Railway pies and rice stew on the Picton Ferry
Travel in New Zealand was not sophisticated in 1975
I was reading this post from a blog called As the Music Plays, which has an awesome video tribute to the song City of New Orleans as performed by Arlo Guthrie.
I never listened to much of Guthrie’s music besides the obvious Alice’s Restaurant, which has its place in many moments in my life. I might have to do a separate blog about that. I recently found a cassette tape that my father sent to his parents when I was about 14. He was telling them a story about life in New Zealand, and I was playing the theme of Alice’s Restaurant over and over again in the background. I played that theme so often including with the infamous Tim Shadbolt in Albert Park in Auckland many years ago.
This great video reminded me of an overnight trip on the Cabbage (night) Train from Picton to Christchurch one cool summer’s night, but that’s another story yet to be written, about 16-year-old me, my guitar, about 40 college girls from New Caledonia, and their eagle-eyed matronly chaperone. It was a 12-hour journey and the train stopped at and in-between every station along the way. It was a freight train with one or two passenger cars.
But what I wanted to share today was a poem I wrote about a trip to Nelson with one of my school buddies, Simon, to go tobacco picking.
This was around the summer of 75. They were desperate for tobacco pickers and we were in Auckland with nothing special to do. The deal was that the farmers paid the travel costs (bus and ferry) of a 915km journey, provided worker accommodation, and we would go down for about 8 weeks and pick their crop.
The journey was kind of interesting and I wrote a poem about it. This poem would be my first rejection from a great publication called The Listener, a weekly magazine that combined great articles with a TV and radio guide. My grandmother, Elisabeth Augustin, tried to get it published through her connections in Europe, to no avail. But she liked it.
The poem is as I wrote it at about 17 years old. No edits.
A Tale of 5 Buses
Te rere ra, te rere ra 1
Wake up!
It’s not time for sleeping.
I sing Maori
You sing Pakeha words.
When Maori talks Maori
Pakeha don’t understand.
When Pakeha talk Pakeha
Maori, he understand.
Te rere ra, te rere ra
Where are we now eh?
Taihape
This is not Taihape, we been in Taihape.
Yeah! We’re back in Taihape,
The bus broke down.
Oh……
Te rere ra, te rere ra
Where are we now?
Taihape.
Eh boys, where are we?
We’re in Taihape, go to sleep! 2
Eh, shudup
We go to Porirua eh girl.
All my family there.
Got plenty more booze
Breakfast in Wellington3
What a feast
Best food in weeks
And coffee to soothe rough throats
Treated by our best road, No 1. 4
Pork pie and gravy
Just the thought is enough to send
Saliva washing off dust-stained boots.
Here it comes
Looks good enough to step in
Hellaby’s pig blubber
Vaseline and jellied flies5
Don’t think I’ll ever touch
Another Railway Pie.
New Zealand’s best people collide
At the Inter-Island Ferry Terminal
Displaying good Christian morality
Until the queue starts moving forward
6 abreast
Dirty looks from 10th in line
Upon finding himself slowly moving back
While feet stand still
Passenger count at a quarter to ten6
Better bring some stretchers by then
Push hard
Your chance won’t come again
2 in casualty and all get on
With room for a hundred more.
Into the ferry restaurant walks
Lincoln and wife7
Weighed down by cameras, horn-rim
Glasses and thick make up.
Unfortunately the poodles were kept
Back by the agriculture department.
Buying plastic teekees made in Hong Kong8
To show the folks back home.
Eyes glittering as they savor the idea
Of chicken, curry and rice for one dollar.
They’re on holiday, so they buy ten tickets.9
Jaws agape, they see rice stew appear
Laughs turn to stunned silence
They can’t tell the folks back home about that.
Still they can have a real breakfast at the American Success in Picton.
Newmans driver
Always friendly
Picks two chicks up young and friendly
Lift up skirts, their knees are showing
His eyes light up
It’s Nelson they’re going
Riding the Rai Forest
They moan all the way
So in the end the frustrated driver
Makes them pay.10
An elderly Maori woman is on the bus and is singing a song to herself and talking to whoever will listen to her on the Newmans bus. She had a few drinks before she got on the bus. It translates from Maori to English as the sun flow, but it could equally have been her version of la, la la.
The bus broke down twice between around midnight and 2 AM and each time had to go back to Taihape which was the nearest bus station.
Breakfast was at the central railway station in Wellingon. Hellaby’s is a freezing works, that processes meat, and among their products are a Kiwi ‘favourite’ the meat pie, which comes in different varieties and was remarkably average in the day.
State Highway 1 runs the entire length of both the main islands of New Zealand, and in many places, the state of the road does not reflect its significance.
Pies were often bulked up with gelatine, so that they didn’t have to put too much meat or gravy in them.
The ferry was only licensed for a certain number of passengers, and back then the ferry was the way most people travelled between the islands. They had to do a count to make sure they weren’t carrying more than safety regulations allowed. On a hot day that seemed to take forever and the next ferry wouldn’t go, weather allowing for another 6 or so hours. Kiwis pride themselves on being orderly and honouring a place in a line, and get angry at people that don’t, until it looks like they might miss out.
American tourists in New Zealand at that time often stood out, wearing different coloured hair, lots of makeup and clothing styles very different to the average Kiwi. You could say that they stood out in a crowd. They felt a lot like the sort of tourists that don’t engage with anyone other than themselves and expect Ritz standards, even in a quaint place like New Zealand. This is of course a gross exaggeration, but the group that I observed in this instance, were like an anachronistic caricature of the blue rinse and golf trouser set.
A hei tiki is a gift, often an ornament you would hang around your neck, which is usually made of nephrite or jade representing human form and ancestors. A real one like this hand made by a master carver might be worth thousands of dollars. The ones sold as souvenirs are often made of plastic in China.
I used license, but this group did buy extra food because it was cheap. Restaurant food, especially on a boat, was very basic and average. Kiwis knew what they were getting, but a tourist might be expecting something a little more sophisticated. I kid you not, there was a restaurant in Picton back then called The American Success and it always had a Stars and Stripes flag blowing in the wind.
True story. A couple of girls were hitch-hiking their way to Nelson as the bus passed and waved it down. He told them they had to pay, the same as everyone else, this was a commercial service. They chatted him up and talked him into letting them travel for free which was not welcomed by the paying passengers. The trip was about 2 hours and they made a pain of themselves, wanting unscheduled toilet breaks, and drinks, complaining about the heat and the winding roads. In the end, the driver pulled over and told them he had had enough of them. They could either get off the bus or pay the fare. Which they did, under protest.