On the road: In the land of the Southern Man

By TONY WALL

He's a Southern man, and he's southern bred, he's got the south in his blood, and he's gonna be here till he's damn well dead.

He don't drink Speight's but.

Grahame Sydney, who has made a name for himself painting Otago's sprawling vistas, prefers wine from one of the excellent vineyards in his province to the beer that sells itself as the pride of the south.

In many ways the artist is the quintessential Southern Man, with his love of wide open spaces and scepticism about big North Island cities.

But Sydney does not like the Southern Man stereotype, made famous by the Speight's commercials.

"He [Speight's Southern Man] is thick - the image is dumb. He's got none of the qualities I admire in a man."

We visited Sydney - whose book The Art of Grahame Sydney dominated the Montana Book Awards last year - at his Dunedin studio as we headed north on our road trip.

He spoke glowingly of life in Otago, where the wine industry has exploded and farming is on the up.

"There's something funny going on here at the moment. There's a real resurgence of provincial pride. It's to do with a whole lot of things coming right and a feeling that things are better here than elsewhere."

Sydney feels his heart is anchored firmly in the region, and the Central Otago area is his "psychological landscape."

His oil paintings capture the arid severity of Central Otago with an almost photographic meticulousness.

"It's huge, spacious and open. It's the bare bones of a landscape; there's bugger all skin and no softness. It has an ancient feel to it, like it could be anywhere within the last half million years."

Sydney never paints elsewhere in New Zealand - "when I think of the North Island I think of green and bush, which is why I don't go there" - and even finds Southland too lush, and therefore boring.

He reckons this is a different country to places like Auckland, with its urban pace and traffic problems.

"Breaking away wouldn't be a bad idea," he says, only half-joking. "We feel smarter for being here. It's literally a village life."

Sydney, who has been painting for 26 years, is making a comfortable living and has a year's worth of orders to fill.

He is building a new home and studio in St Bathans, halfway between Ranfurly and Alexandra, so he can be closer to the land that so inspires him.

Hitting the road out of Dunedin, we look for signs of the land that so captivates the painter, but State Highway 1 snakes along the coast and it's still chilly and misty.

We stop at the Moeraki Boulders, spherical balls formed millions of years ago from mudstone. They sit on the wind-swept beach like giant, alien eggs.

In Oamaru, we find a former Auckland man who is pursuing his own dream of a bygone south.

Bookbinder Michael O'Brien is one of about a dozen townsfolk who have set up businesses in Oamaru's quaint Victorian section, with its striking 100-year-old buildings made from luminous Oamaru limestone.

Mr O'Brien has taken the Victorian theme to the extreme.

He wears clothes made by the Victorian tailor next door, rides a pennyfarthing, drinks English-style beer at the Criterion Tavern and even tries to eat trad food.

He used to do this in Auckland, "but it just didn't work, so I started looking for somewhere in New Zealand that would feel like the old country, and I found it in Oamaru."

Mr O'Brien moved down here in 1994 and has been amusing the tourists ever since.

He says he always had a passion for nostalgia after being brought up in Whangarei by elderly adoptive parents.

Leaving the timewarp, we head up the road towards Timaru. As we cross the imaginary line into Canterbury, the sun comes out and it feels like summer again. Summer in the south.

Feature: On the road with Tony and Mark