State Highway 2 cuts Norsewood village (popn 330) in half. Not so much a bypass as a frontal lobotomy. Yet this valiant little place – central location of our best family memories – is doing everything it can to stay on the map.
Demographer Paul Spoonley says it’s time we faced up to the fact that our regional towns and cities are flat-lining or in decline. Urbanisation is a global trend. 86% of New Zealanders now live in cities. Almost any Aucklander owning a house above the rapidly climbing median could buy Upper Norsewood High St. There’s talk of forcing immigrants into the regions to relieve the pressure on Auckland. Proponents will be pleased to know that the Norsewood general store and cafe were recently taken over, voluntarily, by newcomers of Asian descent. They are brave, these people. Can you imagine starting a Four Square store in rural India?
Rest homes and dairy farms hereabouts rely on Filipino labour. How strange and lonely they must feel in this cold place full of big, rather loud white people who eat food with no spice in it. A Cambodian taxi driver, one of many Pol Pot survivors in Wellington, recently told me of his distress on arrival when his kindly sponsors served him a large animal part and mountain of mashed potato, a little on the dry side. Under Pol Pot’s rural revival scheme, Professor Spoonley and anyone with a qualification higher than NCEA Level 3, would be handed a spade and bussed into the countryside. Royal Society Fellows first on board.
Lower Norsewood mainly comprises the Norsewear retail outlet where you can buy the classic flecked wool socks that get stuck in your gumboots and jam your underwear drawer. Over 40,000 customers a year are relieved to get off the motorway and wander round the shop, which has the assets of a wood stove, great staff, and very clean loos. The owner of the outlet, NZ Natural Clothing Co, as its name suggests tries to stock as much locally made clothing as it can. The socks are still made on site but other “local” brands, including Swanndri, are now manufactured in Asia. Nylon thread has insinuated itself into our classic wool clothing, which otherwise resists modernity. Style was never Norsewear’s strong point, but if you want to survive a southerly in the Tararuas, fashion detail is a secondary consideration. The nation was appalled by the recent death of two young men who died in the ranges, apparently from hypothermia. Condolences to their families.
Norsewood is in an economic stranglehold, despite the enduring reputation of its socks and the admirable efforts of the village promotion committee to leverage its Scandinavian history. The village has been populated by trolls (no, not that kind! – those of Norse myth that lived under “the rickety rackety bridge”). Its future hangs on the socks, one petrol pump, a cafe and the school roll. Farms have got about five times bigger, families smaller. Quad bikes and mechanisation have reduced the labour needed. Stricter drink driving laws discourage pub-going. Noone is interested in the heyday 1960s bring-a-plate, inter-generational dances. The era of weak shandies and Gay Gordons is over. The locals watch other New Zealanders exercising on large screen TVs after a hard day on the quad bike, whistling at dogs (just joking!).
The monks at Southern Star Abbey, 3kms from Norsewood, are not getting any younger. Stressed city-dwellers in need of spiritual sanctuary – Auckland commuters on the edge of madness from idling in traffic – can retreat there. Peace and quiet they will certainly find. For nearly forty years the tolerant monks have turned a blind eye to us trampling their paddocks to get to the once choice swimming hole on their farm. White Rock, we call it. My “go to” geologist, who knows this area very well – the fabulous Dr Hamish Campbell – tells me that the four-metre-high bank of white “chalk” beside the river is actually volcanic glass deposited by a massive eruption in the central North Island 1.1M years ago. There is a layer tens of metres thick under nearby Dannevirke, says Hamish. So if you think this month’s 7.8 earthquake was something, just you wait for Taupo to explode again. It is several hundred years overdue, based on the average eruption period since Lake Taupo was created 26,500 years ago. Every cow and sheep in the North Island will be shrouded in volcanic dust. They will eat glass.
To the delight and wonderment of my family, we found a band of sea shells in the river bank upstream. Not a Maori midden, but evidence that this was once an estuary, since jacked up hundreds of metres by the relentless pressure of the Pacific plate driving under the Australian plate.
We’ve stopped using White Rock since it was fenced off to keep the cows out. You can hardly get near it for weeds and fallen trees. We applaud the monks for being quick to act, but hadn’t quite realised the personal consequences. Our new swimming hole has quickly deteriorated too, from the accumulated effects of stock relieving themselves in it, erosion and excess fertiliser. It’s full of slippery silt covering lethal branches of blackberry, and uninviting drifts of brown and green slime that swim towards you and settle in your hair. We are careful not to swallow.
I went to the fourth annual NZ River Awards in Wellington recently. It is run by the Morgan Foundation (started by Dr Gareth Morgan, the economist who raised the issue of cats as predators of our native birds) and is the best award show in town. The contingent from Hawke’s Bay looked rather glum, understandably. People everywhere are making efforts to save our rivers from pollution, with considerable side benefits for community togetherness. Ecological restoration is the new Church. Maybe synthetic milk and meat production will solve the problem of farm run-off for good. It seems like a crazy idea, but nothing seems too far-fetched in this new age of gene-editing and 3D printing. What will our farmers do then? Run gift shops in antique milking sheds, selling memories of a primitive age when, amazingly, people got milk from cows, killed their offspring by the million, and shaved the sheep for clothing? Young urbanites will wear retro Norsewear socks and shearing singlets.
The guest speaker at the River Awards talked about “wicked problems” with reference to the contentious proposal to build a dam about an hour north of Norsewood. The Ruataniwha. It is hoped by many locals that the extra productivity wrung from the dry plains will save the small towns of my ancestors – Norsewood, Otane, Waipawa and moribund Takapau. Doesn’t look like it will proceed now following a change in Regional Council composition and leadership after the last election. And on the news just now (25 November), the resignation of Dr Andy Pearce, the Regional Council Investment Company Chair. Meanwhile, the row continues over who was responsible for the breach in the water supply that led to the mass campylobacter poisoning of over 5,000 Havelock North residents.
The day after the NZ River Awards, Dr Morgan announced that he was starting a new political party, focussed on social equity and the environment. The Opportunity Party. Good luck to you Gareth. If he gives us all $15K a year universal benefit, we’ll be able to buy mansions in Foxton and Takapau and live the good life.
Norsewood was completely destroyed in the great fire of 1888. Then rebuilt. It once had a movie theatre, churches for every denomination, garage mechanics, a dairy factory. Now the social glue is the beautifully maintained school and the volunteer fire brigade. Fire is a misnomer. Its main business is to cut bodies – dead or alive – from car wrecks. There are a great many on this stretch of State Highway 2. We hear the sad siren wailing across the river valley, calling the volunteers in from surrounding farms. One Christmas Eve, twenty five years ago, five students were killed just north of our farmhouse by a local man who’d been drinking at a pub in Dannevirke. Perhaps it’s a good thing that the locals drink their Tui at home now, a safe distance from their beds.
If you’re on the road this Christmas, take the slip road and have a cup of coffee in Norsewood. Count the trolls and buy some of the locally made Dutch-style cheese. There’s no hurry, is there? Socks are always a great last minute gift. Go for the luxury possum ones and do the birds a favour.
Breaking good news: Some interesting Aucklanders have just bought the dairy factory opposite the Norsewear shop.
http://www.stuff.co.nz/oddstuff/3162564/Reward-offered-for-safe-return-of-Norsewoods-troll
