big night out at the Claris Sports Club where, thrillingly, the Aussie Abba impersonators did their costume changes in an old house behind very sheer orange curtains, an endangered brown teal with a death wish scrambled across the road in front of us.
The taxi driver pretended he was peeved he'd missed it. Actually, he went to lengths to avoid it and spoke about the teal with a sort of rough tenderness. This was odd, because he's a tough, wiry sort of bloke given to tough, wiry pronouncements about everything and everyone.
The brown teal are a good way to start and, probably, to finish a portrait of Great Barrier. The teal is about the only thing most Barrier people agree on. When it comes to the duck, everyone's a conservationist.
Garth Dalton is a conservationist and, in his house overlooking the beautiful Puriri Bay, DoC is known as "bloody DoC". When I tell Dalton I've been told he is the oracle he demands: "Who says?" His wife Delwyn says "probably bloody DoC".
As promised, he has cracked open a bottle or two of his home brew. He won't go short: he's got 25 dozen in the shed. He's got a ride-on mower in the garage. He doesn't fish or walk in the bush.
What do you do? I ask.
"If I want to go on Mt Hobson, I'd go on a helicopter, but I'm old." (He's 65.) And, "You don't know what a body feels like when you're 65. You can come back when you're 65 and tell me." I tell him he will still be sitting here drinking beer.
He's a contented man. Almost. Shame about bloody DoC, symbol of everything the Daltons came to Barrier 14 years ago to get away from. Bloody DoC represents bureaucracy, which the Daltons are not keen on.
Many people on Barrier don't much like the Government, says Flack. They come here to get away from the Government. On the Barrier the Government is DoC and the two resident police officers.
Actually, Dalton quite likes Flack. He admires the way he walked up his steep drive with, "you know, his crook leg".
I do know because the minute I met him I said to Flack, "what's wrong with your leg?" He roared with laughter and said the problem with his leg was that he didn't have one. He is remarkably good-humoured, given what he has to put up with.
Dalton said to him: "Well, you're well named. You've taken all the flack." The "Government" takes most of it.
"I thought," says the red-cheeked, big beer-bellied Dalton, "well, I'll get out here and I'll buy 11 acres, do our own thing. We can come on to the property and if we want to build a little shed for the kids or a tree hut, we can do it. But gradually they're creeping in and creeping in. If Helen Clark had her way, you won't be able to fart."
If DoC has its way Great Barrier will one day have a 52,000ha marine reserve. Such a reserve would be the first to extend to the 12-mile limit.
This proposal has caused a right Barrier spat. Those lobbying against it say only 11 per cent of ratepayers want it. DoC says almost two-thirds of its feedback has been in favour. DoC administers almost 70 per cent of the island.
Poor Jim Flack, what a rotten job, you might think. He laughs and says the locals "expressed a lot of empathy".
If DoC has its way Dalton - a former commercial fisherman who won't eat fish and no longer owns so much as a dinghy - will take up fishing. "I'd go and fish in it just to prove they can't do anything about it." That's the Dalton way.
A united community? Oh, ha ha. Dalton says, "It's very fragmented until there is a disaster. Everybody pulls together and then after that they all go back to where they were and, yeah, fight. It's a funny place. It's an island."
When I tell the taxi driver that Garth's a conservationist he splutters and says, "He was a commercial fisherman. He raped and pillaged."
"The common denominator" of an island community, writes Paul Theroux in The Happy Isles of Oceania, "is not the landscape of the island, or its location on the globe, but rather the fact of a place being surrounded by water ... The water, seemingly nothing, is everything - a moat, a barrier, a wilderness, the source of food and hope, the way out".
And it takes a particular mind-set to build on an island. "There is something princely in the very situation of someone who builds a house on an island and lives in it. But an island is much more than a principate. It is the ultimate refuge - a magic and unsinkable world."
The Daltons - and there are many Dalton types on the Barrier - do not take kindly to others telling them what they can and cannot do within their refuge.
They are, remember, conservationists. Delwyn: "We recycle. We cut down trees."
Garth: "And they turn around and say, 'Well, you can't cut your trees'. What a load of rubbish."
You never heard it from them but: "If it's too tall we cut it in half so it's the right size."
The barrier way is also to be scathing about the following: blokes who don't do DIY. People who don't drink. People who drink too much. About how crap other people's home brew is. DoC.
They blurt out the most private details of each other's lives. That guy, who lives there? You don't need to ask to be told how many wives he's had and why they left him. How she's a bit of slapper, but a nice girl, really. How he used to be a pot head but now he's just an alkie.
How he used to be an alkie and a bit of a bugger but how he gave it up and isn't much trouble these days. How that one doesn't speak to his brother who lives just across the road. He owns (fill in the acreage) worth (fill in the value, say, $1 million) and he lives off the Government. He's a bludger.
A statistic from the 2001 Census: The unemployment rate in Great Barrier Island was 17.4 per cent, compared with 7.9 per cent for Auckland City and 7.5 per cent for all of New Zealand.
Sean O'Shea, "Barrier Boy", is a real estate agent and drainlayer and an on-paper millionaire. To make "an Auckland income" many people do many different things. Phill at the Mulberry Store fries the fish and, a little sideline, offers the Sovereign Elite Service which, for a fee, will find your "Lost jewellery, Watchs [sic], Money." He has invested $1600 in a metal detector. Yesterday he found $2.
The 2001 Census shows that the median income of people on Great Barrier Island is $11,700, compared with $22,300 for Auckland City and $18,500 for all of New Zealand.
The rich look poor. I'm bumping through the dust in O'Shea's filthy, mud-splattered four-wheel drive. He points out a shack, held together with patches of tin and old wood. It squats haphazardly on a waterfront property worth more than $1 million.
"There's a fellow over there in that rather swanky cottage. He is totally engrossed in Barrier hardship. He lives in a haze of struggle and unhappiness. But he's doing all right, really. He particularly likes drinking beer."
When the Barrier-ites tell you things, you say, "I'll tell him you said that". And they say, "You never heard it from me". They also tell you all about their own lives: how many wives they've had, and so on.
It is still pretty blokey out here. And the blokes talk, nostalgically, about their baching-it, in-between wives days. I suppose they know everybody on the island is going to tell you their private business anyway so they might as well get in first with their version of events.
Here is a typical Barrier story: There's this guy who runs a business. He sends a bill to this other guy who says it's not his bill. They argue. The other guy thinks, "Right, I'll fix you", and sets up a rival business just across the road. There are allegations of intimidation.
The conclusion to this Barrier story - and the details depend on who is telling it - will be in a courtroom.
From their living rooms, Barrier people are very rude about other people's patches of paradise. Tryphena, for example, is a perfectly pleasant little seaside community. There's the Mulberry Grove store with the lone petrol pump and a fish and chippie, and a bar which sells booze and flat whites.
Tryphena smells like my childhood: of melting tarseal and ti-tree. Dalton sneers and calls it "that suburbia. I'd rather live in Pakuranga". Where he lives is called, for a joke, Paritai Drive.
The barrier is 280sq km of scraggy bushy beauty and gloriously lonely stretches of white beach. The beaches are empty. The pubs, or sports clubs (drinking clubs by another name), are full.
The Currach Irish pub bills itself as the only pub but locals will tell you there are hundreds of places to get a drink. "A lot of Barrier dos are boy dos," says Sean O'Shea. Abba, he predicts, "will be dancey. As in, women are going." It is. They do.
The bushy bits are probably full of dope, say the locals. You can tell when someone has made a little delivery to the mainland. Off they go on the boat and they come back with the flash clothes. A chainsaw and a new car might arrive later. But you're more likely to be dobbed in to DoC for cutting a limb off a pohutukawa than you are for harvesting the other green stuff.
The Daltons tell of the time "one of these greenie do-gooders" said he had seen a Norwegian rat near their bit of bush. Traps were laid. To the Daltons' delight, "they never caught one". Delwyn cackles. "Do you know what, I reckon right to this day that what that bloody stupid man saw down in the bush was my little grey cat."
They get on - Flack says no one is ever rude to your face - but they are suspicious in the way small communities always are. On the way to the Claris airport a four-wheel-drive swerves towards us, over what would be the centre line if there was a centre line.
"Do you think he did that on purpose?" asks my driver.
"Why would he?" He replies that there are "some nasty people on this island". Scoundrels and rascals, he reckons.
Pat McGrath from Manuka Lodge in Tryphena used to drive the school bus. Here's a conversation he overheard and likes to share. One kid said to another: "Are you a bastard?" "What's a bastard?" "Is your mother married to your father?" "No." "You're a bastard then. So am I."
The percentage of those on the DPB is no higher than the national figures.
Bastards and bludgers. Ferals and hippies.
The 2001 Census shows the usually resident population to be 1017, a change of -10.1 per cent since 1996. Auckland City's population has increased by 6.4 per cent and the population for New Zealand by 3.3 per cent since 1996.
A potted version of the shifting Barrier history, courtesy of O'Shea, whose family has been farming here since 1960: "In the old days there were pioneer family settlers and everybody else. In the 70s we had the alternative movement, the hippie, and they were largely Australians, Canadians and Americans - foreign folk.
"Late in the 70s, we had lots of Kiwi alternative people. Then in the 80s we had that classic thing that people call the yuppie.
"Now you've got a mixture: the Barrier Boy today is made up of the thinking that he's got all the pioneer family history and ideology and he's part hippy in his thinking and ideology and then he's also a mainstream business person."
The commune owners have cut their hair and now run the land profitably - in a conservation-minded way, of course.
The likely future of Barrier depends on who you ask. There are those who say it has already changed. The man I meet on the Auckland-bound flight from Claris says the place has now been given over to the middle-classes. The Daltons, for all their dislike of suburbia, lead a thoroughly middle-class existence.
The land prices are certainly out of reach for those on the lower-income rungs: $450,000 for a plain little two-bedroom house at Medlands. But you can rent a nice place for $75 a week if you let the owner graze his cattle.
The hardships - the winter, the wife leaving, the water shortages, the power outages - have driven people away before.
People come for a week and fall in love, says O'Shea. They wake up when you remind them of the realities.
O'Shea, like real estate agents everywhere, can do the chat with anyone. We stop at Medlands Beach estuary - "holiday-makers, absentee owners; it's the Barrier's Pauanui" to talk to Simon and Helen. Simon has one arm and is drinking bourbon and coke from a can. The conversation is about the crayfish that got away. It gets bigger and bigger in the telling.
The truth is, if you're a visitor without contacts, you'll get a fresher piece of fish in Waiouru because it's on the main trunk line. When I left the office, smirking, to go to the Barrier, I boasted I would be eating crayfish every night. This turns out to be about as likely as the chances of eating an endangered native bird.
Over the estuary, up on the hill, is a house which - most un-Barrier this - looks as if it belongs on the cover of a glossy house and garden magazine. As indeed it does: on the cover of New Zealand Home & Entertaining.
O'Shea has come to drop off some old alternators for the owners of the house.
"What do we owe you?"
"Nothing, just tell everyone what a good guy I am."
The owners prefer to be known as the owners, although this is rather pointless when you consider that everyone on Barrier already knows everything about them.
This house, resolutely modern, designed "almost like a gun emplacement", might be the way the Barrier will look one day. For now it looks as though aliens dropped it off. The owners are not residents and Mrs Owner says, "We're probably not typical". Not yet.
Everyone on Barrier is the same, says O'Shea. "They just live in different shacks."
On Barrier bad luck, battling the weather, the water shortages, the pests, tend to unite people, if briefly.
The rats got in and ate the owners' $6000 couches. The insurance company won't pay for rat damage (it would for possum-nibbling; Barrier has no possums). It will cost $3000 to have them recovered and another $3000 to have them shipped over and back again.
Jim Flack hoots when he hears that and says, "That's a great leveller, isn't it?"
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