Houhora Tavern

I wrote and illustrated ‘The Good Old Kiwi Pub’. It was published in 1995. It was a snapshot of some New Zealand pubs as they were at the end of the 20th century. I have decided to share some of the entries from the book from time to time on this blog.

Houhora Tavern

Seventy kilometres south of Cape Reinga is the Houhora Tavern, the most northerly pub in New Zealand. It stands in a loop of what used to be the main highway before it was re-aligned to facilitate the passage of coachloads of tourists, rushing headlong to click their camera shutters at the lighthouse that presides over the restless confrontation of the Tasman Sea and the South Pacific Ocean.

Being sidelined suits the Houhora pub, which frames up artistically beyond the macrocarpa, where it rests peacefully overlooking the harbour. It started life as a trading store set up by the Evans family in 1888 to supply the kauri gum seekers who came to range across the northern peninsula with rods and spades and big thirsts. The store was licensed in 1892 and, sometime later, it was given status when the old, two-storey building was dragged here by bullock cart from Ninety Mile Beach where it had been the Hukatere pub.

Bill Evans is famously associated with Houhora, where he was not only a farmer and landlord of the inn, but also ran the store, post office, billiards room, stables and dance hall. To cap all that he was a Justice of the Peace. As James McNeish records in ‘Tavern in the Town’, one of Evans’s drunken defendants protested ‘… you has a store, then you has a licence, then you sells me booze - and now, so help me, you fines me for drinking it!’

Evans, being something of a lord of the manor around these parts, had a reputation for toughness but fairness; he helped out many a hard-up digger. So it’s not surprising to learn that, when the ‘Elingamite’, a steamer on the trans-Tasman run, foundered on one of the Three Kings Islands in 1902 with a cargo of gold bullion, he sheltered the forty or more survivors who landed from a lifeboat near the Houhora pub until they could continue their journeys.

The Old Dance Hall 

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Bill died in 1952 and was succeeded by his nephew Fred who sold the pub in 1964. A new bar wing was added in 1971 after which the pub was sold again and the old part became somewhat neglected. Happily, the latest owners, 'Crunch', Jennie and Robert Bradley, have upgraded the grounds and are intent on restoring the original building and its bars. Meanwhile the ghost of Bill Evans dwells in the rusting dance hall and cinema, built of horizontal corrugated iron, that stands forlorn in the next paddock.

© DON DONOVAN

donovan@ihug.co.nz
.

The Good Old Kiwi Pub: Introduction

I wrote and illustrated ‘The Good Old Kiwi Pub’. It was published in 1995. It’s a snapshot of some New Zealand pubs as they were at the end of the 20th century. I have decided to share some of the entries from the book from time to time on this blog.

Title page.

INTRODUCTION

There is a critical point at which Nature through gradual processes such as throttling creeper and encroaching lichen, blends with human artifact to produce Art. I like that. As an illustrator I take my delights from shape, texture, colour and the mildewy stains of dilapidation. Mottled brickwork, weathered timber, mossy masonry and rusted corrugated roofs enchant me. I paint and sketch tottering barns, old houses and crumbling public buildings adorned by all manner of public writing from graffiti to some surprisingly good or endearingly primitive examples of the sign-writer’s craft.

In the case of this book, I have found graphic satisfaction in a few of the hostelries and taverns that have survived - albeit scarred - the regional planner, the bulldozer, fire and that destructive process which breweries call ‘upgrading’. It is significant, I think, that nearly every pub I have illustrated is independently owned and owes the big breweries nothing. Independent publicans do not, as a rule, have the financial resources to ‘improve’ their premises by tearing down walls and fitting false façades, consequently their pubs remain more closely identifiable with their beginnings, and their old kauri beams and pine planks bend with the burden of their years to carry the stains of hospitality with ageing dignity. There used to be a poster in the London Underground for a famous brand of shoe polish (’Kiwi’?) which showed a pair of shining brogues above a slogan ‘They’re well-worn but they’ve worn well!’ That’s what I’m getting at.

There are only two city pubs in this book. The rest are country or provincial hotels and taverns. There’s a reason for that; I like to enjoy what I do and hanging around city streets isn’t one of them, I’m not that enamoured of metropolitan New Zealand. To me the best of this favoured country lies in its rural landscape and its country towns. There’s another reason: I’m a romantic. I like to picture what travel was like in this country in the early days and it doesn’t take much imagination to see how important country hotels were when the likes of Cobb & Co. were carrying travellers across a forbidding land of mountains, dense bush and the capricious, sometimes deadly streams that ran down and through them to the sea.

On one of my journeys in search of subjects for this and other works, I found myself overnight in Haast Township with the weather closing in fast. My work was done and all I then had to do was drive home to Auckland. Apart from food and fuel there was nothing to stop me travelling as far and as fast as freshness and the law would allow, so I drove from Haast to Picton in one day, crossed Cook Strait on the pre-dawn sailing next day and then directly to Auckland. The road was tar-sealed and uncluttered all the way and the journey was not only easy but entirely enjoyable. On my way I passed numerous old hotels or the sites of others long gone and reflected upon their role in the development of early New Zealand.

Derelict White Horse Hotel, Becks, Central Otago 

The journey I was making would, a hundred years ago, have been impossible. Indeed, it was not until November 1965 that there was a road connexion between Haast and Hokitika. Travel in the early days of European settlement was by sea between the major towns and apart from ancient Maori river routes and foot tracks, the development of inland routes was entirely a matter of short distance expediency, to link settlers with their nearest towns, to supply diggers on the goldfields or, perhaps, to facilitate movements of armed constabulary and militia from one garrison to another.

Once the demand for the movement of people and goods had grown sufficiently for roads wide enough for wheeled transport to be formed, a network of primitive routes would have been established. Any serious journey would have been a succession of relatively short day stages by horse or horse-drawn coach on rutted roads following, as far as possible (in order to maintain easy gradients) the contours of the land. There would have been few cuttings or tunnels, the tracks would have snaked appallingly around headlands and re-entrants, often teetering over terrifying precipices and crossing rocky fords. At unavoidably steep climbs or descents passengers might be asked to alight and, at best, walk behind the coach: at worst they would be obliged to assist, with groaning joints and bruised shoulders, slowly to rotate wheels slimy with mud and caramel clay. They might spend hours in rain or humid bush, attacked by sandflies and itching with grime, while a wheel was changed or the carriage was jacked up to replace a broken axle.

Little wonder that in those early days seaports had a pub on every corner, while along the narrow highways, hotels were closely and regularly spaced so that travellers of all ages, occupations and classes could find food and a bed for the night while the horses were rested. Those of a genteel disposition might affect an aloof indifference while all manner of itinerants, ne’er-do-wells or local workers drank, fought, gambled, danced or cursed the night away in the bar.

Over-nighting at a roadside hostelry would have been a great leveller and, as such, might most appropriately have exemplified what New Zealand was all about - equality. ‘…you can forget those ancient European airs and graces, they won’t wash here!’

Railways and greatly improved roads gradually reduced the importance of closely spaced travellers’ hotels, with their accommodation and dining rooms, lounge bars and facilities for stabling of horses. Today, the emphasis is upon destinations rather than stages along the way, and a highly developed network of motels and luxury hotels serves tourists and business travellers at their journeys’ ends. In one or two of the remaining old country hotels you can still get a hint of what life might have been like at the turn of the century - in hotels like the Brian Boru at Thames or the Mangonui Hotel - but most of them, with redundant upper storey bedrooms and their attendant spindly fire escapes, are simple taverns, offering, at minimum, beers and lagers to farm or factory workers, but often rising in sophistication to a ‘good table’ with fine food and wines, and achieving seven-day opening by allowing food and non-alcoholic drinks to feature on their menus as prominently as liquor.

Toe to toe with the changes wrought upon pubs by improved transport and communications are others both social and statutory. Drinking mixed with driving is legally and socially unacceptable these days, and while it’s true that the Sunday newspapers still carry plenty of reports of the public bar excesses of the previous night, things aren’t what they used to be: they’re getting better.

If you doubt me, read these edited extracts from Phil May’s ‘West Coast Gold Rushes’-

‘The number of hotels was commonly regarded as an index to prosperity…’

‘The presence of a barmaid was an undoubted stimulus to trade…’

‘Many of the bigger hotels provided a small orchestra in the evenings, for diggers loved to dance. Of necessity the style was “stag” or “buck” dancing…’(the first gay bars?).

‘Drunkenness was rife in the goldfield community. A large number of licensed hotels (102 in Hokitika in 1867) an unlimited number of unlicensed shanties, an unknown number of illicit stills, twelve local breweries (on the West Coast)… did not make for sobriety. Drunkenness was, of course, the colonial evil…’

***

I promised myself that I would not write a history book. That flaking paint and those distorted boards have a lot to answer for!

‘The Good Old Kiwi Pub’ is neither a definitive survey of New Zealand hotels and taverns, past and present, nor a series of beer-breathed anecdotes or pen-portraits of public bar heroes - although I’ve had great fun turning up little snippets of history, some of which may turn out to be apocryphal! It is simply a collection of pubs that look interesting to me as an illustrator.

The pen and watercolour illustrations were done over five years to 1995, during which time many of the pubs have had new owners, and a new coat of paint. At the time of publication, one of them, the Rat Trap at Upper Takaka, had burned to the ground and so suffered the fate of most of the old hotels. There’s not too much one can do about that; sufficient to look at each drawing and say that that was how it was on the day I visited it. Nothing remains the same and, in time, nothing of the old buildings will remain at all. I’m happy to have captured just a few of New Zealand’s rural pubs of character as they were towards the end of the twentieth century.

© DON DONOVAN
donovan@ihug.co.nz
.
 

Baked Bean Feet

There’s a nasty baked beans story going the rounds at present; all to do with farting. I hate jokes like that almost as much as I hated ‘Blazing Saddles’.

This is the best baked bean story I ever heard:

A man goes to his doctor complaining of blistered feet. The doctor examines them, they are appallingly blistered.

‘Good God; how did you do that?’ he asked.

The man replied: ‘Baked beans.’

‘How could you possibly damage your feet like that with baked beans?’

The man fished in his pocket and took out a small can of the beans. He pointed at an instruction on the label.

‘OPEN CAN AND STAND IN A SAUCEPAN OF BOILING WATER FOR FIVE MINUTES’.

© DON DONOVAN
donovan@ihug.co.nz
.

Kick Out All The Aliens

‘They are wonderful plants for holding sloping ground in place, in the front of the border, among shrubs and flowers, entranceway plantings to the house, around the swimming pool and in cool green tropical plantings.’
Thus spake Colin Hutchinson in The Art of Gardening published in 1991 and described as ‘New Zealand’s finest gardening book’.

The plant Mr Hutchinson was describing was Agapanthus.

Only fifteen years later that ‘wonderful’ plant that graces our motorway medians and one single head of whose glorious blue or white blooms can fill a vase is facing the chop because the biosecurity apparatchiks at both government and local level have decided that: ‘…they are invasive and/or poisonous and crowding out native plants.’

Now, although aganpanthi grow in all the otherwise dead spots of my garden, I don’t know much about floriculture; and it’s not the particular attack on those plants that bothers me. What does make me nervous is that hiding inside the biosecurity police’s statement is a politically correct blinkered yet starry-eyed philosophy that New Zealand should digressively outlaw anything that isn’t ‘native’.

Not long ago there appeared a report that moves were afoot in the South Island to restore parts of Canterbury to its pristine pre-pilgrim state. It was asserted that large areas of native bush had been supplanted by what is now the characteristic patchwork of British agriculture. It was misleading to some degree and although it is true to say that Canterbury has undergone an enormous change, its farmlands have mainly replaced swampland and tussock. The surveyor of Canterbury, Charles Torlesse, writing in 1849, while he described large areas of bush, made much of a country the most part ready for the plough.

This revisionistic urge to take New Zealand back to its beginnings is absurd. The country has moved on, developed, improved, become productive. Inevitably, in its forward march since human occupation around the 14th century of the Christian calendar, there have been casualties: moa, huia and other species have gone, and others are or have been under threat.

Some we can save but the idea of returning New Zealand to a golden age by taking a huge, politically correct leap backwards is nonsensical. To start with agapanthus is like sacking the tea lady at General Motors in order to improve the bottom line. And after agapanthus what? Rabbits, stoats, rats, cats, dogs, cattle, sheep, deer, trout, deciduous European trees; we’ll have to get rid of them all. Maori, European, Pacific Islanders, Asiatics; they’ll all have to go home. But before they go we’ll need to rip up the roads, wipe out transport, raze the cities, eliminate power and telephone lines and, because they won’t be needed ever again, shut down government departments. (Not a bad idea).

Perhaps all that might be left would be a self-sustaining remnant of biosecurity police-persons trotting around planting kauri, totara, kowhai, flax and tussock seeds and cuttings, and warming tui eggs in their hairy armpits. Finally, as they self destructed or paddled away in raupo rafts, they would leave these now unnamed islands to sleep once again awaiting discovery.

There would be only the forest and the birds. Just as it was in the belle epoch before that despicable species homo sapiens came and used its intellect, courage, flawed human wisdom and ingenuity to change it all.
And then, perhaps, a latter day Thomas Gray might imagine from afar a land where:

‘Full many a bird of iridescent sheen
The black-green boughs of hidden bush doth bear:
Full many a rata born to blush unseen,
Now wastes its scarlet on the man-free air.’

Yeah. Right.

© DON DONOVAN
donovan@ihug.co.nz
.

Hannibal’s Umbria

We go to Umbria for the last few days before leaving Italy. The Serchio Valley road unwinds as we pass Fornoli, Bagni di Lucca, the Devil’s Bridge and, skirting Lucca city, join the autostrada to Florence and Arezzo, both of which we by-pass, through the Val di Chiana to Perugia and Assisi. It’s a quick trip, about 200 km, on a relatively empty road. Before we reach Perugia we pass along the northern shores of Lake Trasimeno… this is extra-historic country.

Hannibal

School history left me believing that the Roman army was invincible; so far advanced in weapons and technique that, until the decline and fall of the Empire and its slow retraction into its heartlands while the jackal longbeards and skinheads nibbled its extremities and turned out the lights to start the Dark Ages, it never lost a battle. A romantic notion, of course, and one easily shot to pieces by a cursory examination of the record, but sufficiently embedded in me for Hannibal’s victory at Lake Trasimeno to be astonishing.

North Africa’s Carthaginians were disenchanted with the Romans who, having defeated them in the first Punic (Punic =Phoenician=Carthaginian) war in 241 BC, tried to bleed them dry. So when the Romans became preoccupied on their northern flanks by raiding Gauls and Goths, Carthaginian Hannibal seized the day and besieged and destroyed Sagunto, a Roman-dominated city in south-east Spain, and so precipitated the second Punic war in 219 BC .

By 217 BC Hannibal had become so successful against the Romans that he was halfway up the Italian peninsula fighting Consul Flaminius north of Lake Trasimeno. Flaminius made a frightful mess of things by trying to flush out the Carthaginians through a narrow, foggy valley near Tuoro but Hannibal had fooled him, and the Carthaginian cavalry and infantry came down from the surrounding hills and forced the Romans to fight in open order, unable to employ their classic, hand-to-hand battle techniques.

It was a rout. There was no escape, Flaminius’s army of 15 000 had their backs to the lake and they were all killed, including him - which was just as well as the Romans wouldn’t have forgiven him if he’d survived. History says that the blood of the battle laid around for days and filled a little stream whose name, as a consequence, was changed to Sanguineto - Blood River.

The war against Hannibal went on for another fifteen years during which north-west Umbria was so ravaged that the resultant agrarian crisis lasted until modern times!

From ‘Antipasto’ random samplings from various writings made over a few years of visits to a ‘New Zealander’s Italy’

© DON DONOVAN
donovan@ihug.co.nz
.

The Lonely Grave of Somebody’s Darling

‘SOMEBODY DARLiNG
LiES BURiED HERE ‘

In New Zealand’s South Island, if you find yourself driving on State Highway 8 south of Roxburgh make sure you visit the Lonely Graves. To get to them, cross the Clutha River to Miller’s Flat, turn right at Faigan’s store and take the shingle road that leads along the northern bank of the river towards Craig Flat. You can’t miss the graves, two simple stone slabs within a clumsy concrete and steel enclosure which in the season of the year looks pretty in a sea of blooming daffodils. (In my illustration I have moved them closer together).

The Lonely Graves are a poignant remnant of the 19th century Otago gold rush days when young men came from all parts of the world to try for their fortunes. It’s a sad fact that many of those seekers died or disappeared, frozen, drowned, accidentally killed in rock falls or collapsed mine shafts, or even murdered; unknown and uncommemorated by any grave or entry into a register.

‘Somebody’s Darling’ might have suffered the same obscurity had it not been for the compassion of William Rigney. One day at the end of 1864, Rigney was strolling near the tail-race of the gold claim he and others were working on the Molyneux River - the old name for the Clutha - when he noticed, on the river bank, a dog standing shivering over a huddled shape.

It turned out to be the body of a fair young man who appeared to have drowned. Rigney called the police from Roxburgh who investigated but were unable to establish his identity. Rigney attended the subsequent inquest at which the verdict on this unknown man was determined as death by drowning: there were, it seems, no suspicious circumstances.

Rigney, an erstwhile theological student from Dublin, was deeply moved by the sad anonymity of the victim and requested the coroner’s permission to give the body a decent burial. A funeral was arranged for which Rigney dug a grave near Horseshoe Bend in woods close by an ancient Maori track through the bush. Every one of the local population turned out and they brought the body, on a bullock sledge, to the grave where a service was conducted by the schoolteacher.

Rigney later prepared a piece of black pine planking for a headboard: on it he poker-burned the words:

‘SOMEBODY DARLING
LiES BURiED HERE’

For many years, Rigney tended the grave which he’d surrounded by a fence to protect it from wandering stock but, naturally, the timber board became weathered over the years from 1865 so a public subscription was taken up and in 1903, a new, smart, marble headstone was erected at the base of which, in a special, glass-fronted frame the original headboard was incorporated.

Rigney let it be known that he wanted to be buried next to ‘Somebody’s Darling’ and in 1912, forty-eight years after his touching gesture, William Rigney was laid to rest beside the man he never knew.

The story is deeply intriguing because here at these lonely graves, surrounded by stone-littered hills of golden broom, you find yourself wondering just who ‘Somebody’s Darling’ might have been. What was his story? What romance moved him? Was he, perhaps, the heir of a wealthy family in the ‘old country’ here in the colony to make his mark and win the hand of the girl he’d left behind? Was he one of that great band of itinerant diggers who moved from California to Australia to the West Coast and Central Otago? Was he on the run from the law? And could it just be possible that he was a member of your own family?
Who knows... but as William Rigney knew for sure, he was ‘Somebody’s Darling’.

© DON DONOVAN
donovan@ihug.co.nz
.
 

Sommocolonia on a Hilltop in Tuscany

Sommocolonia is a very old Roman village, the name derived from Latin, meaning ‘high colony’.
There’s a war memorial opposite the church with a dramatic oil painting of a Christ-figure arising from a landscape depicting the town’s ruined tower in a carpet of fallen bodies. Below are two marble tablets. The higher of them was clearly part of the original memorial commemorating the war of 1915 to 1918. It carries the names of one capitano and nineteen soldati, a large number to die from such a small village. But sadder is the lower slab which records the names of sixteen civilians (civili) and six soldiers (militari) killed in the last war (‘ultima guerra’).

Established after Italy joined the Allies, the German Gothic Line - one of many ‘last stands’ which, in 1944, stretched coast-to-coast from Rimini to La Spezia - passed through Sommocolonia. The Germans were unmerciful to those who had, under Mussolini, fought on their side but now found themselves with the Allies so I assume that the remembered civilians were killed by the Germans either in revenge, or hostage reprisal. But when I ask a local man about them he tells me that most of them were killed after the war by stepping on German land mines laid on the forward slopes of the town.

He also reminds me that the Germans had a great time lobbing shells on to Barga - of which there’s a magnificent bird’s eye view - from their field guns, all of which had had to be man-handled up the mule track as there was no motor road into Sommocolonia until the early 1950s.

The village received as much artillery fire as it gave and was substantially re-built after the war. American lieutenant John Fox of the 92nd US Division, was installed in a forward observation post in a Sommocolonia house and was part of a battalion of about 1000 men facing the Germans on a fifty-kilometre front. His OP was suddenly over-run by storming Germans on 26 December 1944. Fox radioed the American 598th Field Artillery to lay fire on to his position and was, as a result, killed. The Americans later recovered his body but it was not until 1982 that his sacrifice was recognized with the award of the Distinguished Service Cross.

Past the ruins of one of two 16th century towers I spend a happy half hour sitting on a hillside with my feet buried in buttercups doing a little watercolour of some tall houses which grow from the lower road and whose roofs are at eye level. The joy of drawing these assymetrical buildings is that the textures of their walls are so varied: brick patches through cracking plaster with clumps of flowers or grasses growing from trapped soil held in mortar lines; or rubbled stone, chalked with swallows’ droppings and ochreous lichens; and windows set at odd angles in seamed frames that haven’t seen paint since the great flood.

A stream of schoolboys comes past me playing musical instruments. It’s all noise for a moment - and then it’s all silence. Uncanny: as if the Pied Piper has taken them into a hole in the hillside never to be seen again.

From ‘Antipasto’ random samplings from various writings made over a few years of visits to a ‘New Zealander’s Italy’

© DON DONOVAN
donovan@ihug.co.nz
.

Capo di Tutti Polizia di Castelnuovo di Garfagnana?

Mounted on a wall across the piazza of Castelnuovo a fat, street-stained, bronze cherub gazes benignly over the shoppers. Ideally, to photograph him, I should have the camera on the tripod but that’s impossible with the amount of passing traffic so I walk out to where the pedestrians end and the traffic begins and as I raise the camera a small blue Alfa-Romeo with ‘Polizia’ on its side stops beside me, blocking the traffic. I lower the camera and look at the driver, a young policeman who gives me a knowing half smile as, from the passenger’s seat, a stout officer emerges. He is gorgeous; a cockerel in blue with scarlet trim adorned by shiny buttons, medal ribbons and embroidered badges. In one hand he carries a pair of white kid gloves which he slaps across the palm of the other as he approaches.

‘Buon giorno’, I greet him brightly and wanting to get in first. ‘Parle Inglese? No parlo bene Italia…’

‘No parlo Inglese.’ he shakes his head, but he extends a hand to me and vigorously pumps mine. There ensues a bizarre exchange in my execrable Italian and a mutual waving of hands.

I point at the statue and wave my camera: ‘Cherubini. Statua. I photograph…’

‘Si - bella, bella.’

He wants to know where I am from.

‘La Nuova Zelanda?’ he muses, his perfectly trimmed eyebrows raised in slight surprise: then he nods knowledgeably. I get the impression he has no idea where New Zealand is.

‘Not English: non Inglesi,’ I say pointing to myself, ‘In la Nuova Zelanda per multo anni, many years. Da Londra a la Nuova Zelanda in 1960…’

I’m conscious that my word endings are all over the show but he seems to understand, even though I have do 1960 in the air with a finger.

He is so splendid that I feel I should throw a question back at him. Pointing at him I say, ‘Capo di tutti polizia di Castelnuovo di Garfagnana?’ (Which I think may come out as ‘Are you the chief of police..?’).
His chest expands a little more, the shoulders are squarer, he confirms that he is, indeed, the head man. I take a step back and bow my head in deference whereupon he raises me from my humble position by shoving his hand in mine yet again and shaking madly.

Meanwhile the traffic is held up in a line that stretches across the square and around the walls of the castle and I can see cars all the way up the hill in the other direction. Not a horn has been sounded. He is either oblivious to the traffic or enjoying his power for he continues the conversation to ask where I am staying. I manage to get across that my wife (mi moglie) and I are staying with ‘la sorella di mi moglie’ (the sister of my wife - I can’t do ‘sister-in-law’ in Italian) at Barga.

He wants to know where in Barga.

‘Gragnana.’

‘Ah, si, Gragnana.’ He asks with whom.

‘Signor e signora Testa.’ At ‘Testa’ he assumes they are Italian.

‘No - Inglesi, da Londra,’ and I throw in ‘Cockfosters… Barnet’ just for the hell of it.

‘Gragnana … Cockfesters … Barrrrnet.’ Again his nods importantly as if all three locations were within his manor.

Some of the vehicles having now turned off their engines, and the crowd is becoming restless as if the arrest is long overdue, but he shakes my hand for the last time, beams broadly, wishes me ‘Buona fortuna, signor Don’, climbs into the Alfa, wiggles a finger in a circle in the air and points ahead like a cavalry officer, ‘Andiamo’, upon which they advance.

I return to the side of the square to appraising stares: who is this straniero that he has so much influence with the capo di tutti polizia di Castelnuovo di Garfagnana?

From ‘Antipasto’ random samplings from various writings made over a few years of visits to a ‘New Zealander’s Italy’

© DON DONOVAN
donovan@ihug.co.nz
.

Of Cures, Half Cures and No Cures at All

The soothing influence of The Green Mountain Ointment was immediately apparent following application, and in most instances permanent cures of an astonishing variety of ailments were effected.

These included ague in the face, swelled breasts, bronchitis, quinsy, croup, felons (a purulent infection at the distal end of the finger), shingles, salt rheum, piles, milk-leg sores, erysipelas, and inflammation of the eyes and bowels. No other ointment in existence was of equal power and it was available in 1850 from Messrs Armstrong and Hurd at No 38 Courtlandt Street, New York.

At a stroke, it seemed, whole swaths of the medical profession were rendered redundant by this splendid remedy, but The Green Mountain Ointment had fallen short when it came to cancer; either that or its promoters had missed a trick.

But the good times were coming. Fifty years later there appeared, in a 1902 copy of The Cosmopolitan, an illustrated monthly magazine (which happens to be in my collection) two advertisements offering typical cancer cures. In the first, Dr. W. J. P. Kingsley (also of New York - where else?) claimed to have perfected the quickest, easiest, cheapest and most scientific cure whereby even ‘the largest’ cases were cured within a few weeks. This modest piece of publicity was followed, a few pages later, by an exhortation from Dr. Ben-Bye of Indianopolis to purchase his ‘soothing, balmy oils’ which would cure ‘cancer or tumor - internal or external’.

The Green Mountain Ointment and the remedies of both Dr. Kingsley and Dr. Ben-Bye have sunk without trace, and along with them such other medical ‘breakthroughs’ as The Health-Jolting Chair; Dr. Scott’s Electric Corset; and Merritt Griffin’s Indian Salve, a specific for the cure of among other things tumours and running-sores.

All of those ‘snake oil’ era remedies have disappeared for one reason - they didn’t work. But no doubt for the brief periods that they offered hope to clutchers at straws their inventors and touters cleaned up nicely without let or hindrance and moved on to brighter, better, more state-of-the-art rip-off products and marketing techniques.

Of course, there were ‘cures’. The mind does marvellous things and faith can, as the song says, move mountains - even Green Mountains, perhaps. But those old nostrums were never tested in the rigours of scientific or statistical research and so, when they didn’t actually kill, their successes were trumpeted from those recoveries which would probably have happened anyway in the natural course of events.

These days, in the ‘civilized’ world, the conjunction of the desperate sufferer with the ‘have-I-got-a-cure-for-you’ medicine man is severely proscribed by the intervention of a paternal, government authority and we ordinary lay-people are protected from exploitation and danger.

But despite that, in modern memory, some things have got through. Remember Milan Brych, the sad-faced little middle-European doctor of the 1970s who caused so much hollow controversy with his secret cancer remedy? How much false hope did he generate before the government’s watchdogs finally shut him down? And how many people might still believe in him?

Remember also Laetrile, wonder cure of the 80s? Made from apricot kernels ‘fresh, chewable and bitter’ (for best effect) it continues to be offered on the Internet as a necessity: as a therapy for existing cancer between twenty and fifty per day are recommended (with scientific precision); or take a mere seven a day for absolute prevention.

For those at their wits’ ends the insistence of the administrators of New Zealand’s Medicines Act that new cures be thoroughly tested must be enormously frustrating. And to we more fortunate onlookers the man from the Ministry might appear to be a tight-faced tormentor against the pleas of the needy, but he must stick to his guns, if he lets one unproved medicine slip through the net he will have no argument against The Green Mountain Ointment and we shall have no protection from Dr Ben-Bye’s ‘soothing, balmy oils’.
A cancer doctor of my acquaintance tells me that two percent of new cancer cures prove effective enough to make a therapeutic claim. Meanwhile desperate sufferers will continue to clutch at straws; who can blame them?

© DON DONOVAN
donovan@ihug.co.nz
.

Riding New Zealand’s Brand Wagon

“A good name is better than precious ointment” – Ecclesiastes vii. 1.

Brands are like people, they are the sums of many parts drawn together into one distinctive personality. Once that personality is crystallised by years of consistency its totality is expressed in a symbolism that’s extremely difficult to change whether consistently good or consistently bad.


Eventually, brand personality can be encapsulated into a trade mark or logo which, the moment it is seen, unlocks in the mind of the consumer a whole matrix of attitudes, emotions, likes and dislikes.
It has become appropriate to apply the description ‘brand’ to entities other than commercial goods or services. The Royal Family is one (indeed, it’s often described as The Firm). Other examples might be Roman Catholicism, the Labour Party, Israel, the USA, Auckland University, the Black Caps or the Maori tribe Ngai Tahu.

Their perceived rating will depend upon the point of view of the consumer. No doubt respect for the Labour Party brand will be significantly different among National Party supporters from those who wear red ties on polling day!

Adolph Hitler was probably the worst brand in remembered history. So bad that even if he had lived a long time in holy orders after inventing Nazism (another bad brand) he would have had a hell of a job changing his already formed brand image. To some, admittedly, the brands ‘Hitler’ and ‘Nazi’ were once heroes, but to the vast and ever growing majority they became anathema. They did not survive because their ‘public’ turned away from them.

Over the years, New Zealanders have readily espoused many brands both of local and overseas origin; have grown to trust and even love them, and have treated them almost as members of their family. Until Britain joined the European Economic Community in 1973, New Zealand abounded with British and, to a much lesser extent, American or Australian brands of products imported either whole or in parts for local assembly, supplemented by New Zealand made brands of goods based upon primary produce or those easy to manufacture. Thus, in the latter years of last century, we emerged each morning from under our Kaiapoi or Mosgiel blankets, shampooed with Loxene and washed with Lifebuoy under a Topliss shower; we breakfasted on Creamota, Weetbix or Kiwi bacon; spread Fernleaf butter on our Tip-Top bread and topped it with Marmite or Vegemite.

We dressed in Jockey underpants, Bob Charles tops, Summit business shirts, Klipper ties, Berlei brassières, Canterbury hosiery, Holeproof socks, Rembrandt suits, frocks from Smith and Caughey, Kirkcaldie’s, Ballantynes or Arthur Barnett and wore Monarch shoes from Hannahs buffed with Nugget shoe polish.
We went to the office or factory in an Austin car running on ‘clean burning’ Europa; wrote with a Bic or Biro; typed on Imperial typewriters.

Speights,On the farm we sheared sheep with Lister gear; ploughed behind Fordson, Ferguson or International Harvester tractors; gave the farm dogs Tux biscuits, enriched the pastures with ‘basic slag’ from Farmers Fert, and owed money to Dalgety’s, the BNZ, ANZ or the Bank of New South Wales.

Our communications were via government-owned monopolies: the P and T Department controlled all postal and telegraphic services long before the brands NZ Post and Telecom were conceived. We listened to public broadcast radio stations, the YAs, YCs, and commercial ZBs on plastic or plywood wireless sets with brands like Philips, Ultimate, Majestic and Bell; brands which transferred to television sets from the early 1960s.
Beers from Dominion Breweries and NZ Breweries were New Zealand originated and jealously provincial: Waitemata Bitter, Red Band or Wards; and some of that rugby tinted provinciality still remains, witness Speight’s in Otago (the blue and gold of the Highlanders). Other national beers came later; brews like Leopard, DB, Steinlager, Lion and the ill-fated Lucky. And as our marketplace opened up, in came the sophisticated exotics: Rheineck, Heineken, Stella Artois and Carlsberg.

Wine hardly existed before the 1960s; where it did, few drank much beyond the sherries of McWilliams. Just a few wine brands have survived to the 21st century, among them are Babich, Corbans, Mission, Nobilo, Selak, Te Mata and Vidals. Montana, now New Zealand’s biggest wine brand, was just beginning to flex its muscles in 1970. Cresta d’Ore might yet make a come back!

Practically all spirits and liqueurs were imported. Scotches like Johnny Walker and McCallums were favourites as were Gordons gin and Martell brandy, later to be joined by Smirnoff vodka, Bacardi and Coruba rums, and Jim Beam or Jack Daniels bourbons. The Wilson Distillery in Dunedin launched its home-made whiskies, Wilsons Malt and 45 South which somehow never hit the high spots but were nonetheless slightly better regarded than non-alcoholic Clayton’s, ‘the-drink-you-have-when-you’re-not-having-a-drink’.

Homes were roofed with Monier Tiles or Decramastic; Fibrolite sidings were painted with Berger, British Paints or Dulux; walls papered with Ashley. Bremworth or Feltex covered the floor of our Neil, Merritt, Keith Hay or Fletcher homes wherein Laminex woodgrain tables supported Crown Lynn crockery. In the kitchen Big Ben pies were warmed over in a Shacklock or Atlas range while our F andP, Prestcold or Kelvinator fridges, Norge freezers or kitchen cupboards were a cornucopia of products carrying the brands or sub-brands of Wattie’s, Sanitarium, Kellogg’s, St George, Craigs, Bushells, Choysa, Bell, Nescafé, Gregg’s, Aulsebrooks, Griffins, Cadbury, Diamond, and the various offerings of barely remembered dairy factories up and down the country.

Hurricane or Cyclone fences enclosed lawns mown every Saturday by a joker wearing Skellerup gumboots and pushing a Masport or Morrison clockwise around a Hill’s Hoist draped with clothes washed with Taniwha or Sunlight soap in a Hoovermatic! Meanwhile, around and above us, NAC was flying DC3s internally, TEAL’s Electra fleet was our international carrier, PanAm ‘The World’s Most Experienced Airline’ connected us to the USA. Our almost anonymous meat went to the United Kingdom in New Zealand Shipping Company refrigerated freighters.

NZR ran both our railways and long distance buses; and George Bettle offered by mail order mysterious marital supplies in plain wrappers in the classified columns of Truth, that great medium for the prurient, whose furtive readership far excelled Woman’s Weekly, the Listener, the Freelance, Auckland Weekly News, Hoof Beats or Friday Flash! Ah, yes, Friday – an hour’s frantic swilling before six o’clock in De Bretts, the Hotel St George or Perry’s Occidental or, more civilised, taking in a movie in a Kerridge-Odeon or Amalgamated theatre and having a care not to send the Jaffas rattling down wooden steps into the one-and-sixpenny stalls…

Enough! The well-remembered favourite brands inventory is endless; make your own list.

To apply a brand to goods or services is to enter an unwritten contract of reassurance which acknowledges that the only guarantee of a brand’s survival is the continuing patronage of its trusting consumer. It promises the consumer that the brand owner is so confident, so earnest of intent, that he is prepared to live or die by the brand’s purity of purpose. At times the brand might falter but receive forgiveness in view of past good character. At times a brand might die because technology has sent it past its use-by date; or because it has been killed off in a merger or takeover. But a brand that lives on, adapting to change and satisfying its user, maintains its place as a trusted friend of that great family of consumers for which the part-art, part-science of marketing exists.

© DON DONOVAN
donovan@ihug.co.nz
.

Tuscany: Castiglione Revisited

Many years of peace make peaceful gardens

Since 1945 when the last German invasion of Italy ended, the people of Castiglione di Garfagnana have lived at peace. They don’t even have to worry much about internal strife because government goes on despite the annual changes of political masters in Rome, and it’s only down south that the mafia blows up judges. Over fifty years without fear. Now, instead of casting anxious eyes over the landscape they can look inwards at the bimbo shows on television and enjoy the comfort of washing machines, fridges, pop-up toasters, stereos, espresso machines, cell phones and three-wheeled Piaggios… their ancestors would have thought them the trappings of the devil.

In a tranquil, deserted but well tended little public garden there’s a memorial to men and women killed in the war. Italian soldiers don’t enjoy the best of reputations, appearing too fond of wine, women and song. The myths of Italian soldiery - they swapped sides readily; they strutted after Mussolini’s conquests in Ethiopia; they wore sumptuous uniforms and reeked of garlic and toiletries; they harboured cravens who hunted with the hounds and ran with the hares - overshadow the courage of resistance workers who fought Nazis in the hills above their native villages knowing that their families were being raped and singled out to be shot in reprisals while they themselves were in constant danger of capture and summary execution. It must have been hard. It is not forgotten: these shrines and memorial gardens exist all over northern Italy.

San Michele, Castiglione

Once my eyes adjust to shadow inside the Porta Principale I can make out a battered painted statue of Our Lady. Holding Jesus, she’s wearing a crown and is sumptuously dressed. Interesting how the Catholic church has rococo-ized the holy family; there’s something meretricious in the way the church has abandoned the simple country girl who gave birth in a stable.

From ‘Antipasto’ random samplings from various writings made over a few years of visits to a ‘New Zealander’s Italy’
 
© DON DONOVAN
donovan@ihug.co.nz
.

Tuscany: Castiglione di Garfagnana

From Castelnuovo di Garfagnana a highway strikes directly north to climb the Apennines, crossing from Tuscany into Emilia Romagna to Modena, where that delicious balsamic vinegar comes from. From the map it’s obvious that in the old days, when life was just one long series of punch-ups between neighbouring tribes, it provided access to coveted territories. It doesn’t take much to imagine the fear and misery that the peasants would have suffered as the ebb and flow of piddling but murderous conflict regularly wrecked their lives. Their crops would have been raided after harvest (bastards who fought mediaeval wars always waited until the harvest was in), their goats and cattle slaughtered to feed mercenary task forces and their daughters - and a few sons no doubt - raped in the name of some scrofulous duke or count bent on adding his coloured pins to the European map.

The fortified town of Castiglione di Garfagnana lies a few kilometres north of Castelnuovo high on the Modena road which climbs steeply in linen-folds to the walls of the town. It would have been difficult to assail from the south, there’s no cover, attackers would be in view over a long distance and the garrison would have had ample time to brew up vats of boiling oil ready to be poured through the macchicolations - the gaps below the battlements specially built for that purpose. The 12th century pentagon of curtain walls which surrounds the town is remarkably intact. Its longest stretch includes the main gate, the Porta Principale, whose stained tower has a white clock face with delightfully naive Arabic numerals painted on it; they look as if they’ve been lettered by amateurs but fit very nicely into the slender tower which has a strange, pyramidal metal canopy, painted a rusty pink; something from Disneyland or towered Camelot.

In the 15th century Castiglione was capital town of the Garfagnana but none of the meagre histories I’ve checked gives it an origin more precise than as a settlement of the ‘Liguri-Apuan’ folk who, in time, were rolled over by the Romans. The first dated historical documents mention the founding of the church and monastery of San Pietro in 723 AD by Longobard brothers Aurimand and Gudifrid. The Lombards were Germans from over the alps, a bunch of prototypical lager louts who spread themselves around northern Italy putting the boot into what was left of the Roman Empire. They must have started the love affair Italians have with Germans that still goes on to this day…

Aurimund and Gudifrid couldn’t have been that bad because the church of San Pietro is still standing, tucked hard up against - and looking in better shape than - the later fortified wall. After the Lombards (Longobards = ‘long beards’: at least they weren’t skinheads) the town was kicked around by all and sundry - Pisans, Florentines and the Lucchese from down the valley who flattened the place in 1227 and so impressed the townsfolk that it became a devoted outpost of Lucca until, in the 19th century, it passed to the Duchy of Modena.


From ‘Antipasto’ random samplings from various writings made over a few years of visits to a ‘New Zealander’s Italy’

© DON DONOVAN
donovan@ihug.co.nz
. 

What’s For Breakfast?

Somewhere high above the Java Sea the Malaysian air hostess brought my breakfast tray of exotically ornamented china, napkin-shrouded cutlery and a lonely bowl of corn flakes. She promised more to come: omelettes, steak, a fish dish of some sort; coffee, tea, fruit juice. But I was desperately hungry, my body clock all over the place, and calculating to when we’d left Rome hours and hours before I’d have said it was dinner time; but the airline had different ideas.

I eyed the corn flakes. A dry heap. No milk in sight anywhere. I had to have something, so I started to eat them as you’d eat nachos or pre-cocktail nibbles and discovered that they were extremely good that way. In fact, while admitting that I haven’t eaten corn flakes for years, I have to say that I’ve never enjoyed them quite so much. I finished the bowl.

At which point - wouldn’t you know it? The milk arrived.

Funny things corn flakes. They’ve been around for well over a century. If you’d tried to buy a packet of Kelloggs or Sanitarium before 1898 you’d have been out of luck. Before then the closest you could have got would have been some gravelly corn husk things called ‘hominy grits’. Cowboys used to eat them in all the cowboy books that I read when I was a boy…

‘Wild George Dubya kicked the dust over his camp fire, packed up his bed roll and finished the last of his hot, black coffee. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand as his tongue sought to dislodge a hominy grit from the cheap upper dentures that low down tooth-puller in Abilene had sold him. He looked at the angry sun rising like a curse out of the prairie. Today was the day when he’d catch up with the skunk who shot his pa…’

The only way you could make hominy grits edible was by boiling them until they were soft enough not to smash your teeth; but by some miracle, in 1894, the Kellogg brothers, Dr John and Will, working together at the Seventh Day Adventists’ Sanitarium at Battle Creek, Michigan, discovered that by squeezing softened wheat and corn kernels through rollers and then baking the resulting flakes they became wholly edible. Four more years of experiment led to the birth of both Sanitarium and Kelloggs’ Corn Flakes and breakfast has never been the same since.

They do say that practically everybody eats either wheat biscuits or corn flakes for brekky these days although I, personally, prefer toasted home-made bread and home made marmalade. (Recipes available at donovan@ihug.co.nz).

Mind you, I wasn’t always that sensible; before cholesterol frescoed the insides of the ancestral arteries I was a great one for the only meal the poms have ever been renowned for, the ‘full English breakfast’. The big London hotels still do them, so do landladies in bed-and-breakfasts around British seaside resorts, and you can get a particularly excellent one on the cross channel ferry that plies between Dover and Calais:- two fried eggs, their skirts ever so slightly singed and their yolks marbled by an assiduous chef who’s flicked sizzling bacon fat over them as they’ve cooked. They lie on fried bread that’s never soggy and are accompanied by rashers of streaky bacon also done to a subtle crisp. The odd beef sausage is by no means out of place and a little colour and piquancy is added by a modestly blushing tomato or two. Oh, the days of my youth!

A piece of research I read some years ago showed that New Zealanders were cereal eaters five days a week but were into the bacon and eggs at weekends but I somehow doubt if that’s still the case. As we’ve become more health conscious we’ve abandoned the glory of the formidable breakfast, which, if you believe all you read, was even more glorious in Edwardian times…

‘Algie appeared in the morning room looking the worse for wear after a losing night at the card tables. Gamely attempting a flippant manner, he lifted the lids off the silver dishes one by one: devilled kidneys, smoked haddock, grouse and partridge (suitably strong and well-hung) larks tongues and venison paté with sauté potatoes… “God I’m bored!” he cried. “Any one for tennis?”.’

The strange thing about those Edwardians is that so many of them lived to ripe old ages. I suppose they suffered from gout; and they probably had a fair measure of flatulence. But they probably compensated by keeping fit tramping the moors, shooting their beaters or drowning their gillies, and if they went travelling at all it was by ship with a chance to walk the promenade deck and play quoits, which you can’t do on a Boeing flying from Rome to Auckland via Kuala Lumpur. Which is why it’s probably a good idea to flag away the omelettes and stick to the dry corn flakes.

And that’s where I came in.

© DON DONOVAN

donovan@ihug.co.nz

.

Tuscany: Peasant Women, Café Men

Where do the solitary old women come from who, dressed in black, walk the back roads of Tuscany? It seems that whenever one drives in the country, at some point on the journey, at some time in the day, there will be one around the next bend, sometimes miles from any visible habitation.

Old fashioned women. Peasant women. 

Are they widows? Or are their men those who sit at the tables outside Barga’s Bar Onesti or similar village bars and cafés, reading tabloid newspapers, smoking hand-rolled cigarettes and covertly appraising the luscious young raggazzi who toss their heads knowingly as they pass on the street?

Café men and walking matrons: I imagine them at home, couples living lives of grunted communication, each to their duties, love and lust spent, children grown and gone. They part company after breakfast, she to walk, he to male bonding at the café, both to return at day’s end to more grunts and a matrimoniale whose springs stopped groaning for joy years ago.

Some men retire early in Italy. I remember a young-looking chap whom we met, with his attractive wife, at the restaurant ‘La Mocchia’ who told us that he was retired from his job as a salesman at the age of fifty. He explained that once you’ve done thirty-five years of work you may retire no matter how old you are and collect a state pension. If that’s correct it’s a way of solving youth unemployment but what does it do to the psyche of the pensioner? Most people who retire don’t know what to do with their earned leisure; they and their minds wither.

But then again, early retirement may explain the intensively worked terraced smallholdings on the hills around the Garfagnana. I doubt that, ordinarily, they’d be payable propositions but if they serve to keep the retiree occupied, to supplement income, and to put home-grown food and wine on the table they make good sense. I think the master of Chiesetta No. 1, may have fallen into that category: he worked his slopes assiduously, especially those overlooking the pool of No. 2 around which the Inglesi women laid in the sun…

One sees some still-together pairs travelling side-by-side, sitting bolt upright in the confined cabs of Piaggios, those narrow three-wheelers low-geared enough to negotiate any track, any gradient. They’re used for everything, to carry goats, sheep, groceries, kids, tools, machinery - I’ve been held up behind one whose tray was so full of hay that it looked in imminent danger of overturning on the slightest bend but, like a mobile Leaning Tower of Pisa, made it all the way!

From ‘Antipasto’ random samplings from various writings made over a few years of visits to a ‘New Zealander’s Italy’

© DON DONOVAN
donovan@ihug.co.nz
.
.

Barga: The Money Changer

We go into Barga to change some travellers cheques. Just off the square, the Banca Toscana is near the Tamol petrol station. (Angela the vivacious pump operator, small, dark eyed, her face deeply tanned by the Tuscan sun, always gives me a big smile even when I’m not buying petrol. Benzina in Italy is expensive but I find it easier to pay for when purchased from Angela.) 

But to the Banca Toscana… to gain access one presses a button outside a narrow, curved glass kiosk the outer door of which slides open to admit one only, then shuts. Once inside this vertical coffin one presses another button to open a similar internal door. The operation takes about a minute. In other words if there are five customers waiting it’ll take the last one at least five minutes to get in. Inside there are queues of people who stand in silence or talk in low whispers and wait, with infinite patience, for the mills of the banca to grind; exceedingly slowly.

I am ushered to one of the queues where I wait and wait until I am confronted by a female automaton who checks my passport while I sign enough TCs to get me 500 000 lire - about $NZ500.00 - of ready cash to see us through the last few days in Italy. La bella signorina sends me to the back of another queue where, at length, I come face to face with a spotty youth with a fag in his mouth. He grunts smoke at me past half-closed eyes, checks my passport again, takes my TCs, counts them then enters something into a calculator which spews a faint print-out which he gives me with a flourish. I scrutinize it and discover that I’m about to receive 950 000 lire!

Hitherto our language has been Italian; well, mine was Italian, his could have been anything. But when I look at the print-out and say aloud to myself, ‘That looks like a jolly good rate of exchange’ he stands, leans forward and snatches it from my hand.

‘Umf umf wumf umf’ he says, his cigarette flapping up and down in his lips.

‘Mi scusi?’ I ask.

He takes the cigarette out of his mouth and admits, reluctantly while reddening, ‘I made a mistake.’

‘Indeed? You surprise me.’ But I think my sarcasm was lost on him.

From ‘Antipasto’ random samplings from various writings made over a few years of visits to a ‘New Zealander’s Italy’

© DON DONOVAN
donovan@ihug.co.nz
.

Eyes Wrong

We were watching a man being interviewed on television the other night and I said to Patricia: ‘I don’t like the look of that man, his eyes are too close together.’

To which she replied: ‘I agree - especially the one on the right.’

© DON DONOVAN

donovan@ihug.co.nz
.

ANZAC Memories

In 2005 I compiled a small collection of archived photographs from various sources that depicted aspects of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps in World War One. It was published by New Holland Publishers in 2005, titled ‘ANZAC Memories’. 

As with Siegfried Sassoon, I’ve always felt the irony of that war; the waste, the stupidity, the overwhelming sadness. Consequently I sought quotations about the war that would be thought-provoking when applied to images that are especially poignant when we remember the disproportionate sacrifices that were made by both Australia and New Zealand at theatres and battles like Gallipoli and Passchendaele.

Perhaps the most ironic of them was the photograph and its caption below; rugby union football features largely in the sporting cultures of both countries. To have stopped the whole pointless calamity of the so-called ‘Great War’ it would only have needed a few just minded men to sit down and talk.

‘The referee has the power to declare no side at any time, if the referee believes that play should not go on because it would be dangerous.’

From The Laws of Rugby Union Football

The photograph shows New Zealand troops playing an improvised rugby match on the western front in France.

With acknowledgements to New Holland Publishers Ltd and Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand

© DON DONOVAN
donovan@ihug.co.nz
.

A Children’s Ballad

THE BANTAM OF THE OPERA

Egbert was a bantam
But what he lacked in height
He made up for with feathers
Hundreds of ‘em, very bright.

On his head he wore a comb
As red as red can be.
The other end his rooster’s tail
Waved proud and gorgeously.

He liked to strut around the farm
Kicking up a riot
With other chickens twice his size
Who only wanted quiet.

His favourite occupation
Was getting up at dawn
And waking up the farmer’s wife,
Crowing like a horn.

With ‘Cock-a-doodle-doodle-do!
Wake up Mrs Jones!
Yo-ho. Nicky-nocky-noo!
Get up you lazy bones!’

One day, Farmer Jones awoke
Pained by Egbert’s racket
He slipped into his big gumboots
And big, thick woolly jacket.

‘You’re fired’ he cried,
‘Your awful squawk is like a fire alarm!’
He grabbed poor Egbert by the neck
And threw him off the farm.

As Egbert lay in mute surprise
Puzzled by his plight.
His world lit up, a golden glow
Bathed him in its light.

And from this wondrous shimmering mist
Materialized a spectre
A giant white rooster wearing jewels
And carrying a sceptre.

Egbert with his punctured pride
Was greatly overawed.
‘Who d’you think you are?’ he asked
‘Dressed up like a lord!

‘I’m your Fairy Chickfather,
I’ve come to help you out.
It’s in my power to grant one wish
But let there be no doubt
‘There’s only one and once you’ve made
Your choice of what to do
You’re stuck with it for ever more
Think carefully, Godchick, do.’

Poor Egbert, thrown into a tizz
His mind was full of questions
‘I just can’t think of anything
Please give me some suggestions.’

Chickfather said, ‘Invisible
‘Through time and space we’ll fly
To find out what exciting things
Your dreams could satisfy.’

He waved his sceptre round his head
And puffed his mighty chest
They took off in a shower of sparks
Young Egbert was impressed
 
They landed in a fire station
As jangling bells were pealing
The firemen slid down shiny poles
From holes up in the ceiling.

Dressed up in blue uniforms
With buttons all a-gleam
And big brass helmets on their heads
They looked a gallant team.

The siren wailed, the engine roared,
They raced all through the town
To help a cat stuck up a tree
They got the moggie down.

‘Well, what do you think?’ Chickfather asked
Said Egbert, ‘Thanks but no;
I don’t like cats or bells or speed -
Let’s have another go.’

* * *
A royal banquet next appeared
With courtiers grandly dressed;
Medals, ribbons, diamonds, pearls
Graced many a noble chest.

Candelabra, golden plate
And finest crystal glasses
Stretched as far as eyes could see.
God bless the upper classes!

Suddenly there fell a hush
As in came all the waiters
Dressed in velvet trimmed with gilt,
Silk shoes and jewelled gaiters
They bore aloft on silver trays . . .
‘Oh’ Egbert cried out, ‘Look!
‘That’s chicken roast they’re serving there
I’ll never be a cook!’

* * *
An ocean gale screams from the pole
And blows the tops off waves;
The rolling, pitching fishing boat
The polar weather braves.

Egbert and his Chickfather
Are standing with the crew
Dragging in the fishing nets.
They’re soaking through and through.

Poor Egbert looks distinctly green,
His feathers wet and droopy,
‘If you think I’d enjoy this life
You must think I’m loopy -
‘It’s not so much the ups and downs,
Or risking life and limb;
What really terrifies me is
I’ve never learned to swim!’

* * *
‘Egbert, I think you don’t like noise,
You’re peacable at heart,
Disliking things adventurous:
Let’s try the world of art.’

And suddenly we see our bantam
Dressed up in a smock
And beret; with a great big brush,
And palette chock-a-block

With brilliant colours, red and blue,
Orange, green and yellow,
And canvas, blank, what might he paint,
This most artistic fellow?

He tried to paint a motor car
Which came out like a boat.
And then he made a bowl of flowers
Look like a spotted goat.

Trees looked like bees and bees like birds
And birds like cows with paws.
So Egbert threw a tantrum
And stamped his bantam claws.

‘I don’t like cats or fire engines.
I’ll never be a sailor.
I cannot draw or paint or cook;
I’m nothing but a failure!’

* * *
‘There, there’ said Chickdad.
‘Calm yourself. We’ll have just one more try.
I’ve had a rather good idea.
Let’s do a spin and fly . . .’

* * *
The lights go dim, the audience stills,
The red plush curtain rises.
A wondrous scenery meets the eye;
A backdrop of surprises.

The orchestra like penguins dressed,
Brass, woodwinds, violins,
Accompany an opera queen,
(All chest and wobbly chins).

On struts the king in flowing robes
First, soft diminuendo,
Then, with his queen, their voices pure,
Soar up through a crescendo.

And as they hold their ringing song,
Descending from on high,
A giant golden cockerel comes.
(The audience gives a sigh).

The music and the singing stop.
The golden cockerel’s beak
Opens wide and from inside
There comes . . . an awful SQUEEEAK!

The king and queen and chorus cry,
‘Oh help, what shall we do?’
When suddenly from afar they hear,
‘Cock-a-doodle-do.’
‘Cock-a-doodle-doodle-do!
Wake up Mrs Jones!
Yo-ho. Nicky-nocky-noo!
Get up you lazy bones!’
It’s Egbert to the rescue;
Alone he’s saved the show!
The audience rises to its feet
They cry ‘Bravissimo!’

And as they clap and stamp their feet
They crane their necks to see
Who owns the virtuoso voice.
What, where, who can it be?

Chickfather said ‘Egbert, my boy
It’s time for me to go.
You’ve had your wish.
Good luck to you. I’m off - prestissimo!’

And as he left in clouds of gold,
On stage Egbert appeared,
His feathers bright, his comb aglow;
Oh how the audience cheered.

The chorus gathered all around
To hoist him up on high.
He was an overnight success
And quickly by and by
He sang with all the greatest stars,
Became a household name.
But deep inside a humble bird
He was not spoiled by fame.
 
When in the Sydney Opera House
Or at Milan’s La Scala,
Covent Garden, New York Met.
Or any opera gala,
Listen very carefully
If Egbert’s in the cast;

Then you, I’m sure, will plainly hear
Above the trumpet’s blast
The Bantam of the Opera sing
In ringing, joyous tones
‘Cock-a-doodle-doodle-do!
Thankyou Farmer Jones!

The moral of this story is
That when you feel depressed,
Nothing goes on getting worse
Things turn out for the best.

© DON DONOVAN
donovan@ihug.co.nz
.