OPO The Peace Monster

Prologue

Hello and best wishes to the extended family – or ‘kia ora te whānau’ as we say here in Aotearoa New Zealand. In this case, by ‘extended family’ I mean the world-wide family of humanity. I’d like to say the ‘one big happy family of humanity’ but hey, that’s a fantasy, right? Except …

But I’m getting ahead of myself. First things first. This is my formal greeting – my mihi – to introduce myself properly:

Ko Whiria te maunga. Ko Ngatokimatawhaorua te waka. Ko Te Puna o Te Ao Marama te moana. Ko Araiteuru te taniwha. Ko Ngāti Korokoro te hapū. Ko Ngāpuhi te Iwi. Ko Araiteuru Whātu taku ingoa, kei te mohio katoa te tangata ki taku ingoa tapiri – Ko Harry. I whānau au i te hohipera i Rawene, Te Hokianganui a Kupe i te tekau o Maehe, te tau kotahi mano, iwa rau, rima tekau ma ono. Ko te ra hoki tenei i mate a Araiteuru... ka mohio etahi ki tona ingoa tapiri ko Opo. Ana, kei te kimi a runga, kei te kimi a raro, kei te rapa i nga korero o Opo kia marama ai nga take i taka ki runga i a ia... Ae!

My name is Araiteuru Whātu, known to most as Harry. My canoe is Ngatokimatawhaorua, my mountain is Whiria, my waters are known as Te Puna o te Ao Mārama: the Spring of the World of Light, my tribe is Ngā Puhi. I was born in Rawene Hospital, Te Hokianga nui o Kupe, on the tenth of March 1956, the day Opo – known to some as Araiteuru – died. My profound thanks to all who have helped me recover this story and share it with the world at large.

I was born the day ‘Opo the friendly dolphin’ died, so of course I don’t remember it. Yet my being endowed with her Māori name – Araiteuru – even though most people called me Harry, that must have sowed a seed that germinated in the memories that leaked, trickled and sometimes gushed around me as I grew up. But you know how it is with kids: our lives are ‘normal’; it’s the other stuff in a bigger, wider world that we want to discover.

I left home – the Hokianga – to go to boarding school then university, became a public servant then a diplomat and ended up working for the United Nations Development Programme, based in New York, for an ex-prime minister of New Zealand. And that’s another story. Actually it was when an earlier prime minister caused an international stir at an Oxford Union debate in 1985 (I was 29), proposing ‘That Nuclear Weapons are morally indefensible’, telling the world that leaders were just as entitled to declare peace as war, that I began to realise something quite special had happened that summer, in Te Hokianga nui o Kupe; the summer peace broke out in a big way.

While it is named as the great returning place of Kupe – the place from which the great Polynesian explorer returned to his homeland, Hawaiki, to bring news of Aotearoa: the land of enduring light – the Hokianga is also the place to which its people return to reconnect with their tūrangawaewae; their spiritual home. It was when I returned for my mother’s tangihanga, her funeral, from a world increasingly ruled by fear, that I took the opportunity to dig a bit deeper, not so much to discover ‘who dunnit’ as to understand why: why was it not allowed to continue? After all, the people I wanted to talk to about it, they were not getting any younger.

My Uncle Kepa, for instance – who went on to become a high-flying advertising hot-shot before he crashed, burned, reassessed, retrained as a social worker and returned to the Hokianga – he had his gold card by then. His older sister, my Aunty Georgina, who worked almost all her adult life in the office of the Rawene Hospital, and her hunter-turned-handyman husband, Hughie, they’d just had their golden wedding (I Skyped in for that celebration). And Sue, whose parents ran the Opononi camping ground and Coronation Tea Rooms, she rose from science teacher to headmistress then worked on contract for the Ministry in Wellington; she’s a mother of three, grandma of five and about to be a great grandma. Kia ora to that.

These are the people I got to talk into my digital recorder. Then Georgina (thanks Aunty!) transcribed those korero, emailed the files, and I took it from there. Of course I’ve had to use my own imagination too, to relive their experiences and fill in quite a few gaps. That’s why I call this book ‘historical fiction’. If Opo had just changed the lives of one or two people, it would have been a different kind of story. But the fact is, Opo – Araiteuru – had an extraordinary impact on thousands if not millions of people. Having transformed a tiny community, she captivated the entire country and became the biggest tourist attraction New Zealand had ever seen. By the end of that southern summer in early 1956, sixty years ago, she’d begun to attract international attention, which may or may not have been the problem.

Some called that summer ‘miraculous’ and saw the dolphin – Opo; Araiteuru – as some kind of prophet. Others were more excited by her profit potential. Then there were those … But I won’t give it all away here. Suffice it to say that whichever way you look at it, it was fear that brought about the end. And the irony is that for Opo, it was her complete lack of fear that sealed her fate. That was her fatal flaw.

Even so, for one brief summer in one small country at the bottom of the world, she helped us prove this thing called ‘peace’, this thing we all say we all want all the time – not just ‘not war’ but unconditional love on a massive scale – it really is possible. But some people back off when I talk it up that way. A friend of mine who gave it a read, she reckons it’s about fear, love, war, peace and tourism. It’s the ‘What if Jaws had been a dolphin?’ story, she reckons. Fair enough.

I’ve revisited it in the present tense to represent how it was, in the moment, at the time, for lots of different people. I hope you think it’s worth the read.

A ‘Harry’ Whatu (June 2016)

Chapter 1

On a Monday around the middle of March 1955, not that she knows the date or cares, a young female bottlenose dolphin leaves a huge north-bound migrating pod and dives deep into the blue-blackness to explore a shipwreck on the ocean floor. Another dolphin follows. It’s a rule among dolphins: never travel alone. So the more cautious dolphin appoints himself the companion of the more inquisitive, adventurous one.

The lifeless wreck offers little of interest to Uwha. She approaches Te Hoa, rolling on her axis, inviting him to ‘come and play’. The instant he rolls in agreement, she flicks her tail and shoots upward. Te Hoa follows, catching up fast. Two glistening streaks rise from blue-black through blue-green to green-gold and burst high into a clear blue sky.

Beneath the same blue sky, within the fertile green of a native forest watched over by giant Kauri trees, birdsong and insect noise give way to the growing roar of a hard-driven car. The chrome grimace of a jet black ’54 Plymouth rises ahead of a cloud of dust. Nineteen year-old Hughie Payne, jaw set, eyes narrowed behind a grimy windscreen, guns the Yank Tank over the rise and into a dip, gripping the steering wheel tighter as the monster slews and slides in loose metal.

A bit like a Kiwi James Dean but with dark brown hair, Hughie is an angry young man. A rebel, but not without cause. His dad was killed at Monte Cassino when Hughie was only eight. ‘You’re the only man in my life now,’ his mum said. ‘You are the man of the house.’ Then just last year, no sooner was Hughie at the varsity than she took up with this American prick, Eugene Gleeson, who came to Auckland to sell swanky American cars: Gleeson’s Luxury Limos. Hughie tried to be the ‘good Kiwi bloke’ for his mum and to make Eugene welcome but in the end, he couldn’t help it, it disgusted him to see them fawning all over each other, so lovey-dove and coochie-coo. So he purloined one of Eugene’s ‘limos’ and took off up north, with his second year Engineering mate, Cameron Thornley. Cam. That’ll bloody show ’em, eh.

Cam flings an empty beer bottle from the car, crows at scoring a smash-hit against a tree-trunk, reaches forward to the crate at his feet and grips the neck of another. As he stretches back, his possum-skin Davey Crockett hat slips down over his bloodshot eyes, revealing the Brylcreemed duck’s arse below his crew cut. He unbuckles his old boy scout belt and uses it to flick off the crown top. Of course it sprays its stinky, sticky substance all over him and the door. Only some makes it out the open window. He silences his own larrikin whoops by wrapping his laughing gear round the foaming nozzle and sucking on the bitter ale.

The Waipoua State Forest appears impervious to this invasion as the driven black beast with the boys in its belly roars onward. Hughie, feeling even angrier now, clings white knuckled to the wheel and concentrates on avoiding the potholes and ruts without reducing speed. Not that Cam notices how skilled he is. Hughie grabs the bottle, takes a swig, corrects the Yank Tank’s sudden lurch and laughs as Cam snatches it back. ‘Christ, mate! Jeeze.’

At exhilarating speed Uwha leads Te Hoa, streaking through water and leaping through air in perfect unison, approaching an inviting coast with turmoil at its edge.

As if on a collision course with the unseen dolphins, Hughie guns the Yank Tank over another rise. Neither he nor Cam show any appreciation of the sudden and magnificent view. Its entrance spectacularly marked by a gigantic sand dune on the north side, the long narrow harbour reaches inland, eastward, further than the eye can see. Wisps of misty cloud kiss the distant hilltops and stroke the valleys, shrouding them in mystery. But if either intruder notices, he says nothing to his mate.

The Hokianga. Te Hokianga nui o Kupe. Te Puna o te Ao Mārama. Oasis. Paradise. A bloody mirage, it’s got to be, it’s too bloody good to be true! Whatever names most travellers use, be they visitors or locals returning, they’re bound to pause to take in the scene, take pictures of it, take time to enjoy it. The Great returning Place of Kupe. The Spring of the Land of Light. But not these boys.

Uwha and Te Hoa race on past the vast sand dune towards the headland opposite and its churning, sea-thrashed coastline. Uwha knows what fun there is to be had in such turbulent waters and leads Te Hoa onward in great anticipation ...

Hughie swerves off the unsealed highway, takes the Yank Tank down the even rougher track to South Head and skids the hulk to a halt. The dust settles. Dead end, for the car, at least. Beyond the scrub-covered headland, the sand dune looms like some slumbering whale of Māori myth. Hughie grabs the bottle from Cam and guzzles on it long and hard to get his share.

‘Fair go, mate!’ Cam complains, without conviction.

Hughie belches and guzzles some more. In response to his bladder’s cold, sharp, insistent message, he opens the door and staggers away draining the bottle ... It does nothing to relax the demon that grips his gut. He breaks into a run and, as the edge of the headland approaches, swings his arm back and throws the bottle high. Tumbling gently, it glints against the azure sky, falls … and disappears from view.

Uwha and Te Hoa are playing in the churning, coast-kissing sea when the strange object hits the calmer water beyond. In a trice, Uwha’s there, swimming in an inquisitive circle as the lifeless thing sinks slowly to the sandy floor.

‘Every Little Helps by Won Long Pee,’ Hughie shouts as, eyes closed, he finds relief at the brink of the headland. It’s a playground game he brought home, once, to amuse his mum. The Broken Window by Eva Brick. Who Fell Over the Cliff? by Eileen Dover. Hah. She loved it. To banish the stupid memory, Hughie’s tired eyes open and focus on the sun-drenched the sand dune, opposite. His engineer’s brain lazily considers how many yards of concrete you could make out of that lot. Jeeze, mate, you could build a whole city. He’s buttoning his fly when he sees them: two dark dorsal fins breaking the water, not twenty five yards out from the shoreline below. ‘Hey!’ Suddenly animated, Hughie backs off, turns and breaks into a sprint. ‘Hey!’

Cam’s hosing the dust off a rear hubcap with a seemingly endless stream of hop-ponging piss when Hughie skids to the boot, wrenches it open, extracts his hunting rifle, grabs a fist full of ammo and slams the lid closed. ‘Sharks,’ is all he offers by way of explanation. He’s halfway back to the headland by the time Cam is able to follow.

At the cliff edge Hughie loads with the practised ease he learned at school cadets then perfected over summer holidays on hunting trips at an uncle’s farm in the Waikato, where he went to earn some money and spend time with men. ‘It’ll do you good,’ his mum insisted. ‘A boy your age doesn’t want to hang round home with his mum.’ It was only in retrospect the penny dropped. She just wanted him out of the way so she could get to know Eugene better. Or to be more precise, get to know GI Gene again, because she’d first met him during the war when his show-off battalion was on R&R in Auckland, flashing money and nylons and good-time smiles, while Hughie’s dad was off in the thick of it all … It didn’t bear thinking about. Anyway, Hughie got so good at this hunting lark, his uncle gave him this rifle for Christmas, having bought himself a better one. It was Hughie who added the telescopic sight, brand spanking new. And more than once he’s fantasised using it on Eugene. Maybe that’s another good reason to get the hell out.

As Hughie locates his quarry and raises the telescopic sights to one eye, Cam arrives, sees the ‘sharks’ and grabs the rifle. ‘Come off it, mate. You’re too far away.’ Now it’s Hughie chasing Cam, down the steep, scrub-covered rock face.

‘Gis it back, Cam!’ Hughie yells. ‘It’s mine!’ Cam skids to a halt, raises the rifle, takes aim and squeezes the trigger. Nothing. Hughie feels smug as he takes back his weapon. ‘Safety catch?’ He flicks it off, secures his footing and takes careful aim.

As an inquisitive Uwha nudges the bottle along the sand, Te Hoa surfaces for air.

In eerie silence a dorsal fin and sleek, black, curving back looms large in the telescopic sights. Hughie’s finger squeezes. The rifle discharges.

The impact of that bolt from the blue is nothing Te Hoa has known before. Instantly he is outside his body, observing its pain, watching the blue-green water turn red.

Feeling quietly tough – feeling the way his father looked in that photo his mum kept on the mantelpiece until Eugene moved in – Hughie lowers his weapon and waits for Cam to congratulate him. But Cam just tugs at the rifle. ‘My turn. Come on, mate.’

‘My turn, my turn,’ Hughie mimics. Then suddenly drained of caring, he lets it go, turns and begins to climb.

Emitting a constant flow of high-pitched distress signals, Uwha swims in circles around Te Hoa’s lifeless body, pushing at it with her snout, vainly trying to elevate the carcass. But the migrating pod has moved on and the headland blocks, deflects, reflects her calls ...

Hughie heaves himself to the cliff top, lifts his head and discovers a whole new world. The long, narrow, placid harbour stretching inland into mist. He sneers at it. Bloody picture post-card, chocolate box crap. ‘Where the hell are we, anyway?’ he asks out loud.

Cam looks up. ‘Eh?’ Only then does the other dorsal fin break the surface behind him. The wind, surf and distance cover the sound of the blow-hole sigh. When he looks back, Cam doesn’t notice the swirl. He gives up and climbs to join Hughie, who’s squinting inland to find signs of life. Only briefly do they catch the rumble of the school bus passing, back on the highway.

Pigtailed, fair-skinned and rosy-cheeked, Sue Gardner doesn’t bother to put up a fight when, after much furtive stealth, freckle-faced, carrot-topped Dag snatches her home-made fortune teller and hands it to his big mate Monty, destined to be a front row forward. The school bus, driven by the slightly podgy Alan Godfrey from Agnew’s store in Opononi, has come the long way round from Pakanae school, dropped off the Waimamaku and Waiotemarama kids before circling back through Omapere to end its run in Opononi. Not that either Montgomery (Monty) Blanchard or Douglas (Dag) Shaw live on the route. They live ‘up river’ as the locals say, but Dag’s dad runs the cream launch and Monty’s dad drives a truck so they hang around Opononi, like bad smells in Sue’s opinion, to get a lift home with one dad or the other when the pub closes at six-o’clock.

Monty puts on a girlie voice to command his faithful lieutenant: ‘Pick a colour.’

‘Red,’ Dag obliges.

Monty’s thick fingers go to work, opening and closing the fortune teller like a double-jawed snap-dragon. ‘R-E-D spells red and what number do you want?’

Dag squints at the four numbers inscribed inside. ‘Six.’

Monty lifts the flap. ‘You will marry a fat man and have seven children. Ha!’ He thumps a scowling Dag on the shoulder.

‘Cut it out,’ calls Alan Godfrey, watching in his rear vision mirror, ‘or you’ll get out and walk, the pair of you.’

Monty drops the folded paper beside Sue as the boys slump into the seat behind. ‘Stupid girlie stuff anyhow.’ Sue ignores him, preferring to contemplate the harbour and the swim to come, as the bus rattles and squeaks to a halt in front of the Pakanae Four Square store. No one in the bus, or back at South Head, has any inkling of the drama being played out across the water, at Rangi Point.

Skinny, brown and shivering, with a badly bruised face and ribs, Kepa Whatu stands frozen at the water’s edge. Waitapu beach, the next bay out from Rangi Point where he goes to school. Or used to.

Up on the bank above the sand Kepa’s father, Hema Whatu, attempts to hold his balance on wooden crutches and maintain his grip on a battered suitcase as the boy’s much older sister, a young woman of striking beauty, resolutely hangs onto the handle. ‘Georgina …’

‘Just give us it, Dad. We’re going.’

‘You’re all I’ve got left.’

Georgina tugs hard. Hema has to let go to stop falling over. Georgina’s laughter adds fuel to his fury. He rams one crutch into the ground and raises the other as if to strike her.

‘Hema!’ A younger, fitter Māori man, shin-deep in the water, holds his wooden dinghy’s bow steady with a broad hand. Kepa’s Uncle Pene. He feels no pleasure at having to bark like this at his older brother. And it does nothing to improve Hema’s mood, being ordered about by Pene.

But Georgina doesn’t need her uncle’s help. She curls her lip at the raised crutch. ‘You reckon that’ll make me stay? Huh. Just like it made Mum stay?’ As she lugs the suitcase to the water’s edge, she calls to her uncle Pene, loud enough for her dad to hear, ‘Why didn’t you shoot him properly? Put us all out of our misery.’ Taking the weight of the case helps Pene cover the kick in the guts her words make him feel.

‘Yeah. Why didn’t you?’ Hema calls. He means it, too. If that blast of pigshot had only hit a little higher, he wouldn’t have been here now, suffering these insults to his manhood.

As Pene stows the suitcase aboard, Georgina swings her little brother into the bow. He’s so rigid he can hardly sit. ‘You’ll be right, Kep,’ she reassures him as she clambers aboard. ‘You’ll be right.’ She knows why Kepa’s so scared, why he hates the water. One of their dad’s little tricks to make a man of his boy, way back when he was only three (eight years ago), was to take him out in the harbour just out of his depth and throw him overboard. He’d done it more than once before their Mum got wind of it, took a stand to protect her boy and got a hiding for it. Georgina felt really bad about that because she was the one, aged ten then, who’d seen it and told. Settling on the centre seat, she reaches for her brother’s hand as the boat swings about and Pene’s boarding in the stern sets it rocking and rolling in the tide.

Pene winds the cord on the Seagull outboard, flicks the fuel tap, tugs, opens the throttle and sets a steady course for Mahena Bay, back on the south side. Only Kepa can see the receding figure of his father, shaking an ineffectual crutch at them and spitting: ‘Haere atu! Get lost.’ Gripping the gunwales as the bow waves surge on either side, Kepa feels really bad. And scared. Bad and scared.

Beyond the knowledge or understanding of Kepa, Georgina and Pene, and Hughie and Cam come to that, beyond the crosswise line of surf that lies to the west and marks the sand bar that makes entry to the harbour so treacherous, a dolphin mourns.

Uwha grieves for her lifeless companion, Te Hoa, and grieves for her vanished tribe. Her aloneness is as new to her as it is absolute.

Chapter 2

‘Sue, Sue, Sue!’ Little Lucy jumps up and down on the hotel veranda, waving at her favourite neighbour. They are the only two children who live year-round in Opononi itself. Sue is happy to defer her swim long enough to let wee Lucy discover her fortune.

On the front wall of the brand new hall beyond the hotel, a man carries a painted sign up a ladder to where two similar boards, reading ‘South’ and ‘Hokianga’ await their companions. This next word, ‘War’, has to be balanced on the top rung as the man reaches for his screw driver. Below, bare-footed Dag is chasing Monty to get back the threepence-worth of pineapple chunks he just bought from Agnew’s store, only to have Monty snatch them away.

‘I’m gunna get you, Monty!’

‘Aw, yeah? You and whose army?’

Already the chocolate coating is beginning to melt against the small white bag in Monty’s sweaty grasp. They duck and dive around the ladder which, inevitably, is bumped. As the man above clutches the sign with one hand and presses against a weather board with the other – ‘Hey, watch it!’ – the screwdriver impales the dirt between Monty and Dag. Suddenly united against the new threat, they flee across the road and onto the jetty where they will negotiate the tradeable values of Monty’s raspberry and lemon acid drops against the pineapple chunks that are now worth less because most of the chocolate has gone.

Lucy squints into the glare of the afternoon sun. ‘Tomorrow’s my birthday. I’n gunna be four. Are you gunna give me a present?’

Sue laughs. ‘How about a great big kiss?’

Lucy is not impressed. A Māori housemaid appears at the hotel door with a glass of orange cordial. ‘Kia ora, Sue. You want a drink too?’

‘I’ll have one waiting at home, thanks.’

Having spelt out P-I-N-K, lifted the flap numbered four and told Lucy she was destined to become a world-famous ballerina, Sue shoulders her satchel and heads for home, past Mrs Agnew, half-draped in the store doorway’s coloured plastic strips that keep insects out of her shop as she sweeps dirt out over the step and onto the hard clay ground. Sue knows it’s Mrs Agnew’s father-in-law that owns Agnew’s Store but he’s crippled now, confined to a wheelchair. His son was a pilot, killed in the war, and Mrs Agnew is his widowed daughter-in-law. So she runs the shop with the help of her brother, Mr Godfrey, who’s hosing the dirt off the back of the school bus, parked down beside the store now, alongside the faded sign on the wall that reads ‘Garage – Grease and Oil Change, Minor Repairs’. Apart from a petrol bowser, air hose and watering can for filling radiators, the garage is down round the back of the store.

There’s no sign of life at the Coronation Tea Rooms. Sue doesn’t have to look in past the balcony, she can just tell there’s no one there. She runs up the dirt driveway into the deserted camping ground, checks for the whereabouts of Matilda, the ancient sheep that used to be her pet lamb – she’s in the shade by the abandoned caravan – spins on the spot swinging her satchel in the manner of the hammer-throwers she saw in a film of last year’s British Empire and Commonwealth Games in Vancouver, and lets it go. It lands in the sandpit, where Sue has set up a home-made high jump. She’ll have a go at that when she’s in her togs.

The kitchen smells of fresh baking. Sue’s father, Des (he was Lieutenant Commander Desmond Gardner in the Royal New Zealand Navy during the war) is spreading pink icing on a rainbow sponge. Lucy’s birthday cake. At the table Sue’s mother, Joyce (who used to work in her father’s office in Auckland, until she met Des), is working at the account books, tapping the keys of the adding machine and pulling the lever with practiced speed. A talk on the wireless has caught Des’s attention. He lifts his eyebrows in greeting and nods to the waiting glass of home-made lemonade and plate with Sue’s favourite after school sandwich: brown bread with peanut butter