1

Here’s a day I’d like to have back: the first

weekend we stayed at Flock Hill – Ken and Rob,

the gang from the Harbour – in the shepherd’s

cottage with Andy and Liz. The dawn of

the decade, a tawny February,

Jimmy Carter was still in the White House,

I was six months back from Sydney, full of

beatnik derring-do.

		                Sunday, first thing, grey

and foggy, Rob and I got our hands on

a threadline and caught a brace of skinny

little brook trout to take home for breakfast

(hippie stoneware and gumboot tea at the

big formica table in the Lockwood

kitchen). Andy killed a sheep for the dogs

and stood a while talking to the boss who

pulled up in his Range Rover. ‘Andrew, you’re

not going to work today’, warned Liz, and

he waved her away, laughing shyly. Ken

said, ‘Hey Sis, where’s your guitar?’ and Liz came

out with her lovely old Maton, and rolled

up a joint – she was pregnant, not smoking, but the

rest of us got stoned as crickets – and she

fetched her autoharp as well, and out came

the old family songbook.  And we were

family, too.

                   Back then, to hear Ken play

guitar, his flat-picking so crisp and sure;

and Andy, cigarette glued to his lip

as he rattled off those locomotive

banjo rolls, Earl Scruggs in hobnails and home-

spun jumper, tearing into ‘Eight Miles to

Louisville’ and ‘Armadillo Breakdown’.

Then Ken on mandolin, Liz on guitar

and singing, her fluid soprano, un-

studied and effortless.

   		                    So . . . did part of

me want to say Aw c’mon! to that bad,

old white-trash gospel? Maybe. Yet I was

hearing something else as I gazed out the

window of that kitset kitchen at the

wide hay paddock opening green where it

sloped to the lake at the foot of the blond

mountain.  Giants had laboured here, it seemed,

and left behind hay-bales tall as houses,

hay to feed every last sheep in the

high country, broadcast over the prairie

like megalithic knucklebones. And the

cottage echoed with our sober joy, and

as Ken’s mandolin figures flowed like spring

water and those tight, lonesome harmonies

lifted the roof, I knew, as you do when

you’re high, that, yes, I was family too.



2

But what can I say about the City,

its vapours, its wickedness? There, once again,

we were mostly confounded. We took off

our clothes and played our instruments in the street.
Sometimes months would turn into years as we

failed to accomplish the simplest thing. As if

our young bodies would forgive us anything, we steeped

them in poisons and tortured them with improvised jewellery.
Vehicles were driven heroically:

to Kaikoura for a crayfish, to the Coast for a plait of garlic,

to the badlands of Bishopdale to liberate a cactus

and render it down to a noisome liquor.
Friends embraced, then sheared off,

trailing cinders. One joined an oil firm and learned to use a sjambok;

others found the saffron-coloured East and set out to fuck their way

to enlightenment. A climber was last seen hefting an ice-axe, 
face an ardent cathode blue, carving

footholds in the lath-and-plaster as if he meant to walk upside-down

on the ceiling. One fell asleep with his head in a bass bin

and woke with an evil tinnitus he mistook for the voice of God.
Bait-fishers, skate-punks and other degenerates

crowded the lanes of the liquormart.

Diet pills flattered the will to intelligence.

One joined the army for a weekend but later thought better of it.  
We had not given up on our elders, but their choices

were now unhelpful: they handed in their weapons

and worked for the government; a cousin

imported half a pound of heroin and left it on the tarmac. 
Somebody’s uncle

beavered away at a fictitious fiction the size of a

garage, and no one was so indelicate as to inquire

when it was likely to be completed.
Still, despite everything, we looked to the mountains.

Thick cream of winter, blue of mid-summer,

we’d climb to the rim of the harbour

simply to feast our eyes on them.  
From Mt Aspiring to Tapuaenuku, their granite

imperative ringed the horizon, and Erewhon,

Kekerengu, Algidus, Flock Hill, the names of

those elevated stations were one more voice in our confusion.