There's not a whole lot to look at in Runanga, says Deb Kendon, but the people there make up for it.
Listen to the story as it was told at The Watercooler or read on.
A couple of years ago, I had to move to the West Coast for my job. I didn’t know anything about the Coast, really. I’d been there once before when I was training with the army to deploy overseas and they decided Greymouth was the nearest thing NZ had to a small war-torn Pacific island. So my expectations were cautious.
I prepared by watching World’s Toughest Cops, World’s Strictest Parents, and Louis Theroux: Gambling in America. I did buy a very strong bike lock with a thick chain and a padlock that could stop a bullet. As it turns out, nobody ever tried to steal my bike, but they did steal the lock.
Obviously, I had to find somewhere to live. I like to live a bit away from my job - you know, have a bit of work/life separation - so I looked on the map and thought the little suburb just a bit out of Greymouth would be OK. It was called Runanga.
You know how towns have those fibreglass things by them, like Cromwell has fruit and Ohakune has a carrot? Runanga has a coal cart. Not a fibreglass one, just a coal cart. In fact, most houses in the town have a coal cart. They weigh about 250kg, so how they get smuggled out of the mine is a mystery I never solved.
Runanga is the sort of town where there are houses with giant holes in the weatherboard and a SKY dish on the roof and you have to swerve to avoid sheep running out of the long grass out the front of people’s houses as you drive to work. It’s not far out of town – only about 8km, the same distance as Remuera to the CBD in Auckland – but for Coasters there was some sort of mental distance. If you came in to town people would offer you a bed for the night. There are so few phone lines people give their phone numbers as ‘Dobson 2095’ or ‘Taylorville 5190’. I ended up giving mine as ‘Hell 7027’.
There’s not much in Runanga. After the disco ball got blown out of the tree in the Easter storm there were really only two things to do - sport, and spy on your neighbours. No, really, you are expected to keep tabs on everyone. Since I spent most of my time in PE trying not to get hit in the face by flying objects, that really only left one thing to do. I could look through my curtains and see the neighbours across the road looking through their curtains back at me. And they waved. One time I got a wrong number and it went like this:
‘Is Carol there?’
‘No, sorry, wrong number’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes, I’m quite sure.’
‘Well do you know what her number is?’
‘No, sorry.’
‘Do you know what street she lives on?’
My house had a window over the kitchen bench that looked directly in to my neighbour’s back yard. Since the sun came directly in and reflected off the bench, blinding you as you did the dishes, someone had put tinted film over the window. It was the perfect setup to watch the parade of constantly changing tenants.
First there was a rather nice bogan family. They were upwardly mobile; aspirational bogans. They filled the back yard with bogan markers of prosperity – first they replaced the dead car with a flasher dead car, then a barbeque, then a Para pool, then finally, the crowning glory – a trampoline. But this was a natural selection trampoline – no pads, so you can trap fingers and hair in the springs. On an angle so children can get bounced off. And to top it off, a hole in the middle so children could fall straight through.
They only lasted a couple of months before I had some ‘coastal’ businessmen. They would stand in the back yard, stubbie resting on their pot belly, discussing some grey-market money making plan. They always had trailerloads of coal without tarps over the top. It took me a while to work out that this was because one doesn’t have time to put a tarp on the trailer when the coal is slightly stolen. One plan I picked up on halfway through - or at least I assume it was halfway through because I felt like I was missing some critical details for it to make sense.
As far as I could make out, it involved trying to rent a goat, or at the very least, buying a goat, then trying to return it under the Consumer Guarantees Act. This was scuppered in the end when they decided that the CGA didn’t apply to goats.
About this time I was invited to be a member of the Runanga debating team. They’re quite proud of their Labour heritage – it was the birthplace of the Labour party; don’t listen to what people from Blackball tell you – and still have the old miners’ hall in the middle of town with ‘Workers of the World Unite!’ painted across the front of it.
So the annual May Day celebrations are quite a thing and can last up to a week (depending on how much you drink). Part of this is a show debate against Blackball. I’m not sure quite why I was picked, as I’m not exactly a union firebrand. I’m not even a socialist. The closest thing I have is a Che Shadbolt t-shirt. But it meant I ended up having dinner with two communists to discuss our debate plan.
One was one of the directors of the 1974 Commonwealth Games film. You can spot his bit when the narrator starts railing against the exploitatisometimes on of athletes for the amusement of TV viewers. He was wearing a beret and thoroughly inspected the badge collection on my bag before asking me to sign an anti-asset sales petition. The other was planning to open a museum of Runanga and labour history that wouldn’t frighten the horses. I don’t know why you’d take a horse to a museum but I wouldn’t be surprised in Runanga.
After discussing our debate over some pesto pizza it was only the sight of the stag’s head on the wall and the bare floorboards and rain coming through a gap in the door that reminded me I was still in Runanga. I have to say though that communists make excellent coffee cake.
After that, I had another set of neighbours - a middle-aged couple. They were always shouting at each other, like Eastenders on steroids. Every day when I did the dishes they would be shouting in and out of the back door, crashing around and slamming doors. She was a Slag! And he was a Worthless old bastard! This in itself was mildly amusing, a bit like catching the end of Home and Away before the news.
But one day they weren’t shouting. Straight away that raised alarm bells. Do I ring the domestic violence helpline pre-emptively? The man pulled an old couch out the back door and started ripping in to it with a sledge hammer. And he’s smashing away, and then the woman comes out and stands in the doorway and just looks at him. And for once I can’t actually hear what they’re saying. Oh god, should I call the cops?! But then she walks up to him, grabs the sledgehammer, and starts smashing the couch too. It’s nice that they found marital harmony.
The last family installed a 44-gallon drum in pride of place in the middle of the lawn as soon as they moved in. Every weekend, someone would back a ute right on to the lawn with a tray full of driftwood and tyres, fill up the drum, and light it all on fire. They would stand around it like some sort of rite, beers in hand, staring at the fire.
One night I came through to my kitchen and it was full of a vaguely apocalyptic dark orange glow reflecting off my cupboards. The flames coming out of the drum were at the height of my carport and clouds of smoke were going everywhere. They were sitting on their barbeque table admiring their fire and getting stoned off the rubber fumes.
‘That fire’s f–ing hot’
‘Yeah’
‘Yeaaaaaah’
And it was about then that I decided to move out.
So I moved back to Christchurch, and immediately missed the quiet. Runanga people may spy on each other but they don’t make any noise between 10pm and 7am. Even the boganest of my bogan neighbours would turn down their stereo by 10.30pm on a Saturday.
And I miss being able to wander around looking at the contraptions, like the man who couldn’t be bothered calling out someone to fit a cat door so he made it a little ladder so it could climb in the window. In my new place, people won’t wander out in to the middle of the street to have a chat. Everyone has a normal house and a normal fence and a normal garden and keeps to themselves. It’s normal. And it’s a bit boring.
This story was originally told at The Watercooler, a monthly storytelling night held at The Basement Theatre. If you have a story to tell email thewatercoolernz@gmail.com or hit them up on Twitter or Facebook.
Illustration: Lucy Han
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