Book of the Week
We're saving on sunscreen...
If you are interested in entering the writing and photo essay competition this year you may be interested in the book we published with last years entries.
Resilience in the Rangitikei
Melanie Bovey and Jaime Ward (ed.), We’re saving on sunscreen…..Writings from the Rangitikei, Rangitikei District Libraries (Marton) 2007, 60 pp, ISBN 978-0-473-12428-1, $10.00.
There is one acknowledgement missing in this quirky little book. Alan Buckendahl, owner of Marton Printery, came up with the picture of a snow-covered cottage out of Taihape as the front cover. We’re saving on sunscreen….. started from a writing competition run by the Rangitikei District Council Libraries during the summer 2006-07. The title comes from the prize-winning entry, a poem by Elizabeth Coleman – the full title being We’re saving on sunscreen, in Marton’ a reminder of the storm in February 2004 – ‘houses cower at the swirling, slapping day’. At the book launch, Elizabeth confessed that she preferred another poem she had entered ‘Marton’ a hymn to the town’s attitude: ‘a silent finger to Rogernomics and carrying on’. Her fondness for the place comes out in two other poems in this anthology. For those not in the know, ‘the smell of cut grass emptied in the Tut’ is pronounced like ‘toot’ the local abbreviation for the Tutaenui Stream which flows through Marton, periodically (as in February 2004) becoming ambitious and stretching into the town’s main street, Broadway.
These poems are followed by the whimsical ‘Traveller’ by schoolgirl Crystal Johnson, who spotlights an unforgettable place, ‘the small loving town of Bulls’. Students at Pukeokahu School provide seven short poems, and they all, too, clearly love their place – ‘the wind in collision with the sun’ unfazed by realities of rural life – ‘sheep that are killed to be eaten for tea’. A staunch survival emerges at Whangaehu, another river settlement hit by the floods in 2004 (and again in 2006). Trisha O’Leary writes of the shut pub where locals no longer tell the stories ‘that can’t be repeated here’. Ken Smith recalls the challenge of painting the lofty railway viaducts in the District in the days before OSH. Quentin Barry’s ‘Rangitikei rolling green’ takes an even longer view of the inspiring landscape – ‘where fossils show an inland sea, where whales swam and once were free’.
The first and last short stories in this book both focus on death. The anonymous ‘Two brothers in Leedstown’ refers to a local murder enquiry (perhaps a reference to the tragic death of Mona Morris in Marton in early 2005) and the narrator faces real and unexpected violence. Irene Withycombe, ‘The killing fields’ is set in South Africa but the death she portrays could equally have been on SH-1. Her second poem in this book is also a less local, more universal theme – on the perils of a first-time encounter with chewing gum. So too is Peter Wilton’s tribute to the Model T Ford, Jill Boyd’s letter home from an immigrant in the 1850s, and the poem by Nga Tawa student Phoebe Andrews ‘In memory of broken promises’ who understands what comes before loss: ‘ to lose a friend like you, is something I fear’.
The longest contribution is from Harold Hastings Richardson, who was Rangitikei County Clerk from 1891 to 1944. A few of his work diaries survive in the District Council’s archives and We’re saving on sunscreen… contains a transcript for January 1934. While each day’s entries are brief and formal (just noting the death of his brother-in-law, who had been the Marton Borough Clerk), they are a reminder of the daily pace of life – accounts, audit, contracts, meetings – and a reminder of the times (the depression spawned government work schemes and local authorities were involved in their administration). A man who managed the County’s affairs for over half a century must have had an abundance of resilience.
For those who prefer to gaze rather than read, this book has a few pages of historical photos. There’s a sense of pride outside the County’s Taihape office (now gone) and at the opening of the Carnegie Library in Marton (still there). The County road ‘location and date not identified’, empty apart from an object seemingly deliberately placed on the road, is a wordless statement of a changing, uncertain world where ‘carrying on’ is the essence of life.
3 September 2007
