Going home: Now showing in Masterton, the big-city blues

Movies and murder have come back to Masterton. CHRIS DANIELS on the pros and consof urban ways.

It used to be called going to the pictures. Whether it's me or the world that has become more sophisticated , I don't know, but it is now "going to the movies".

In Masterton, the town I grew up in, an ability to go to the pictures put us apart from other small country towns. We were big enough to have a picture theatre - two, in fact, when I was young, the slightly fading State and the more stately Regent.

In the late '70s, my brothers and I eagerly queued up right around the corner of the State, waiting to see Star Wars.

But by the time I left the town in 1989, the State had closed and the Regent was on its last legs.

My brothers and I were by this stage just as likely to see new-release movies at the flash multiplex cinemas in Wellington, rather than wait months and months for the theatre chain to send a copy of the film to be shown in Masterton.

Not long after I left, the Regent closed - leaving my hometown not much better than any other hick country town.

As the largest town in the Wairarapa, Masterton had to have a movie theatre. Without one, it was no different from the other small towns nearby - Carterton, Greytown, Martinborough, Featherston.

When Brent Goodwin arrived in Masterton 15 years ago, it was as the proud owner of a movie theatre.

For six months, the once-proud Regent had been closed - shut by the Auckland head office of the big cinema chain.

Mr Goodwin paid $5000 to the chain for the business it had abandoned.

At the time he lived in Wellington and would bring a trailerload of chippies, lollies and other junk food over the Rimutakas to roll the movies.

He remembers quite clearly which films he first showed - Field of Dreams and Dead Poets Society.

Two quite apt movies: one had the motto, "If you build it, they will come"; the other had the catch line "carpe diem - seize the day".

Anyone choosing Masterton as a place to seize the day in the late '80s would have been brave indeed. The place was on the rocks when I left in 1989.

The town's biggest employer, the Waingawa freezing works, closed that year, making hundreds redundant.

There had been nasty gang violence in the preceding years, and many of the shops in Queen St - the name seems to amuse Aucklanders - were empty.

But Brent Goodwin built it. And they came. He has now, in a real feat of engineering and design, turned the old, one-screen theatre into a three-screen multiplex - just like the ones in the big smoke.

He shows the blockbusters at the same time they open in Auckland. And his film festivals, often showing obscure foreign films, get better audiences than those in bigger, apparently more sophisticated centres.

During the early '90s, when I told people I was from the Wairarapa, they usually assumed I grew up on a farm. One former Auckland colleague took great pleasure in plucking an imaginary banjo whenever my Wairarapa origins were discussed.

Now, when the subject of my childhood comes up, people often say "Aaaaah, wine country", in a fashion that would make one think I grew up playing among the vines in Provence or Bordeaux.

The "wine country" tag is, of course, a reference to the growing importance of winemaking in south Wairarapa, especially in Martinborough.

But Masterton, half an hour's drive north of Martinborough, is not wine country. It's an agricultural service town that used to strike me as having many of the disadvantages of a city, with none of the charm of a small town.

"Masterton is a lot more sophisticated than it looks," says Mr Goodwin."It is unlike most hick towns in New Zealand, which are usually miles from anywhere.

"We are a suburb of Wellington but don't know it."

Maybe it is a result of improvements to the road over the Rimutaka Range to Wellington or better cars, but Masterton does not seem as isolated as it did when I was growing up.

The town is run in a unique way, however, as Mr Goodwin, who has just been elected to the Masterton District Council, describes. Business and culture are dominated by charitable trusts.

Every bar and and tavern used to be owned and run by the omnipresent Masterton Licensing Trust.

Because of its geographical isolation, "The Trust" as it is universally called, was one of the most successful in New Zealand, taking money from the public by charging too much for a beer, then putting most of it back into the community, in the form of parks, playgrounds and grants.

Since losing its monopoly on alcohol sales during the 1990s (thanks largely to pressure from the supermarket chains), The Trust has branched out, buying supermarkets in other towns, and eventually merging with other, less successful licensing trusts under the banner Trust House Ltd.

The Trust was born after Masterton went dry in the 1940s, selected as a comfortable midway point between the teetotallers and the boozers.

Now it owns a resthome, restaurants, bars, cafes and a large hotel and all the state houses formerly owned by the Government.

It is quite a organisation, with a formidable reputation for spending Auckland-style sums fitting out bars and restaurants that compete with those of private entrepreneurs.

The profits from the pokie machines and the alcohol sales are all put back into the community, to build playgrounds and sportsfields.

A lot of people hate this kind of "Community Capitalism", as it is called, but my hometown is not looking too bad.

Cafe Cecille - a fantastic new cafe in the old aquarium kiosk in QE II Park, was set up with more than $400,000 of ratepayers' money.

So where once I used to stare at some ugly Mexican walking fish in a slimy old tank, there is now a classy French-themed cafe, run by a private operator but established by the community.

Would all the new cafes and bars have been built had The Trust not been involved?

Some say it is this public investment which started the new rush of cafes and restaurants that have dramatically changed the way Masterton looks.

Not so, says Mr Goodwin.

The change would have happened anyway, he believe, as "cafe culture has come to every town in New Zealand".

He complains that the same group of local worthies who now dominate the charitable trusts stood by and let the town's only movie theatre go out of business in the late '80s, all for want of $5000 to buy the business.

So is Masterton more sophisticated than your average hick town?

Let the evidence speak for itself.

This is the town that elected a left-wing Maori, former sex worker and transsexual as its MP - in an electorate that was once a Tory stronghold.

The weekend I visited, the woman herself, Georgina Beyer was pictured topless on the front page of the Wairarapa Times-Age.

My new hometown of Auckland is now led by a mayor and city council wanting to sell pensioner housing, make it illegal to have a glass of wine with a picnic in the park, somehow "crack down on law and order" and asphalt over even more of the city for new motorways.

Perhaps a bit of sophistication and tolerance is not just the preserve of the Ponsonby cafe set.

Or maybe the cafe set survives in outposts farther afield than we think.

P OSTSCRIPT: My trip to Masterton, taken in early December, was a treat. That hot, dry, Wairarapa summer had begun, while the rest of the country complained of a seemingly never-ending winter.

I drove around the town for a few days, past the huge resthome complex not far from my mother's house and the Scout den I went to as a boy.

The resthome is improbably named Kandahar. Every time I hear of American B-52 bombers bombing the hell out of Kandahar, I can't help but think of those poor old dears in that huge Masterton resthome, hiding under their beds.

I went past my old primary school, Lansdowne School, which looks tiny but is a cute place. I know I would send any child of mine there if I could.

Half an hour before leaving for Auckland, I go to check the mail, about 10 o'clock in the morning.

A boy, who I later discovered was 12 years old, is walking down the footpath, smoking a large roll-your-own cigarette. "Heard about the murder?" he asks.

"What murder?"

"The two girls killed last night, just over your back fence."

The resurrection of the Masterton movie business suddenly seems a bit less relevant as a topic for a story about my hometown.

Camera crews and reporters stream over the Rimutakas and Masterton is back in the news - attention not seen since 1992, when a man killed seven people, including three children, in his home.

Covering the first day of the murder investigation for the Herald, I go back to Lansdowne School for the first time in decades, not to say "hi" and check on progress, but to interview the principal.

One of the girls who died went to my old school. All teachers have told their classes that one of their schoolmates is dead.

It was not an accident, they told the children, someone had killed their friend, but no one knew why.

All the good works of the charitable public organisations and the private business people do not seem to improve a town much when things like this happen.

The beautiful new arts and history centre - built by the community but still too expensive, say the likes of Brent Goodwin - has just opened. I'll bet there were no news crews to cover that.

Big-city sophistication maybe, but some big-city problems too.

* Chris Daniels is a Business Herald reporter.

* Tomorrow: Richard Boock in Otago.