Steve Braunias puts his best foot forward, wearing gumboots.
Gumboots, in Te Atatū. They are torn all to hell at the heel but they have served me loyally and well over many years and I don't have the heart to ever just get rid of them. This is the way
many New Zealanders feel about their gumboots. They become a part of us, another skin – a black and rubbery skin, smeared with mud and filth and yet we feel at home in that skin, in fact many of us feel truly ourselves in that skin. They work the land. They muck in. They plod on, two dumb beasts of the field, connecting us to the earth. "You will not never see me," declared Fred Dagg, "without me gumboots." And he was right. You cannot picture the gumboot laureate without the pair that lie in state at Te Papa, like the skins of a precious bird.
Gumboots, in Tokomaru Bay. I once heard about a man who lived in the ruins of an abandoned meatworks. I went to visit Lance Roberts at the Tokomaru Bay meatworks on the East Coast. I wrote about him in my book, Civilisation: "Small, nimble, in gumboots and an oily jersey, he had approximately one yellow tooth left in his old bristled head, and his voice croaked from the base of his throat. When I first saw him, he was sitting on his front porch, and something like 10 or 11 cats formed an orderly queue to take food from his mouth ... There were bones in the ashes of his woodstove. He lit it with chainsaw shavings and put on the kettle." The meatworks were opened in 1921. They closed in 1926. Lance bought the ruins in 1984 and made a kind of apartment on the first floor: "It used to be the sorting room: he slept where the offal was stacked, bathed where the livers were separated, cooked where the lungs had stopped breathing."
Gumboots, in Urutī. I once milked cows on a winter's morning in Urutī, a grassy, obscure settlement in Taranaki, on a dairy farm owned by Keith Nicholls. I once was married; he was a great father-in-law, a wonderful guy and he kept several pairs of gumboots at the farmhouse door – strange to think of all the farmhouses in New Zealand with pairs of gumboots at the front door, of New Zealand measured in pairs of gumboots at the front door. We had tea and toast in the kitchen and then headed out to bring the beasts to the cowshed in the darkest hour right before the dawn. My contribution was to open gates. Keith showed me the ropes in the cowshed and we went at it. The pumps, the sweet smell, the big faces of the beasts – it was one of the best mornings of my life and, when milking was done, I hosed down the cowshed in my gumboots in the grey morning light.
Gumboots, in Eltham. I once went to the Riverlands meatworks in a low corner of Eltham, beside the Waingongoro River, which is considered excellent for trout fishing. I wanted to see what it was like in the killing season. It was what it was – hard work in white gumboots, a beast killed every 55 seconds, the cows electrocuted in the head, their throats slit by a Halal slaughterman, the front hooves removed with a giant pair of scissors, the skin pulled off its face as the two-footed corpse swung on a hook, etc. The specific reason I went to see what it was like in the killing season was to eat a Riverlands steak. Lunch was served in the canteen. It was very good.
Gumboots, in Te Atatū, on my arable estate – no animals are harmed in the wearing of my pair of gumboots that I bought a good 10 years ago from Hammer Hardware in Pt Chevalier. I walk the sucking banks of the local mangrove creek in my gumboots. They disappear into the thick mud and it takes a lot of effort to bring them back out. I stomp massive piles of fallen fruit from my citrus trees underfoot in my gumboots. The grapefruit make a kind of marmalade on the grass, and the mandarins and tangelos form an orange squash. Then I transfer them to the compost bin, mow the lawns and cover the citrus mess with the clippings. It takes many happy hours.
Next week: Siena Yates
