An Oxymoron Called Diversity for Kiwis in the 1960s

An unhappy ending to an entomology adventure in National Park

PART ONE

Let’s go to 1965. The Beatles needed Help.

Sonny and Cher still had each other.

And I was heading off on an adventure to Tongariro National Park.

In a previous post, I wrote about hiding in the dark in our first rental house in Christchurch, after we immigrated from Holland, to start our new life. My mother and I (I was 3 or 4 at the time) were waiting for my father to come home from his new job on the Railways, while the neighbours were throwing stones that clattered down our steep corrugated iron roof, to the laughs and jeers of men (who knew my Dad wasn’t home), yelling, “Go back to where you came from, bloody foreigners, stealing our jobs!”

Later our neighbours became friends, but the locals didn’t like people who were different. We looked like them, but our accents were very Dutch, English was our second language.

In some parts of Christchurch, there are still elements of people who are racist. They are in the minority, but there is still an undercurrent. As we made friends and assimilated into New Zealand society, there were still some unpleasant experiences. This story is about one of them.

It’s also about food, and unlike today, the choices in New Zealand in 1965 were limited. A home-cooked meal was largely meat, potatoes and 3 vegs. All grown in New Zealand. Good wholesome food. Breakfast would be a fried egg or Weetbix. Lunch would be sandwiches, perhaps with a slice of Chesdale Cheese.

If you went out for dinner, options were pretty much Steak, eggs and chips, or perhaps Sausages and Chips with a couple of slices of white bread, followed by a cup of tea. Not many people even drank coffee. There was one Chinese restaurant in the city. Sometimes we would catch the bus into town, a 45-minute trip each way, for fried rice with sweet and sour soo gai, or something similar.

So let’s start at the beginning. My father was Preparator at the Auckland War Memorial Museum, where he was involved in developing dioramas and displays. These included the famous Bird Hall, featuring all manner of birds from petrels to the extinct Moa. He created amazing 3D displays, reconstructed trees, did taxidermy on birds, and painted art scenes. Pretty much everything, even the backdrop plaster and asbestos dome that held it all together (which would create a health nightmare for him in his later life, as he contracted Asbestosis).

He was in the middle of writing what became a best-selling book, called A Guide to Model Making and Taxidermy.

One part of the book was about insects and he was invited to join a trip of scientists, entomologists and students to go to National Park to look for giant alpine moths and insects native to the alpine environment. They were going to be exploring the scrubland for a bit over a week, as well as climbing to the crater lake on Mt Ruapehu.

School holidays were coming and my father asked if I would like to come too. There was a catch. He was driving down the week before in the Museum’s Austin Gypsey, and I would have to go down by train. It was a night train. I was excited, I was going to catch insects and climb up a mountain.

So, on a Friday night after school, someone took me to the Auckland Central Train Station at the bottom of town. My mother couldn’t drive, but she along to see me off. She rented me a pillow, which was how it was done back then. They saw me to my seat and spoke to the train conductor to ask him to wake me up and make sure I got off at the National Park train station at 1 am, where my father would meet me.

This was going to be an exciting trip. The train was pretty old, noisy, and had red seats with backs that could flip over, so you could face in either direction. I got a block of 2 bench seats facing each other to myself, at least for the start of the journey. I settled in with my bag, pillow and a book to read before it got dark. There were two types of people on night trains. Those that went straight to sleep when the train left at 7 pm, and those, such as lads on a rugby trip, who would have one loud party until the beer ran out. As an 8-year-old, I was happy being in the lights out compartment, watching the lights and people’s back yards that faced the track.

I had some money in my pocket to buy a cup of tea and a pie in Taumaranui which was the halfway point of the train’s journey to Wellington. The station after Taumaranui was the stop where I had to get off at. The train would always stop for the obligatory meat pie in Taumaranui, even at midnight.

There has been a lot of fuss about that stop recently. The train doesn’t stop there anymore after decades of it being not only a stop but a bit of Kiwi culture, as depicted in this fun song which most older generation Kiwis will remember. Taumaranui locals are asking for the train to stop again like it did in the old days. They feel it is part of NZ heritage.

This is getting to be a long story. I will make it in two parts. If you want to get to the unhappy ending, you will need to bookmark this page, or to make it easy, subscribe, if you haven’t already.