Part II An Oxymoron Called Diversity for Kiwis in the 1960s

An unhappy ending to an entomology adventure in National Park

I woke up in Taumaranui, as per the previous post and saw we had been there for a while because the train carriage was empty. I raced through the open door and asked someone how much time we had before the train left. Enough time to buy a railway pie.

Wiping the sleep from my eyes, I bought myself a pie, then boarded the train, with my hot pastry treat bleeding grease through the brown paper bag. It was steaming hot, with thick crusty pastry holding in the steak and gravy.

I ate it with relish and spent the next while glued to the window, waiting for the National Park Station to appear through the darkness. The conductor came down the aisle to make sure I knew it was the next stop.

I was the only person getting off at the station as I made my way onto the platform. My father’s bearded face appeared out of the dark, sporting a green Swanndari and welcomed me with a hug. We went to the Austin Gypsy, dumped my bag in the back and drove off to the DOC camp at National Park.

We were quartered in dorms. There was one for men and one for women. Leo had a bunk sorted for me and I quickly retrieved my sleeping bag from the top of my pack, climbed into it, and managed to get to sleep, despite the cacophony of snorers.

The next few days were great fun. I had a bag with specimen jars, a net to catch moths in, and an aspirator which I used to catch beetles, strange-looking millipedes and other insects. This image from one of my father’s books, A Guide to Modelmaking and Taxidermy, shows how it worked. You sucked on one end of the tube and held the end with a glass tube next to the insect. It was a bit creepy the first time because I was scared the insect would end up in my mouth. Once it was safely in the tube, it would go into a glass collection vial.

The best part was catching the moths. Some of them were very big. Most that I caught would have had a wingspan of around 5cm, but some, like the female Puriri moth, can have a wingspan as wide as 15cm! They were mostly a grey/brown colour, but there were green ones and even yellow ones. Nothing like the ones that would hover around the lightbulb on a summer’s night at home, when we left the windows open. You had to be very careful not to damage their dusty wings getting them out of the net.

On the other side of the world, the Who released the Album, My Generation which I would come to love, but not for a few more years.

Our days down there were pretty full-on, during the day we would go exploring, mostly looking for places to go back to after sunset, which was the best time to find moths.

One day we had a trip to the crater lake on Mt Ruapehu. I was really excited as we headed up the mountain, climbing past the chairlift pylons, waiting silently for winter. We got onto the snow and ice that never melts (or at least it didn’t back then before global warming changed the landscape). Sadly some way past the beginning of the ice, the ranger came to me and said I wasn’t allowed to go any higher because I was wearing sneakers. I had hoped nobody would notice. I didn’t own tramping boots. So I had to stay on the ice and entertain myself. I found an old pack sled sitting on the ice and played on that, but when it started going too fast on the ice, I was scared I’d fly over a cliff, so I jumped off, watching the sled go another 100 meters or so on its own.

It’s time to get to the point of the story though. Each night one of the team had to buy, prepare, and cook for the team.

Meals at the camp were made of variations on steak, chops, sausages, eggs, potatoes and veggies for evening meals, with lunches being paper bags of sandwiches if we were out in the field, or Watties baked beans from big tins if we were at the base.

So it became my father’s turn and he was excited to cook up a signature dish that he would sometimes prepare at home. There were french sticks made into garlic bread and the main was 3 big oven dishes filled with macaroni in a cheese sauce.

Mixed into the dish were a variety of meats. Frankfurters, salami, onion, tomato, gherkins, mushrooms and all manner of other things, topped with more cheese, and covered with a layer of crunchy breadcrumbs.

My Dad had gone to the local Four Square for supplies, and the bottle store at the back of the pub, for some red wine. When he returned, I helped him prepare it in the afternoon, while the others went out for another field trip. We were excited, looking forward to them enjoying the evening meal.

Were we in for a surprise? My father was well respected for his skills and knowledge of the wildlife on the mountain, but that did not extend to his culinary offering.

A few of the group took some garlic bread and filled a bowl with the macaroni dish, toyed a bit with their forks, and then the mutterings started up around the solid long timber dining hall tables that looked like something out of a great hall in the Mord of the Rings. The rumble spread with words an 8-year-old doesn’t normally hear, and the volume rose. “What the fuck is this slop? This is New Zealand! We don’t eat swill like this. Let’s get out of here!”

The next thing we knew, it was just my father and I standing there on our own, with loads of food, not comprehending what had just happened. They all got in their Land Rovers and disappeared in the night to National Park, to a restaurant, where they could have some real Kiwi food and a few Lion Red beers.

I didn’t know how to deal with that. I couldn’t understand what had just happened. Everyone had been great. Friendly, enjoying the adventure, and then the mood turned sour on a sixpence in that DOC dining room.

My father was a very proud man and was hurt and offended. The next thing I knew, we were tossing the food into a rubbish bag, packing our things, loading the Austin Gipsey with our bags, and driving home in the night. We didn’t even eat it ourselves! He didn’t want to face those people again.

It was a very strange situation, these nature lovers, university-educated people with enquiring minds, lost the plot over a meal. A year or so later I saw one of the men who had joined the exodus out of the camp, at the museum. He apologised to me, saying that they had been out of line. “But who cooks foreign food like that?”

It reminded me of my father-in-law who served in the Air Force, fighting the Japanese in the Pacific in WWII. We invited my wife’s parents over for dinner one night and served up meatballs that had a variety of things in them, some for taste, and some to make them go farther, as we were on a very tight budget in our first home, paying 21% interest on our mortgage.

“This is nice ‘Sharmie’”, his nickname for my wife, Charmaine. “What’s in it?”

“Mince, curry, various sauces, rice”

He couldn’t spit out the contents from his mouth fast enough! I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.

Russ had seen and heard stories, and the results of atrocities from the second world war, and literally couldn’t stomach anything to do with the Japanese people. Rice was a stark reminder for him.

There was no way he was going to eat rice, ever, period.

What a change from those days to the 2020s, when food from other countries is something we enjoy exploring. I don’t know why the people on the entomology trip were so anti garlic bread, macaroni cheese and red wine, or how the educated group turned into a pack, but my father passed on a number of invitations to go on trips after that.