South West to Whanganui

It’s warm when we leave Waipukurau around 9am. My brother and me, making our way around the easy curve that’s like a woman’s hip bone at the base of Pukeora Hill. I’m at once startled by the openness of the Takapau plains, I shouldn’t be since I know it well, even when I lived away all those years. Knew it like an old friend with whom there’s no need for fumbled reintroductions.

I feel my soul stretch out like the road before me. The drive south west to Whanganui is easy, mostly silent but not uncomfortably so. Because I’m driving, fast but reasonably lawfully, I hardly notice my older brother in the front seat beside me. He’s quiet like that and our silence is companionable.

I wished I had some Nickelback in the CD player, the unmistakable voice of Chad Kroeger ‘How you Remind Me’ was playing in my head, sending my memory back to 2001, having beer (I passed on it because I don’t drink beer) and pizza in the Triple FM Board Room in Bondi Junction with the Nickelback boys. It was a cool blast. Lovely Canadian rock guys, with manners and unimaginable humility.

Chuck Eddy from Rolling Stone Magazine said as much seven years later when he was reviewing their ‘Dark Horse’ album back in November 2008. He wrote, “and to his credit, Chad Kroeger gratifyingly comes off as more of a regular guy than a rock star.” You really had to be there to know that what I’m saying is true. I had a half dozen odd mugs they signed for me. One I put up for auction at a fundraiser for Thepbc (Petersham Bowling Club) except that the winner didn’t know who they were. Imagine that!

The drive through the Manawatu Gorge is serpentine, our belly-flight has all the feel of a broad-banded water snake moving effortlessly round each bend in the road, mesmerising if I’m not careful and don’t pay attention to the distance between the braking red tail lights of the car in front of me. It occurs to me I’m liking the drive. There’s an openness about the countryside here without feeling isolated like you can when you’re driving in the Australian outback. Once out of the Gorge and heading towards Ashhurst I give the horses beneath the bonnet an open rein.

“The Whanganui River begins high up in the volcanic plateau of the central North Island at Mt Tongariro, then travels north towards Taumarunui before heading south for 260km towards Whanganui. Its journey to the sea passes through the native tree and fern clad hills of the Whanganui National Park.

The upper reaches of the river are cloaked in dense rainforest and lead to the deeply incised gorges of the middle reaches. Tree ferns and rare native plants cling to the steep riverbanks and morning mist clings to the surface of the water from dawn, rising slowly with the light of day. This dramatic landscape opens out in the lower reaches of the river to follow rolling farmland and open valleys to the coastal dunes and cliffs which border the Tasman Sea to the west.”

As we approach the renamed “Whanganui” (from Wanganui) township, I recall the words of the Whanganui tribes, “E rere kau mai te awa nui nei l Mai i te kāhui maunga ki Tangaroa l Ko au te awa l Ko te awa ko au translated The river flows l From the mountains to the sea l I am the river l The river is me”

I remember that tomorrow is Christmas and all I can think about is how up the river is Jerusalem, “once an important kainga (fishing village) on the Whanganui River where a Roman Catholic mission was first established in 1854.

Known to Māori as Hiruharama, Jerusalem was the isolated site where, in 1892, Suzanne Aubert (better known as Mother Mary Joseph) established the congregation of the Sisters of Compassion. They became a highly respected charitable nursing/religious order.

A convent remains on the mission property, as well as the church which replaced the original building destroyed by fire in 1888, and Sisters of Compassion still care for them. New Zealand poet James K. Baxter and many of his followers formed a community at Jerusalem in 1970 and Baxter is buried there”. I make a mental note to go there soon. 2010 is filling up fast. One more sleep.