Dialogue: Taste of Coast justice for corporate shout-dodger

West Coasters have good reason to feel angry at DB Breweries' decision to close Monteith's Brewing in Greymouth, says JOHN HARNETT.

Not all that many years ago, a young man arrived in Greymouth from Christchurch with a serious shout-dodging habit.

He worked in a socially mobile job, played senior rugby, and liked drinking beer. He became well known for his incurable affliction. He turned up in drinking schools like a cancer pill.

Within a year, he was so ostracised he packed up and left town. A few weeks later, he came back in a new Ford Cortina to see an old girlfriend. When his former friends saw it - owning a car was quite a big deal back then - a couple of them climbed on to the roof and jumped up and down until it caved in slightly.

"We've got shares in this car," they said. "We want you to remember that." (For the record, the man now works in Wellington.)

Shout-dodging in New Zealand is socially perilous. On the West Coast it is social suicide, which is why Coasters always leave their money on the bar. It puts the onus for remembering whose shout it is on the bar person.

By packing up and leaving Greymouth with its brewery when it is so far ahead - Monteith's sales are up 225 per cent since 1995, while overall beer sales dropped by 27 per cent - DB Breweries is committing the biggest shout-dodge in West Coast, and possibly New Zealand, history.

If fully mobilised by the West Coast Action Group to stop drinking DB products, the West Coast consumer could seriously damage the company's revenue. The West Coast diaspora, brought about by the end of the gold rushes and, in more recent years, coalmine closures and a ban on logging native timbers, has dispersed Coasters all over New Zealand.

Go back a few generations and the West Coast was the epicentre of the New Zealand dream. There was a time when its population of 50,000 was greater than that of Auckland.

The attraction was the vision of a shortened route to a rich and comfortable future by striking a rich seam of gold. Prospectors arrived from all over the world. With them came publicans, merchants, bankers and moonshiners. A goldfield wouldn't be a goldfield without entertainers, dancing girls, prostitutes and bums, and they came, too.

The presence of some nationalities was small - the Swiss and Portuguese, for example - but it was enough to assert an influence on the character of the collective West Coaster. Coasters' differences caused many fights, but their successes and failures also bound them together.

Ultimately, their ties became stronger than their differences, and it is that lineage that has been aroused by DB's decision to shout-dodge their region.

New Zealand has a lot for which to thank Coasters. They produced 6,644,601oz of gold, valued at nearly £26 million, between 1864 and 1938. Adjust the buying power of that amount of money to today's terms and it would be worth much more than $2 billion.

The tax and duties on gold were used to establish New Zealand's social infrastructure of hospitals, police stations, courts, schools, railways, and roads.

Coasters have had little in return. Until recent years, they have not really worried about it. They know that they are off the beaten track, that it rains down there a bit, and that these are the reasons the Coast is sparsely populated and under-resourced.

Myth aside, booze has been a way of life on the Coast since the gold-rush days and Monteith's has been part of the menu for 150 years - taking it away is like removing a part of themselves.

Coasters still have a lack of respect for the law compared with their fellow countrymen, though they tend not to take it into their own hands as they once did. But when they did so against the shout-dodger, for instance, justice was their motive. For years, the West Coast had the lowest crime rate in New Zealand.

That kind of justice might well re-emerge when DB's contractors walk on to the Monteith's site to demolish the brewery. But maybe it will be more peaceful this time - in the form of a boycott.

* West Coast-born John Harnett is an Auckland freelance writer.