Albertland was the last organised British settlement in New Zealand and largely Non-conformist. Its first two ships, the Matilda Wattenbach and the Hanover, sailed from the east India Docks in late May 1862. Two of my great-grandparents and their children were on the Hanover. The lure was the free land offered by the Auckland Provincial Council, Forty acres for each adult and twenty for each child. In Kent they could never hope to acquire their own land. Out here, with four children, they were entitled to one hundred and sixty acres although, to gain the freehold, they had to stay on the land for five years.
The roadless isolation of the wilderness that they were going to was not comprehended. The euphoric meetings back home and the tame English countryside had led them to expect something very different. Many of the intending settlers did not get beyond Auckland where work was plentiful at the time and, of those that took up holdings, half walked off the land in less than a year and this after months of near starvation when the Kaipara bar was unworkable. But the families of those who persevered are strongly represented throughout Albertland to this day. My own family no longer.
The ‘city to be’ of the settlement, Port Albert, was surveyed and its sections sold at auction but it never came to anything. There was a sawmill in the kauri days and later a dairy factory, both gone before my time. There was an old boarding house that we lived in when I was small and my grandfather still alive. That’s gone now too as has I imagine Bennet’s Store which was still operating in the late sixties when I was last there.
My paternal grandparents had three children, my Uncle George, my father, and auntie May who married an American Marine and died in Kansas. George, being the oldest son, inherited the family farm, the original one hundred and sixty acres plus another hundred acquired later. I doubt that my father wanted it. He had had his fill of milking cows as a boy and had served his time as a motor mechanic. We were down in Auckland by then and as the years went by we kept well clear of Port Albert.
As far as I could tell, that had something to do with Auntie Edie. Edie was married to Uncle George. I was given the impression that she was the Wicked Witch of the West and when my cousin, Ralph, left home for parts unknown the moment that he turned sixteen and my parents were agreed that it was only to be expected with a bitch like that for a mother.
We went back in 1962 for the centenary, that was a must, but we stayed at the hotel in Wellsford. There was a distinct chill on both sides whenever we bumped into George and Edie. We were apparently being very rude in not staying with them but, as Mum said, they’d have found fault too if we’d asked to stay with them. This was the last trip that I was to make with Mum and Dad, they had their fatal car accident only a month or two later, and that seemed to be the last of Albertland as far as I was concerned.
Yet five years later, I received a very nice letter from Uncle George, In essence, I was being offered the farm. George was getting on, Edie wasn’t well, and my cousin Ralph hadn’t been heard from in years and didn’t deserve it anyway. They had done so much for that boy and, as it turned out, all for nothing. They felt it important that the land stayed in the family rather than go to strangers. It would be mine on certain conditions.
Perhaps I should have known better but I went to see them and found Edie to be outgoing and friendly, ‘just call us George and Edie’, the exact opposite of what I’d been told. I was not to know that I was seeing her public face. Later, I would see her switch from screaming rage to sweet smiling reasonableness in the blink of an eye the moment that a car pulled into their driveway.
It seemed that what was required of me was to find work in the area and board with them on the farm for a year, perhaps a little more, to learn the ropes after which they would transfer the farm to me and retire. That sounded reasonable enough. In fact, more than reasonable.
I didn’t take much of a look at the farm then. I knew little of farming. It was the house that impressed me. The furniture, carpets, and drapes were obviously new. The kitchen had every appliance you could wish for. Edie had her own car. The place had to be a goldmine.
So I found a tenant for my two-bedroom unit in New Lynn. It had been my parent’s and I thought it best to hang onto it in the meantime. Finding work was no problem. Aerial Work were moving a plane into the area and needed a loader driver. It proved to be ideal. The plane didn’t fly if there was more than a light wind. That meant early mornings before the breeze got up and a lot of non-flying afternoons and even whole days that could be spent on the farm. On a good flying day though, it was dawn to dusk and hard slog.
Right from the start, George warned me to, “Try not to upset your Auntie Edie. She’s not well It’s her nerves you know. The doctor said that she mustn’t be upset.” Edie was by that time loudly dismissive of this doctor and conventional medicine in general but this piece of prime wisdom had been preserved for its obvious utility. In practice, it meant that she must always be allowed to be right and to have her own way.
George and I drank coffee while Edie drank herbal tea. Mate Tea. For months she delighted in sneering at us as drug addicts, caffiene being the drug, but then I found a magazine article that said that Mate Tea had five time as much caffiene as coffee. When I showed it to her she took it as a personal attack. “Humph!” she said and stalked off extremely angry. George took me aside later and made it clear that I had acted very badly. But George himself wasn’t always so careful. On one occasion, we put the corn-flakes gifts that she’d been collecting back into a new packet. It seemed a harmless enough joke. “Here’s another one”, she said, “And another!” getting excited. After the fifth she woke up to what we had done and couldn’t take it. She stormed back to bed leaving us guilty of a cruel hurt
And being guilty was something that I had settled on me in that household. After a good flying day with hardly a break for smoko, I’d arrive home looking forward to a bit of a rest. But the moment that I sat down, Edie, who had probably been reading all afternoon, would jump up and rush around in frantic activity all the time haranguing me about how much she and George did for ‘certain people’ and how these ‘certain people’ did not seem to appreciate it. I didn’t dare say, “Meaning me.” That would have been attacking her. There’d have been ructions. You had to play by her rules. And, silly as it was, I’d feel guilty, get up, and go out to help George finish the milking or whatever else he was doing.
Money was another avenue of attack. Edie kept the books and with every bank statement it was a woeful, “I don’t know how we’re going to eat this month.” She managed to imply that George and I were to blame and that we didn’t care. High grocery prices were somehow our fault while she was the poor harassed housewife struggling to make ends meet. George’s special pipe tobacco was an extravagance while the new curtains to match the new bedspread were an obvious necessity. Her trips to a succession of alternative-medicine practitioners in Auckland were also a necessity. To suggest otherwise would be to have her throw a wobbly and her wobblies were unanswerable. She was the one going through the money and yet clearly believed that it was us. And it was money that should have been ploughed back into the farm.
I enjoyed the farmwork but soon came to the conclusion that I wouldn’t learn much from George. He was a dreamer and, when you started looking, there were signs of neglect everywhere and the two hundred and sixty acres was only carrying ninety head. I’d want to fix a fence and there’d be no posts and no staples so I’d buy some on my way home. I bought several loads of metal for the main race. In fact, I bought quite a few bits and pieces and dropped the odd item off in town for repair. I didn’t mind paying because I was investing in my own future. It took me some time to realise that my doing this was giving offence.
I can’t speak for Albertland as a whole. It is fragmented by tidal estuaries. Houses within shouting distance can be many kilometres away by road and they were metal roads in the sixties. But I can tell you that the area around Port Albert itself was strong on sport and social activities, a very close community. Edie was always in the thick of things, on every committee, a staunch church-goer, no- one else was allowed to do the flowers, local president of the W.D.F.F. And although she never failed to come home upset and fuming over something it was always carefully hidden from those who had upset her. Her on-stage persona was a gracious and self-confident denial of her emotional vulnerability. A denial as much to herself, I would think, as to the world. At home, she would chew on imagined slights for days.
She was insistent that I get involved locally, play rugby, go to socials, get to know the people who would be my neighbours. What she really meant was get to know the local girls. She was going to marry me off and had apparently taken to herself the right to make a short list. She was so obvious in her introductions that it made me feel like sale goods.
But I didn’t marry a Port Albert girl and neither did I take over the farm. Looking back, I have no difficulty in forgiving Edie. I see her now as inadequate and pathetic, damaged somehow, although I did find her pretty hard going at the time. I still haven’t figured her out. She backed into my ute one day and put a ding in it. I was standing right there and she looked at me. “Sorry!” she said. But half an hour later she was angrily denying that it had happened and I was a terrible person for saying that it had. What sense can one make of that? George I find more difficult to forgive. He had allowed himself to become Edie’s puppet and meekly went along with her even when he couldn’t help but know that she was being grossly unfair. Admittedly, if he’d done any less she’d have believed him guilty of disloyalty. It would have proved that he didn’t love her and she’d have been upset and disappointed. There’d have been tears and an angry hurt silence until he capitulated.
They began to wonder out loud where they could possibly go when they left the farm. A not particularly subtle hint that I should give them the New Lynn unit in gratitude at what they were doing for me. I didn’t bite. By then I was hearing whispers that the once-debt-free farm had, in one generation, become heavily in hock to the bank. If it was as bad as some were saying, I’d be on the losing side.
They must have guessed that I’d heard this because they now began to dwell on the dreams that my great-grandparents had come half a world to realise, on their struggles to clear the land, on how my grandparents had held on to it grimly in the hungry years of the depression, on our need to keep faith with them, on how we must hold onto the family land no matter what the cost. To do less was to make the hard work of those earlier generations to have been all for nothing. The disinheriting of my unborn children even came up for mention.. Coming from a pair who had largely sold off the results of the earlier struggles it might seem like hypocracy but I doubt if they were capable of seeing any blame as attaching to themselves. If the land went out of the family, the blame would be mine.
Fortunately, my employers decided to move the plane further north and it was something that I kept to myself. It was a chance to bow out without having to endure a scene. I loaded my gear into the ute one morning before even George was up, left as though I was going to work, and followed the plane north. I lost a few things in the wash but it was a cheap price to pay and some months later when the unit came free again, I moved back to New Lynn.
There were letters waiting for me. I read one and put the rest in the bin. It was an attempt to force me back by sending me on a guilt trip. It was written by George but almost certainly with over-the- shoulder input from the old master herself. ‘How could I leave without saying anything’, he asked, ‘and after everything we’ve done for you?’ I should have talked to them. It was grossly unfair that they were not given a chance to explain. And so it went on, full of recriminations and expressions of disappointment at my actions. ‘How could I live with myself?’ it asked.
It was not long after this that the Port Albert community turned out in a futile attempt to block the bank’s efforts to truck George and Edie’s stock away. The police were called in. I saw it on the evening news.
That should have been the end of it but another two years on when I was newly married and living in Home Hill in North Queensland, I received a letter from Edie. It must have taken a lot of effort to track me down. In the envelope was a newspaper cutting, the announcement of George’s death. It said in part, and was highlighted, that ‘he died of a broken heart’. Edie’s note was short and to the point. It said, ‘I just hope you’re happy’.