Sleepy Pokeno in dot.com tizz

Wooing the good people of Pokeno to upgrade their town's name to a computer-friendly one has introduced a strange virus to the peaceful rural setting. MICHELE HEWITSON reports.

In Room 5 at tiny Pokeno School sits a gleaming new computer. It glows in the corner where it holds pride of place like some 21st-century icon. Which it is. For this computer represents the arrival of the dotcom revolution in small-town New Zealand.

That, at least, was the theory.

Not that you would necessarily know this if you happened to pop in to see what a very model of a model country school looks like.

Leah Plath, who rules over a roomful of chattering nine and 10-year olds, pads around in boots a few sizes too large with Rowdy, the school dog, trotting behind.

The kids are out in the playground pushing hockey balls around, swinging from monkey-bars, sinking hoops. Plath's husband drops by for lunch. A small boy ducks into the staffroom with a pie for teacher aide Lynne Campbell to zap in the microwave for him.

Watching over all this is a man with the boundless energy to match any of the 62 kids in his enthusiastic care, principal Dean Parkinson.

He's a man with a big voice and an endless capacity for what he calls "crackpot" ideas including a scheme to put Rowdy - eating apples, reading a book - on a fundraising calender. Parkinson was always going to be in the running as the man most willing to embrace a revolution.

And one happened in Pokeno on March 25, the day the little town became New Zealand's first dotcom town.

The 2 am brainchild of Jenny Hannah, who owns the Internet business Jennifer Ann Lingerie, became a stunt which was to propel Pokeno - and jenniferann.com - to hitherto unknown heights of publicity.

The deal: a free town promotion spot on her Website, a new computer and free Internet access for the school in exchange for changing the name of Pokeno to jenniferann.com for a year.

Many locals embraced the idea. In the windows of Joan Castle's two shops, Pokeno Country Fashions and Pokeno Country Cafe, Pokeno has been cheerfully crossed out and replaced with jenniferann.com signs.

At Pokeno School, which Parkinson says "really put our backs in behind the concept," staff and pupils think of Hannah as "a fairy godmother" who swept through the playground dispensing McDonald's vouchers, Easter eggs and the magic of the worldwide Web.

Strange things happen in small towns. When Franklin mayor Heather Maloney was first contacted by Hannah, she was stunned. "I have to say that when you pick up the telephone and the person at the other end says, 'How would you feel if I changed the name of Pokeno,' you think, 'Is this for real?'" But once she was over the shock of the new, Maloney thought, "This was something that might be a lot of fun."

And Pokeno is a community which could use a bit of fun, Maloney figures. The town has "had a bit of chequered time lately," with a motorway bypass which took Pokeno off State Highway 1 in 1997, and bitterness about three years of negotiation with Winstone Aggregates over what is destined to become New Zealand's largest quarry.

Pokeno has a population of about 400 - it's never been clearly defined, says a spokesman from the mayor's office. "One minute you're in Pokeno, the next in Whangarata. The locals know where they live."

Metro Planning, commissioned by the Franklin District Council to prepare a structure plan for the future growth of the township, held a public meeting last month to determine what issues were of concern.

One of the possibilities is to promote Pokeno as a dormitory town for commuters. The advantages for Aucklanders are travel times of 40 minutes outside peak time, residential rates from $400 to $700, and the village aspect, of which the locals are so proud.

A three-bedroom house with double garage and workshop is advertised in the window of the Pokeno post shop, asking price $179,000.

You can tell a lot about civic pride by the state of a town's footpaths. Pokeno's are nicely paved and weed-free.

But other than that computer, that scattering of signs and some yellowing newspaper clippings taped up in a shop window, there's not much to tell you that a revolution has taken place.

"Pokeno," says Karen Michelsen, who owns the Letterbox, the town's post centre, "to me is still big ice cream cones, bacon and mohair [the Mohair Factory Shop at the end of town]."

There is no disputing the allure of those ice creams - as the pair of out-of-town policemen who have stopped off for a double-scoop apiece can attest. It's perfectly in keeping with the rural flavour of Pokeno that you can sit in your car on main street and lick away, overlooking paddocks where chickens and a huddle of calves look right back.

On a Tuesday afternoon it's small-town quiet. A few ice creams are sold, the occasional packet of famous Pokeno bacon is picked up for tea. The calves yawn.

It wasn't like this on March 25 when homecoming queen Hannah - she grew up 5km from Pokeno in Whangarata - arrived in town waving that magic wand.

About 600 people turned out, along with the television cameras, and nobody minded at all that the 26-year-old now lives in Manukau Heights in Auckland. She was back to cut a ribbon, eat an ice cream and attempt a haka with the schoolkids.

Pokeno, and Hannah, revelled in the sort of publicity that money can't buy: a raft of newspaper stories, an appearance on the evening news, a full page in one of the women's mags.

On the surface it looked as sweet as hokey-pokey ice cream. Let's not forget, though, that strange things can happen in small towns.

Stop off at McIntosh Motors to meet Todd McIntosh and you get the first whiff of something not quite rosy. McIntosh, a long-time local, runs a business which has been in the family for 43 years. Rather conspicuously, McIntosh Motors wears no jenniferann.com sign, unlike the post shop across the road.

"We don't know," says McIntosh, grinning and pointing, "who put them up."

Which is where the dotcom vision gets about as clear as country mud. Because in the dead of a Friday night in March, unauthorised signs began appearing, one above the post shop and others at either end of the motorway off-ramps.

Transit New Zealand was not impressed. To taunts from Hannah that Transit chiefs were spoilsports, it had staff remove the motorway signs.

Michelsen, who owns Letterbox, arrived at work on the Saturday morning to find that her store had been renamed jenniferann.com. Inside her shop, a cheerfully cluttered small-town store with hanging gewgaws and novelties, the friendly Michelsen sports a sweatshirt bearing the name Pokeno.

Like other locals, she's ambivalent about the gains the dotcom revolution has brought to town and doesn't want to complain too loudly. Pokeno, as Castle has sternly pointed out, is a town which doesn't need any division. "We're so small we just have to stick together. I would hate this to suggest that there was division in the town - that would be worse than us never doing this at all."

Still, Michelsen admits to being "a bit miffed" that her sign appeared. "I hadn't been asked if I wanted a say."

So, who did put up the signs?

"It certainly wasn't council, I can tell you that," says mayor Maloney.

For her, the "bit of fun" has turned more than a little sour. She made a blunder, she owns, in giving the go-ahead for Hannah to put a sign on the Town Hall before gaining permission from the hall committee.

But it was the motorway signs which have led Maloney into what she calls "a little bit of a dispute with Jennifer Hannah."

The mayor wrote to Hannah that she was disappointed over her putting signs on the motorway after being told she wasn't allowed to.

Hannah, she says, denied putting them up herself and told Maloney that she couldn't prove it was her company which had printed the signs.

Hannah, the mayor says, then threatened to "sue me for slander if I went on [accusing her of having done so.]"

Appropriately for a dotcom girl, Hannah responds by e-mail from Amsterdam, where she is on her honeymoon.

She says she was "granted permission" to put up the sign on Michelsen's shop.

Michelsen says that she and her husband, the shop's owners, most certainly didn't give their permission. She has let the sign remain because the store is being painted and once that is finished the Letterbox sign will go back up.

Hannah, in a roundabout way, still denies that she put up the motorway signs. Approval to do so, she says, "was declined and I took no further action. I did get a letter from Heather Maloney (who up until than had been most supportive of the Pokeno campaign) expressing her disappointment in jenniferann.com putting up motorway signs.

"I immediately phoned Heather to express my disappointment that she hadn't simply phoned me before accusing me personally of putting up the unauthorised motorway signs. I take accusations like that personally, and in light of the whole promotion, which has been very successful and costly, felt very let down."

How costly has the campaign been? About $20,000, excluding staff time, Hannah estimates. She "never expected sales to cover the expense, but from a branding point of view for both jenniferann.com and Pokeno, the promotion has been incredibly successful - measured by the amount of media received and the talk on the street."

John Woodward, owner of the Mohair Factory Shop and head of Pokeno's Business Association ("for what it is"), says the promotion's benefit to the town is "difficult to quantify. I'm sure that some of the passing traffic that wouldn't normally stop would say, 'Let's just call in here on the way through.'

"No, it hasn't changed anything. We just get on and do our own thing. We just take the jokes, if there are any jokes made, and carry on."

Maloney, counting the cost, says there is anecdotal evidence that "people are coming off the motorway."

The real benefits, she agrees, might well be measured in ice cream sales.