From The Other Side: New Year’s Eve relationships not what they used to be

The days of having police around for a New Year’s Eve barbecue are long gone, and more’s the pity, former Northland Age editor Peter Jackson says.

OPINION

It’s happened again. One year has slowly fizzled out and a new one has begun without my active, or even conscious, participation.

Truth be told, the days of enthusiastically gallivanting from one year to the next were well and truly over for me some time ago. These days I struggle to stay awake until midnight under any circumstances, and the attraction of waiting for the clock to chime 12 midnight is nowhere near enough to keep my eyes open.

It wasn’t always like this, but individual New Year celebrations don’t come to mind at all readily. There was a time, though, in the 1990s when New Year’s Eve was quite a big deal at our place, thanks to one John Ponsford, then in charge at the Kaitāia police station.

He suggested one day, as the festive season neared, that he and the others who were working that night might drop by for a quick barbecue and a beer or two. They would arrive about 9pm, and wouldn’t be able to stay long. They duly turned up, about a dozen of them I think, ate half a beast (or in Dave Ratapu’s case, a tray of cream puffs), imbibed fairly modestly, to be fair, then disappeared into the night, promising to give me something worthy of my next front page at the Northland Age.

On one occasion they arrived a man short. Brendan Power, who was stationed at Kohukohu, had become separated from the pack, so was advised by radio there was a 1D (domestic dispute) at our address. When he arrived he could hardly fail to notice a veritable fleet of police cars, so concluded that whatever was happening, it was a major.

He gained entry to our kitchen via the back door, which he opened with one shoulder, and, baton drawn, confronted my wife. Raewyn managed to impart the information that “they’re out by the pool”, so he charged out there. I always thought he looked a little disappointed to be handed a plate rather than finding the brawl he had been expecting.

Equally memorable was the night they didn’t arrive. We were in agony, but hung out until midnight before deciding they weren’t coming. My head had just touched the pillow when I heard a car door slam. Then another one. Then four more. So we crawled out of bed, fired up the barbecue and Raewyn started on a new batch of profiteroles.

Sadly, we don’t have many photos of those occasions, but we do have at least one, somewhere, showing everyone tucking in. Unfortunately, we were one chair short, so Brian Camplin had to stand, balancing a plate of steak and salad with one hand and trying to cut the steak with the other. He could have sat at the table, but our cat, Sam, was occupying the only “vacant” chair, and John Ponsford had forbidden Beej from moving him. So he didn’t.

This was a time when the police interacted with the general public much more than they do now, more’s the pity. It didn’t last. The tradition in Kaitāia of people giving the local cops a few beers for Christmas was the first to go, quickly followed by rules preventing them from keeping any tangible expression of gratitude or goodwill. Anything remotely resembling a gift — more likely to be a plate of scones than anything intrinsically valuable — had to be reported and handed over.

So it was inevitable that New Year’s Eve at our place was seen as a potential gratuity, and it was knocked on the head, making just one brief revival.

It was about April or May when Joe Cooper, a lovely man and a very good cop now plying his trade in Australia, quietly told me that “the boss” (Senior Sergeant Gordon Gunn) wouldn’t be working on New Year’s Eve, so would there be any possibility of a few of them calling in for a feed and a beer? I said that sounded good to me, but I would check with Raewyn.

A few days later Joe asked if I’d, ahh, had a chance to, um, ask Raewyn about, well you know, about um, New Year’s Eve. Yes, I said, I had told her that Joe Cooper wants to know if he and some others can call around for a barbecue.

“And, um, what did she say?”

“She said ‘Tell him to get stuffed’!”

Joe, bless him, hung his head and said, very quietly, “Fair enough.” I hastily assured him he and anyone else working that night would be very, very welcome.

While I’m happy to consign this particular tradition to history, I do miss the relationship I had with the police in this community over many years. I rubbed one or two the wrong way, but by and large we got on well, a relationship built entirely on mutual trust. I enjoyed a cup of coffee on the taxpayer at the station every weekday, while I found out what had happened over the preceding 24 hours, and while I (and the Age) benefited enormously, it was very much a symbiotic relationship.

The people of Kaitāia were generally pro-police, and I was the middleman. And it wasn’t me who changed. It was the police who enthusiastically embraced bureaucracy and control from a distance over what people should and should not be told.

It got to the point where, six months before I retired, I gave up trying to talk to them. And you know what? I reckon that’s making their job much more difficult than it used to be, or needs to be. New Year’s Eve at our place was symbolic of all that was good about policing in a small community, and I’m glad I was there.

Peter Jackson was editor of the Northland Age for 44 years. He retired in July 2021, but continues to comment on topics and local issues important to him.