In memoriam
Seddon Bennington, 8 October 1947 – 11 July 2009
Photo courtesy of the Dominion Post
We were all fast asleep, clearly. None of us heard the crash, the ambulance, police, firemen, or crane arriving, just 200 metres from our farmhouse. It was shortly after midnight on 23 January. A truck took the 90 degree downhill bend beside our drive and went over the cliff into the steep river valley. The driver and his 7 year old son died. We imagined the child’s excitement at being allowed to go on this night time journey with his father at the end of the school holidays. And the comfort it gave his father to have him alongside. Let’s hope the little boy transitioned smoothly from sleep to oblivion.
The Norsewood Volunteer Fire Brigade has been busier than usual. The saddest, most ominous sound you ever heard is the siren that calls the men in from surrounding farms. It’s almost always a road accident, almost never a fire.
Five months later, in mid winter – we’d come to the farmhouse to plant the garlic crop (for the rabbits) – a man travelling south on a Saturday night left the road as if he mistook our driveway for the highway and wrote his car off in a sidelong collision with two macrocarpas. Hunks of fresh orange wood were embedded in the car. We didn’t hear that one either. The clearing he made in the undergrowth revealed new stashes of broken beer bottles and other rubbish. You just wouldn’t believe how much rubbish is strewn along the highway. Our driveway is a popular place for trucks to stop and drivers to relieve themselves, and for teenagers to park up, judging by the alcopop bottles. No condoms in the tangle of barbed wire, glass, plastic, used nappies, and Old Man’s Beard. Is that a good or a bad sign? Inside the boot of the smashed car we glimpsed a pack of Tui. We won’t jump to any conclusions. We’re just glad to hear that this driver survived, despite appearances to the contrary. He’ll need to get the Fire Brigade back with the ‘jaws of life’ to prise those beers out of the boot.
We were not at the farm that night in October 2009 when it snowed, and David Bourke, a freezing worker from Whanganui, who had killed his brother and stuck him on the back seat, crashed – on that same perilous bend. He abandoned the vehicle and his brother, and escaped across the neighbour’s farm, shooting and injuring a farm worker he encountered on the bleak Eastern rise. He then disappeared down the vertical river gorge at the back of our farm and was not captured for nearly three days. How he survived the cold and didn’t get stuck in the blackberry forest, I don’t know. Police searched our woodshed and farmhouse in the manhunt.
The whole 3000ha block around our farm was locked down; the highway traffic diverted both ways by armed police. If farmers happened to be elsewhere, they were not allowed to go home and no one inside the blockade could leave. I mentally searched our top cupboards in the farmhouse kitchen to imagine what we would have had to eat if we’d been there. Those decade old cans of spaghetti and beetroot. Prime Minister Bill English could have made a meal of it. The farmers were not allowed to milk their cows, which hit them in the pocket and caused the cows much physical distress. A couple of farmers were allowed to milk under armed guard. All great material for filmmaker Vincent Ward. David Bourke was not a monster or a murderer. He was convicted of manslaughter by a merciful jury. He and his brother Timothy, also a freezing worker, were both depressed after the death of their mother the year before. Timothy repeatedly begged David to kill him. He finally relented.
It was the other coldest night of the year in July 2009 when the CEO of Te Papa (New Zealand’s National Museum), Seddon Bennington, and his companion, Marcella Jackson, died in thigh deep snow on the Tararua Range (11 July 2009). We were building a fence around our orchard-to-be that day. I remember how cold the metal on the post hole digger felt. The ashes of my brother-in-law, the architect and builder of this proud fence, are now scattered under the gnarly pepper tree. We couldn’t bring ourselves to cut it down. The fence was forced to go round it. My brother in law didn’t know he was fencing off his own grave.
The orchard is a bit of a failure, actually. This autumn: 1 quince, a few sour apples, and some rock hard nectarines. My sister thinks it’s a bee desert, too cold and far from other food sources. It never occurred to me that the bees would have to come from somewhere, and that they wouldn’t necessarily fly 30kms from the gardens of Waipukurau just to service a few quince and apple flowers. Our passionfruit also died and the rabbits (birds?) ate all the red and black currants. Even the rabbits couldn’t eat the apples.
My daughter thought the world of Seddon Bennington because he came down to the shop in Te Papa where she was working one Christmas Day, to talk to her and the other staff, and thank them. I remember his fork slipping while he was elegantly eating moules marinieres at a Wellington restaurant, splashing hot, greasy liquid all over one of his beautiful pastel shirts. He made no fuss. I imagine he died with dignity, too.
The grass in the “orchard” soon grew chest high after we fenced it off from the cows. But now we have found someone to mow it. The man who, until recently, ran the general store in Norsewood. Brother of the Dutch cheesemaker across the valley. Quiet, practical, enduring men. The orchard looks very smart now, if unproductive, with 100 daffodils about to bloom, though no one will be there to see them. Speaking of the general store and cafe in Norsewood, the new immigrant (to Norsewood and NZ) owners seem to be settling in well.
Our neighbour, farmer and teacher, Keri , is packing slabs of a delicious looking chocolate slice in Tip Top icecream container lids to give to various people. She is a legend in our family. So strong, capable and unfazed by anything. I remember her sitting calmly while her enthusiastic boys threw darts into a board beside her. She never flinched. Keri could run Fonterra in her spare time, and still keep the tins full. Her three sons and one daughter have had an incredible upbringing. Celia Lashlie would have approved. I’m not surprised to learn that all the boys made this year’s final of the TeenAg competition in Feilding. Sam ultimately gained third place in the Grand National Finals, and Tom and Fergus got first and second in the East Coast Regional Competition.
We’ve come to ask if we can buy some of their wood now that our dear brother in law and his best friend, Chainsaw, are out of action. My sisters and I do what we can with hand saws, but we need commercial quantities of firewood in this high, cold country near the Ruahines. Keri says the kids will deliver the wood for pocket money. Sure enough, next time we go to the farm, the wood has been delivered right to our back door bunker, which means they went to the trouble of taking the fence down to save us carrying it. That is typical of them.
Keri and Nick Lourie are outstanding farmers. They farm for profit rather than production in these times of low milk prices.
Of course, calving is about to start, hopefully not today, 13 July – the coldest day this year, without a doubt. This season, when the calves go to the works, the law now demands that they be able to walk up a ramp into the truck, rather than risk them being thrown up by an impatient farmhand. A small improvement in the lives of farm animals, but an improvement nevertheless. Millions of calves are born and killed every year so we can have their milk. Some like it raw, though food safety experts strongly advise against it. My sisters and I used to want to vomit at the sight of the warm, congealing yellow milk my Uncle delivered to my grandparents every morning.
What other news in southern Hawke’s Bay these last few months? Looks like the plans for the Ruataniwha Dam are now terminal. The Supreme Court has disallowed the land swap which would have ceded conservation land needed for the Dam. The Government says they will change the law. I wouldn’t if I were them.
And the verdict is out about the cause of the campylobacter poisoning of 5000 Havelock North inhabitants. What everyone surmised from day one. A heavy rain soup of farm animal faeces overwhelmed and breached the town water bore. The new genomic technologies give us absolute certainty about the source. Sheep in this case. This was the second worst incident of its kind in the world, ever. Infectious disease expert, Professor Nigel French, says that an estimated 80 million tonnes of cow faeces splatters onto our land every year. That’s quite a load of pathogenic material.
Last year, there was more than usual concern about the mental health of rural people, under financial pressure with the collapse of dairy prices and nursing their anxiety alone. New Zealand is right up there in the bar graphs that neatly contain and abstract death by suicide – we have the tallest bar for youth suicide. Our other neighbour tells us that one of the freezing workers took his own life recently. He had been laid off, though we cannot make any assumptions about his reasons. The lamb kill is significantly down this last year.
This is a grim account, I acknowledge, relieved in nano-part by the thought of calves walking freely to the slaughter. Hear the skitter, sklatter of naive hooves on wood and metal. Do not look into those eyes. Out of sight, out of mind for the 87% of New Zealanders living in cities.
Depending on your point of view, the decision against making conservation land available for the Ruataniwha Dam is cause for celebration or fury. Locally, I know many people will be very disappointed about the transfusion this water might have given their dying towns. Others fear that the water would just be used to make more faecal soup.
But we can all celebrate good neighbours, volunteer firemen, and the search and rescue teams that go looking for people lost in the hills. And we can hope for a better harvest next year…and swimmable rivers in 2040(?).
Brother-in-law Stephen McBride (died 8 October 2016) with son Jeremy, and grandson Kaleb
