“I don’t think we’ve got Dolly yet,” deadpanned Ron Mitchell as he swung the SUV past the Hands of Fame. Kenny Rogers, Slim Dusty and Ricky Skaggs have all left their handprints at Gore’s guitar-shaped monument, as have Kiwi legends such as Patsy Riggir and Suzanne Prentice, but no, Dolly Parton isn’t there. Yet.
The monument – modelled on the one in Gore’s sister city of Tamworth, Australia’s country music capital – sits at the centre of the Southland town, symbolising the local institution that is part of national lore, the Gold Guitar Awards (which celebrated its 50th anniversary two years ago) and Bayleys Tussock Country, the 10-day, 40-event festival that has lately grown around it.
Nearby at the St James Theatre, the atmosphere at the door of the festival’s opening night, the Country Music Honours, was buoyant and the biggest cheer on the red carpet was reserved for a lanky young man in a Stetson hat: not a country singer, but a lanky young man in a Stetson: Ben Bell, the 25-year-old mayor of Gore.
I had visited Bell a few hours earlier and he reflected on the bitter internal war that followed his election in 2022. Things, he said, were “much more settled now. We’ve spent a lot of time working through, as councillors, all the different teething issues that we had. So we’re a lot more united now.”
It’s still not exactly plain sailing. The council was obliged this year to present a rates increase of 21.4% and even that came at the cost of shelving its long-term plan for the sake of getting an annual budget through.
Maintenance was deferred, the town’s community awards have been cancelled, the recycling scheme Bell campaigned on is on hold and the council will simply not fund about a quarter of its depreciation requirements. Even so, depreciation accounts for nearly half of the rates rise.
The increase, he said, “was hard for us to swallow, but even harder to communicate to the community”. Gore district’s biggest single cost now, nearly a quarter of its total annual expenditure, is water infrastructure. It is not alone among regional centres in that position. Might the previous government’s scotched Three Waters scheme have helped?
“Ah … well, I was largely elected in on it being given back to locals, rather than the assets being taken off us,” Bell said, in a tone that might have indicated some regret.
“A ratepayer base of 6000 people being saddled with $180 million worth of debt, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to do the maths there on the unaffordability of it,” he continued. “The water model that they’ve got in Auckland and that Wellington wants won’t, in my opinion, work in the rural sector. We just don’t have enough ratepayers down here.”
Beyond the standards
At the St James, Lyttelton-based Mel Parsons won the MLT Songwriting Award for the then unreleased The Hardest Thing and American-born, South Island-raised Holly Arrowsmith took out the APRA Best Country Music Song for Desert Dove.
“I can’t write for nuts,” chirped the evening’s guest star, Suzanne Prentice, musing on the way that songwriting has become central to a musical community that used to be happy to sing the standards. She knocked out a half-hour set in her big, broad and bulletproof voice, hitting every note in her rendition of Hallelujah.
There was a reason, apart from being country music royalty, that Prentice was on stage. There is usually a third award presented here: the Tūī for Best Country Artist, given by Recorded Music New Zealand. But after taking a pause on the Aotearoa Music Awards last year, RMNZ not only reclaimed the country artist category for its own awards, but rescheduled the AMAs.
“They landed square on our Thursday night, which we’d had for decades,” Jeff Rea, the chair of the trust that runs the festival, told me the following morning. “I don’t know how that happened. I was grumpy to start with, because they should have known.”
The trust had to bring forward its own awards night, renaming it the Country Music Honours. The Tūī in Auckland went to Kaylee Bell, who came out of this community – her career began when she won the Gold Guitar in 2007. She’s the first New Zealand country artist to get a real foothold in Nashville since Rea himself, who worked with Gary Morris for years.
The council markets Gore as “the events capital of the South” and Tussock Country is the largest of those events – half its 8000 patrons come from out of town. The branding may seem ambitious for a town with scant accommodation and one taxi company whose two cars are rarely out on the same night, but everything’s a community effort here. The trust helped get up a scheme where locals let out rooms and houses to Tussock Country visitors, and shuttle drivers account for some of the festival’s 10,000 hours of volunteer labour.
Gore also has local media. The twice-weekly Ensign newspaper is plump with tractor advertising, NZME’s Hokonui FM is on the main street and the town’s colourful independent radio station, Cave FM, broadcasts from the same building as the Ensign. Cave’s owner, Bob “Caveman” McKenzie, successfully stood for council on Bell’s change ticket. Bell’s mother, Rebecca Tayler, is also an identity at the station.
“Can I swear?” McKenzie asked me after we’d spent an hour yarning on the radio. “I think the whole system is fucked. It really is. There’s just too much stuff being put onto local government. Hence the rates rises.”
But, he added, “I believe we live in paradise. We’ve got a shit-hot town and we want to keep promoting it and encouraging people to come here and spend their money and see if we can keep these rates down a bit.”
Culture cues
Culture is a good reason to come to Gore. The Eastern Southland Gallery is home to the spectacular John Money Collection, with its Rita Angus and Theo Schoon works, a nationally significant Ralph Hotere collection and a working Len Lye sculpture. The Hokonui Moonshine Museum tells its tales through the narrative paintings of Trevor Moffitt. The gallery and museum are the work of Jim Geddes, a self-effacing man who came back to the town of his birth after making a name for himself as an arts curator.
His latest venture, across the river in East Gore, is a church built in 1881 and now renovated as an artists’ residence and community facility. It’s home to print presses gifted by Muka Studio, Marilyn Webb and Nigel Brown. “We just scrounge, basically,” Geddes told me when I asked how on earth he managed all this.
The night before, at the festival launch at the Moonshine Museum, Geddes told a deeper cultural story. When Scots bootlegger Mary McRae landed at Port Chalmers, then made the journey to Gore with her sons in 1872, they brought not only her whisky still, but their bagpipes and books of poetry.
“Above all else, those were the things that were precious to them when they settled here,” he told the local VIP crowd.
“So, all that we know from mana whenua about this place is through waiata and kōrero, and this first cultural expression in this place is song and verse. And that’s the tradition you’re continuing.”
The full spectrum of the tradition was on display that day: line-dancing in a hall, a Mel Parsons show in a tiny theatre, country singer and broadcaster Joy Adams holding court at Gore’s vast RSA. I was too tired for the late-night party for the young folk, but the mayor was there with his demographic – still wearing his Stetson and, for a few hours at least, not having to think about the rates.