Kelly Johnson in the 1981 movie Goodbye Pork Pie (inset) and Aoraki Mt Cook seen from the road
On the eve of a journey across New Zealand, editor at large Shayne Currie reflects on the romanticism of a road trip.
“We’re taking this car to Invercargill, boy!”
The immortal words of “Blondini” – aka actor Kelly Johnson – in the 1981 cop-chase caper Goodbye Pork Pie, one of our most beloved Kiwi movies.
Pork Pie was the ultimate New Zealand road-trip – a yellow Mini rented with stolen money in Kaitaia and driven, fair screaming, to the bottom of the South Island, with Blondini behind the wheel and his ride-along gang (fellow actors Tony Barry and Claire Oberman) barking instructions and the cops in hot pursuit.
While the vehicle literally falls apart on the journey south, the backdrop of the movie is a solid showcase of a different era (the film was shot in 1979 and released in 1981) - police officers in Holden Kingswoods, trolley buses in Wellington, empty state highways. There is one familiar landmark – the Beehive looms large as the Mini whizzes past.
Johnson, now 66, has fond memories of the movie, which took about eight weeks to shoot.
“We were in the train going to Kaikōura down the coast,” says Johnson, referring to a scene where the car is smuggled onto an empty rail wagon in Wellington, in order to avoid the police and move it across Cook Strait.
“I was blown away by the scenery and the landscape of the South Island,” says Johnson, who has spent most of his life in Northland and Auckland.
“It was the first time I’d seen it; I was like a tourist. I think it was November, the lupins were out and there was lots of fresh air because we had the box car open.
“We were filming, so you spent a lot of time standing around and watching the scenery fly by – I do remember that as being particularly kind of romantic.”
Ah yes, the romance of a road trip.
About the same time that Pork Pie was being shot, acclaimed New Zealand photographer Robin Morrison was in another yellow car, a Mazda Capella, and on an odyssey of his own - a six-month road trip of the South Island with his wife Dinah and two young sons, Jake, 8, and Keir, 6.
“I had no real plans other than I wanted to photograph the South Island,” he told the arts show Kaleidoscope in 1981.
“Not the usual ways of simply landscapes and scenic views. That’s been done before, and I had no wish to repeat that. Some of the landscapes, the ones that really struck me [are] things I saw from the car as I was travelling along and made me think ‘That’s it!’”
He also wanted to capture New Zealanders. “I enjoy photographing my own people and that’s what I want to record. I want to show what the country is like, really is like. And not just a superficial look, either.”
Morrison died from cancer at the age of just 48 in 1993 but his work is immortalised; he took more than 4000 images on that trip.
Some of them – including his famous image of Fred and Myrtle Flutey’s paua-shell parlour house in Bluff – are on display at Auckland Museum, in an exhibition simply called Road Trip. It is worth a visit.
Waka Kotahi’s website is a mine of information about New Zealand’s state highway network.
Almost 11,000 kilometres of roads make up the state highway network – with another 83,000km of local roads. The longest state highway is SH1 – 2033km; the shortest is SH78 - Timaru’s port loop road at 900m. (There’s no official tally, it seems, on the number of potholes, although more than 211,000 have been reported since 2018.)
Upon those roads, memories are built.
In 2020, we asked Herald readers for their best road-trip memories. The response was overwhelming.
Sights, sounds, smells – a different time.
“When I was a kid growing up on the farm in an isolated Waikato dairy farming district, we would look forward to the annual Christmas holiday at Mt Maunganui,” wrote Allen Swney.
“It involved packing six kids and all our holiday requirements - including food for four weeks - into the Falcon station wagon.
“Thankfully, Dad had to stay home and milk cows, otherwise we would not all have fitted in. At least one sibling would be in the back with luggage.
“The four siblings jammed into the back seat would have Tupperware containers of soup and casserole on their knees.
“Invariably a fight would break out because someone was taking too much space, and at least one would be carsick going over the winding hill road over the Kaimai Ranges, resulting in a screech of brakes and quick evacuation of people so the chunderer could get out of the car. Not always successfully.
“But there was always a great sense of joy on the way down the Kaimai road with the Bay of Plenty ocean in the distance. And the thought of four weeks of summer adventures ahead of us.”
Lauren Mellish: “I came to visit my parents for a holiday after they emigrated to New Zealand. We did a road trip all around the lower North Island, which was so breathtaking. The beautiful wineries of Martinborough, the black sand in Taranaki. I loved NZ so much I transferred from my UK university and have been here ever since.”
Larisa Bovhan: “It was one of those summer days when you woke up in the dark. You didn’t ask your father ‘where to?’ and ‘are we there yet?’. But there was endless sun, laughter and radio music, stale sandwiches that never tasted so good before, the trees and water intertwined in their embrace, where time did not exist. I want to go back.”
My own first, truly long-distance road trip was in a rust-orange Datsun 180B, Tauranga to Timaru, in the summer of 1980-1981.
I was nine.
It was a different time. New Zealand was still recovering from the oil crash of the late 1970s and the Erebus disaster in 1979.
A photographer by the name of Robin Morrison had completed his South Island road trip a year earlier and a movie by the name of Goodbye Pork Pie was about to be released.
Later that year the country would be torn apart by the Springbok Tour.
We’d moved to Bay of Plenty from South Canterbury in 1980. We had flown most of that first trip, to the new, warm and sunny world, on an Air New Zealand Fokker Friendship.
For the first trip back to the Mainland to see the relatives, it was a road trip all the way.
We squeezed into that Datsun 180B, squashed together, no back-seat seatbelts, mum smoking in the front seat, the summer sun roasting us.
Happy, carefree days.
This week, I take to the road again, for the NZ Herald’s Great New Zealand Road Trip.
Almost four years on from Covid – and with the pandemic now firmly in the rear-view mirror, those horrible lockdowns a distant memory – we want to take the pulse of the nation again, and meet everyday Kiwis helping drive our recovery.
We’re not trying to be Pollyanna-ish; clearly there are deep-seated issues that this country needs to address around the income and wealth divide, healthcare and education.
But at the same time, we’re looking forward optimistically, with a desire to uncover some great yarns and meet good people making a difference.
Some, especially those in rural areas, will no doubt be euphoric about the election result; others perhaps less so.
A certain rugby match on Sunday morning is sure to dictate some people’s moods, although as a country we’ve moved far beyond the rugby, racing and beer culture that dominated the Kiwi landscape when Blondini was driving his Mini and Robin Morrison was in his Mazda 44 years ago.
Summer is on the way. There’s the prospect of enjoying great weather balanced with the challenge of needing to address climate change.
We’ll be meeting people doing just that.
We want to showcase the beauty of our country and the work of some inspirational Kiwis.
And we’ll be doing it all in an all-electric vehicle, thanks to the support and sponsorship of VW.
The Volkswagen ID.5 will be a new experience for me. I’ve enjoyed road trips in petrol-powered V8s and diesel campervans. This trip will be a discovery about driving electric in some of the toughest terrains in the world, and reporting back.
After Pork Pie, Kelly Johnson starred in a string of other New Zealand movies, including Utu.
He lives in Whangārei and is still part of a community of actors attached to the OneOneSix Trust – he’s helping organise a fringe festival next year.
Johnson, who trained and practised as a lawyer, is now working as a Disputes Tribunal referee.
He’s still sometimes recognised as Pork Pie’s Blondini; certainly, you can hear the character in his voice, even after all these years. He missed a flight once for a training session for work, and had to drive to Auckland. Someone asked him if he drove a Mini.
Coincidentally, he actually drives a VW himself these days, albeit a slightly older petrol model. He’s actually speaking to the Herald from it today.When he thinks of Pork Pie, he remembers the spring and summer sun, and being outside in the great Kiwi outdoors for the shoot.
“That was an attractive part of it all - going from start to finish from the top to the bottom [of New Zealand].
“It really was a road trip – the film crew would have to drive to the next location. And then we’d be a couple of days here and a couple of days there.”
He looks back “wistfully” on the movie that attached to him as a shadow for certainly the rest of his 20s and, indeed, now.
“It felt like a pioneering time; there wasn’t a lot of [movie-making] precedent in New Zealand to draw upon. I don’t think it was expected to succeed really, or quite the way it did. I never thought it would fail … you don’t think like that when you’re young.
“I realised after reading [director] Geoff Murphy’s book [A Life on Film - I’m taking this bloody car to Invercargill] how close it had come … through money running out and disasters happening. I had no idea that that was going on.”
He looks back on the whole experience with fondness.
“Later on, when you get kids and mortgages, jobs and some responsibilities, it’s hard to imagine that I could ever have just thought that was normal.
“I genuinely hold it very dear to my memory.”
We’re hitting the road - from coast to hinterland - in a new editorial series to gauge the mood of the nation and celebrate the very best of New Zealand.
Following a tough three-and-a-half years - including a pandemic and a cost-of-living crisis - we’ll be meeting notable as well as everyday Kiwis helping make a difference in their towns, regions, country, and the world.
In association with VW, and with the help of our NZME teams, editor-at-large Shayne Currie is travelling the country in an all-electric VW ID.5 from Monday, October 30, to Sunday, N0ovember 12, starting in Dunedin and winding his way north.
Do you have a story that’s worth us covering or a person in your town or city worth speaking to?
We’d love to hear from you.
PLEASE EMAIL: roadtrip@nzherald.co.nz
More than two dozen firefighters battled the fire at its peak.