KEY POINTS:
The vigorously chipper Mr Four Square is Kiwi nostalgia on a stick. Forever 1950s, the grocery-chain mascot presides over small-town New Zealand with his oversized thumbs-up; jaunty, happy to help. He evokes the mythical golden age when things were simpler. Neighbours knew each other. Kids played on the street. And we all could afford to buy cheese.
Even the chain's founding story is Kiwibattler stuff: concerned about big grocery chains crowding out Auckland's independent grocers, Foodstuffs founder J Heaton Barker spearheaded the Four Square co-operative in 1925. Today, Foodstuffs is part of a supermarket chain duopoly, but the Four Square schtick is intact.
The stores smell of lollies and fruit. Their tiled floors, manageable size and familiar brands make them somehow friendlier, more relaxed than supermarkets. Drop in for an icecream, some fags or a top-up shop and you're bound to bump into someone you know.
Last week, we visited four Four Squares and one independent store in Northland, Bay of Plenty and Waikato. The towns were Ngunguru, Kaiwaka, Katikati, Te Puke and Tokoroa, their populations ranging from 537 to 3579. We spoke to shoppers about their lives, their towns, the election, and the economy.
Outside Te Puke's Buyrite Four Square (manager's special: Ernest Adams Ginger Kisses $2.30), Russell Doughty is true to his name. The orchard realtor believes fruit exports will cushion his region from the worst of the recession. "I don't see the recession as having a major influence on the town. We're not talking about the big money world. I don't think the financial impact would be as great as it is in the city."
After years of a strapping Kiwi exchange rate inflating our export prices, the dollar is finally dropping now hovering around US61c from this year's peak of almost 82c.
Up the road in Katikati, still in the western Bay of Plenty, kiwifruit grower Edwin Pooley ducks into the local Four Square (Griffin's Chocolate Sultana Pasties $1.99) on his way home to Waihi Beach.
He's laughing. "For me, the outlook is positive, compared to other people, like builders. The service industry has really been giving us a hiding, pushing up their prices for labour. Now I'm laughing. As long as the bank doesn't call my loan in!"
Nevertheless, the retirement and holiday beach town where he lives has gone flat as weekenders fall away. Cherry Wilson is a psychotherapist who lives near Katikati and works in Tauranga. Her colleague is counselling people who've been made redundant from a major local
employer.
"Maybe two years ago, you could have something else to do, you could
be optimistic," she says. "Now, with what's going on, people are quite
frightened. It's coming up Christmas, will I get another job?"
Last week, more than 300 workers discovered they were to lose their jobs at Carter Holt Harvey sawmills in Mt Maunganui and the south Waikato town Putaruru (population: 3765). The bulk, 212 jobs, will go with the closure of the Putaruru mill.
"As I walk through the town, it is quiet and sombre," the district
mayor Neil Sinclair told the Herald on Sunday. "The workers have just gone home and are trying to take it in."
Fifteen minutes south on SH1, Tokoroa is feeling the pain. Joanne
Tangahau is buying bottled water from the Balmoral Four Square (Budget dog rolls five-pack $11.99) after a morning of door-knocking for Jehovah. She's going to eat her lunch by the lake. She knows people who work at the Putaruru mill. "That's a big fright. They don't know what they're going to do."
Everyone's talking about the elections, says Tangahau. "They ask me who I'm voting for and I say I'm voting for Jehovah's Kingdom, and they don't understand."
Shantae Browning, 20, will vote Green. It's just after 1pm. Miles away in another world, city executives are sipping wine over lunch. Browning's sipping Lion Brown, rollie in hand, sitting on the concrete outside the shop waiting for her mother. It's a warm day. Dainty white blossoms flutter opposite the bulk butcher's.
Browning's boyfriend is looking after their 9-month-old daughter, Kaydence (named after a character in the film Shallow Hal).
Next year Browning will study early childhood education. She sounds hopeful, articulate, bright. "It's the thugs who give Toke a bad name," she says.
Former nurse Shona Wilson pulls up with her son, his partner and their
3-year-old daughter, Alize. "Want an ice cream, Mum?" asks her son, a
part-time commercial diver. She does. Alize plays on the forecourt. Wilson explains why she's nervous that National will gain power and revisit the corporate model on health.
"I've watched the new systems come and go and all they've ever done is bring in a new broom with no teeth," she says. "We've got to get back to
empowering the people on the ground to do their jobs."
Alize appears at the car door. "Hey Nana!" Mid-sentence, Wilson swings her up through the open window. Friends her age have returned to nursing, she says, but she won't. "The old girls end up doing all the work because the young ones don't know what they're doing. Nurses have got way too much work. You need people who care in hospital and if you care too much you get burned out."
In small town New Zealand, kitsch is non-ironic and retro is redundant.
Some things simply haven't changed in 20 years. Cafes still proudly, perversely, sell gristly meat pies, cream lamingtons and custard squares; townies rifle op shops for bargains because no one would pay $150 for a 1980s standard lamp in Tokoroa.
Change for change's sake is not in vogue.
You hear the "time for a change" chant from National-leaning people, but you also hear the "leave well enough alone" counterpoint in Labour's defence.
In small-town New Zealand, gilded cliches about community life seem true, at least for some. In Te Puke, Jeannine Morrissey is buying flowers for her pregnant sister-in-law who babysits Morrissey's two children when she works. As a kitchen hand, Morrissey, 35, is on the minimum wage of $13.50 an hour. Her husband's new job as a store manager pays less than $20 an hour. "We can't save for a house because of that," she says.
But they're not tempted by the city. "I used to live in Auckland, it was too busy for me. Everyone is so easy to talk to here. You can walk into a shop and someone gives you a smile and you pass that on to someone else and it just continues."
Notices taped to the window of Jaques Four Square, Kaiwaka are a window into the tiny Northland community. "Lady Gardener Available"; "Fright Night at Kaiwaka sports complex"; a fashion show with celebrity host Georgina Beyer; "1 pair guinea fowl $30."
"It's fun here," says Mikhail Nathan, a 16-year-old Ngati Whatua Rodney College student. She's with her cousins Chevelle Nathan, 12, and Creedence Hemopo, 13. They're buying soft drink and juice to have with fish and chips.
Mikhail is strikingly beautiful, poised, unaffected, with chopsticks in her hair. The teenagers are affectionate with each other. No, they don't get bored here. "You've always got someone to call up, go see," says Mikhail. There's the pub and the marae, and, says Chevelle, "There's a thing called the RSA and you go there every Friday and have dinner. And heaps of old people go there."
John Aiken, 47, drops in for some yoghurt, bread and cash after yoga
across the road. He and his wife, both from Scotland, live in an ecovillage. He's building their house, living off the land. "The distinction between work and leisure breaks down," he says, "It's just part of living."
Far from a fringe throwback, he believes the eco-village model is a
sign of things to come. "Food's going to have to become more locally produced, people are going to have to get skilled-up to do things that are real. It's been a big party, but it's not going to last much longer."
An hour or so north up SH1 on the Tutukaka coast, small town living by the sea draws Aucklanders such as Chris Leeper. Leeper has gone fishing for good at 56 after working 80-hour weeks running a furniture polishing business in West Auckland. He loves the low crime his Auckland neighbours had their home cleaned out twice by burglars.
"The burglaries up here are someone takes a push bike." He motions northward, "Crime up here is basically growing marijuana and supplying the Auckland market."
Auckland-raised Natasha Kerr, 30, has just bought a house in Ngunguru
with her American partner. She's a diver, he works at the Tutukaka
marina. They came for a season and ended up staying. It's a good place
for their 11-month old son, Bailey to grow up.
"The school is right on the beach. When pods of dolphins come into the estuary the kids go down to look and play in the water."
A yellow sticker implores Save the Sandspit on the bumper of ex-Aucklanders Vanda and Mike Knowles' car. Again, it's a community thing: a developer plans to build houses along the sandspit; the locals aren't having it. Mike hands Vanda, a relief teacher, an ice cream.
"Can you believe anyone would want to do that?" she asks, already sure of the answer, gesturing towards the pristine gold and blue.
