On wetlands and the cost of standing up for the environment in a small rural community.
For seven years I gave the responsibility for the land under my stewardship and care to a local farmer. Twenty acres of land so sodden and stony the last owner had named it Bastard Flats. The farmer owns 20,000 acres, and to him, my paddocks must have seemed inconsequential. But in summer when drought visited and the hills became crunchy with tawny grass, the springs in my paddock fed a greenness, enough that 35 cows and their calves could live here six months of the year. The cows kept the land in order and made sense to my rural neighbours.
I missed the acres of golden waving grass. In the wind it had rippled like a living thing. The seed heads fed the wild birds that lifted and circled and landed to feed again. But each year the cows ate the grass down to a close-cropped sward, the timothy and cocksfoot and rye, the Yorkshire fog grass. Their hooves pugged and broke down the edges of the springs and streams. On a hot day the cows stood in the 40-metre-long pond and lifted their tails. The cows grew fatter, the calves were eventually taken away for the meat industry or raised as replacement heifers. In the country there is a rhythm to how things are.
But I could not continue in this cycle. To own land is to be dependent on it, and to understand that the land is also dependent on us. For though in the century- scale of life the land may have the final say – by earthquake, drought, flood – in our own times the land is at our mercy. What I wanted, when I finally stopped building my own shelter and looked around, was to protect the springs and the small issuing freshets of water, and the pond, which was choked with willow and manure-enriched grasses, and the swampy areas where the long, seeded rushes had been grazed to a few inches high. I wanted for the wet areas to be wet and to grow those things wetlands desire. To begin here meant to disrupt and question how things were done: that grass was not always meant for cows, that money was not only made from animals, that rushes could lengthen and sway again, the watercress return, and ducks, plovers, grey heron. A different life than the warm round rumps of chestnut cows as they passed stolidly from one end of my land to another.
Here, fire and early humans destroyed the kowhai, totara, beech and extensive shrublands that once graced these hills and helped the soil retain moisture. Since then we’ve been clearing the tussock lands, a million hectares and counting, and drained the marshy, puggy loams that also play their part in the ecosystem. Ninety percent of wetlands are already lost in New Zealand. How did we not know that raupo purifies the water of toxins, the spongey land absorbs and regulates floods, the flaxes, sedges and wetland plants hold back the silt, offering shelter to birds and shade to fish, and the whole system absorbs carbon. Breathes it in. Not bog or waste, but land, water and plants working together in ways we may not understand, nor the consequences of destroying such relationships.
On the former Bastard Flats then, instead of a herd of cows, there would be a trial crop of hemp in the far stony paddock, and a wetland, repo, in the paddock of springs.
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“You’re just a greenie witch,” the farmer said, when I explained I didn’t want the cows returning. He said it with affection, or so I believed, for he had been my encourager and advisor, the person I had turned to for country wisdom when I came on my own to an unknown place to put down roots. I’d grown up in a street of houses. What I longed for was soil, rocks, mountains, river, sky. What I believed in was community.
On a summer day at the river, the air is hot and still, smelling of wet rocks, minerals, algae. Here, in the higher reaches, the awa is its own being – deep, swift, musical. The white of rapids, the golden bronze of pools. But in the lower third where the irrigation takes have depleted the flow, there is no sense of joy or wonder when I walk the river. Each bend there’s another slow-moving shallow, a brown slurry of algae and silt, the smell pungent, and of decay.
To understand what was happening, I walked the length of the Manuherekia over seven days; from the silvery threads of streams through tussocks, and down gorges into the valley, past sheep farms and dairy farms; from the glassy waves of water clear over rocks and into jade pools; through long clattery stretches and silent, silted glides where the water barely covered my boots, till the water entered the Clutha/Mata-au near Alexandra.
I began to speak out about the river. I wrote submissions to the Otago Regional Council, to the Environment Court. When my neighbour and friend Mike Riddell wrote to the newspaper challenging the regional council on their management of the river, the response from our community was swift and personal. “We, the farmers …,” they wrote in a letter to the editor. Their names signed represented the hills around my home almost as far as I could see.
I understood Koestler’s ‘anguish of disillusionment.’
Dr Riddell had “recently come to live within our farming community,” the letter read, yet [he] seems intent to ‘continue his carpet-bagging career as a mischief-maker’”.
“To which I plead guilty as charged,” Mike wrote in the magazine Tui Motu. “My only defence is that the mischief I’m making is on behalf of the environment.”
As some of the newer people to the district, as the environmentalists, we are a focus for the farmers’ frustration and fear.
For the next community meeting, I put my name on the agenda. When I stood up to talk to the packed supper room, to the mostly long-time residents, the intergenerational farmers, my voice shook.
“I was on duty cleaning the public toilet the week the letter in the paper came out,” I said. “Every day as I walked down to clean I thought about how we are a community that helps each other. We provide meals and support when needed, we mow the roadside and around the tennis courts, we work side by side at the Brass Monkey rally, we chop and stack wood to raise funds. But how shall we get through this rift between us?”
A burly man stood up. “I don’t need to listen to this fucking crap!” He pushed his way out of the room.
A still summer day biking up Hill Creek Rd, the heat like a mask pushing close the smell of bugloss and yarrow and clover, the sweet pea, lilac scent of the lucerne. The paddocks opening out and rolling away to the blue and tan Hawkdun mountains on one side and away, away to the Old Woman and Old Man Range to the west. Hawthorn, briar rose, matagouri and wild apple trees sporadic along the fencelines. Where there is a row of pines, sheep lie clustered in the shade, and where there are sheep belly deep in the purple flowering lucerne, they look up and stare calmy, hardly bothering to walk away at our commotion, the bikes wobbling on the flood- juddered road. On the edge of the large body of water on McKnight Road, white geese stand beside the blue.
I think maybe only water can be pristine. Not our human natures.
And also, music.
The night of the letter from the farmers to the paper, we gathered at Mike and Rose’s home for a drink before we walked to the pub. Every Friday we go to the pub – it’s six, seven, eight houses from our doorsteps – because that’s how we meet our neighbours; the farmers, the truck drivers, those who work in the valley. We have a laugh with them. It doesn’t matter if it’s at our expense. The time I plastered earthen floors in my house, for instance.
That Friday night I remembered those moments before my band Red Dress went on stage, in the days when I was a drummer. The three of us musicians would link arms and sing Amazing Grace before we walked out to our instruments and rocked it. So that’s what we did, the new people, the ‘greenies’, the night of the letter. We put our arms around each other and sang Amazing Grace. Then we walked down the road in the dark under a starry sky, and it didn’t matter someone had put boxing gloves on the bar, or that a police sergeant happened to call in and check on things. We bought our beers and we talked with our rural neighbours.
I ring my friend and fellow activist, archaeologist Matt Sole. “Farmers are under mental health pressure, and environmentalists are too,” he says. “It’s not just the emotional attacks on us, from verbal abuse to anonymous attacks and court cases for libel, but the fact that as living creatures part of a living ecosystem, we feel the degradation of the river and ecosystem habitats inside, as a health blow in ourselves as well. We struggle with stress, overwhelmed by the amount of unpaid work we do that takes us away from our own careers. There’s anxiety, with the feeling of being unwanted by our communities in the landscape that we cherish.”
How much the birds soften the beginning of day. Their songs to existence. I wonder if what drives them is “sheer unadulterated joy” as Brian Turner wrote in his poem Blackbird. Then I can at least find some solace in their choir, right and left, from silver birches and pines and willows. Oh, starlings, blackbirds, thrushes, sparrows; the world a twitter with birds. The sun just risen over the right flank of Mount Ida into a cloudy sky. The moon a pale ball hovering exactly over the peak of Blackstone Hill. On Rough Ridge, the tors are covered in cloud. When I look up, I imagine walking there, the ground damp and soft underneath, the sheep baaing out, the way ahead only a few metres and then the mist until you are in a world of rock and white.
On the pond, two sets of paradise ducks swim – well more like propelling in a seamless fashion, then honking up into the sky and wheeling northwards. Two days ago, walking beside the spring- fed cutting I heard a different sound, as of tinkling water and yet the stream itself hardly moved. When I looked closely, I saw there was water rippling over the edge of the field into the stream. Where did that water come from? I poked at a puddle with my stick and saw the slight bubbling on the surface. Was this a new spring, or one that had always been there? It seemed a miracle.
I visit the newly discovered spring again, and film it, the subtle bubbles from the small dark hole where water leaves the earth. A fragile bounty of water. Paradise ducks, pūtakitaki, in the metallic shimmer of newly-cleared pond. Two honking now as they fly into land in the paddock, folding their wings at the last. There’s so much water in the wetland paddock; little sink holes of water and broad platters of it, and the reeds growing taller. In the afternoon the new wharariki and toitoi rippling and shiny in the sun. At a distance, they look like white birds moving through the marsh.
Water, or lack of it – the reason we are conflicted as a community. The reason for sleepless nights. The reason some will say hello and some reject a proffered hand. The reason one farming family poignantly lost their farm: the ridges and tors and downhill exuberance of stream through tussocks, the roses and lupins and black currants, and the daphne by the door. It’s why the lucerne will sometimes crop three times in a season, or not, or why some years the haysheds are full with extra bales stacked around the outside, and some years the haysheds are just four posts and a roof and you can see right through to the mountains.
I think again of the little spring, how all night and all day, despite the news, and the clench of heart at what is to come, the spring – like a thumbprint in the earth—keeps upwelling. This fact of water issuing forth, this puna wai, and all the other springs in the rushes and reeds of the paddock are mysterious and sacred. I follow their bubble and slide through the marsh, along the paddock, over ruts, burbling over a small fall in height, into the pond, clattering out of the pond, through the next paddock and the next, into dark pools with submerged willows and at last across the moss and mud and shingle into the Ida Burn. The Ida Burn, that reckless stream, sometimes twenty metres wide carrying logs and sections of bank and broom, and sometimes no more than an algaed back water. But it perseveres, and further down the valley it turns through the Poolburn Gorge, under the viaduct, below poplar and willow and steep banks of rock. It rattles out to merge with the Manuherekia. The Manuherekia with the Mata-au. That deep, swift, turquoise river with the ocean. Ki uta ki tai. From the mountains to the sea. In this way, we are all connected.
A grey heron flies down to land on the lawn. It stands looking into the long grass where the snowmelt runs, its long neck throbbing. A paradise duck glides in honking above the pond. There are birds noisy in the willows. Tweet tweet tweet tweet. Chitter chitter chitter. Proop proop. Wee hee wee hee.
Sometimes I wonder if this world is mostly for the birds. How free they are in the medium of sky or water or tree. How each day they call up and farewell the sun.
It is the community Christmas picnic. Ken is cooking the sausages. The vegans have brought their own. The table full of salads and desserts. I walk over to ask a farmer, Ro McDiarmid, if she would be willing to be interviewed some time on farmers and environmentalists.
“I’d love to. I don’t think there should be a division,” she says. “We are all one.”
I feel such a hope and lightness as I talk with her.
Meanwhile, at the centre picnic table, friend and neighbour Declan Wong has agreed to show us some magic. He licks his finger and holds it to the wind, flexes his fingers, checking their agility and responsiveness.
“Do you want to watch some magic?” I call to my farmer neighbour.
“Depends, “he says, “is he going to magic me a beer?” He walks over to the chilli bin but comes back to join us. 92-year-old Lorna sits in the front with two boys, who later bowl and bat in the nets while Declan fields.
Right in front of us, coins shifting from under cards, cards changing from heart to spades. The “Whaaaat?”, and “Oh my God,” and “Wow”. Under the grey and purpling clouds, a circle of farmers and newcomers, around a sleight-of-hand illusionist.
The farmers will go back to their stock and their wide acres. A magician is not part of that life. But he offers what creativity and art can bring – wonder, a circle, hope, perhaps. Anything that draws us in, that holds us together, all else forgotten. Wanting to be charmed, wanting mystery, wanting something to be not so, to be mutable, to pass through the laws of nature. To be transfixed.
Words: Jillian Sullivan
Art: Raupo, by Laura Williamson
This essay was shortlisted for the Zealandia Te Māra a Tāne Essay Prize 2021, jointly run by Massey University and Headland Journal.
