Kaiapoi

In my innocent years—all eleven of them before lust visited—I had a healthy respect for authority. Authority meant my parents, my teachers, Community Constable Jack Highstead and everybody over the age of 12. Of course I was brought up in Kaiapoi where innocence and respect were the norms and a rebellious streak in me meant I soon lost mine. But Kaiapoi never did. It retained its innocence and its naïveté through decades and generations. People who were conceived there stayed there, made love there, married there, had children there, and not necessarily in that order. Generations of families attended old schools there—and even, nowadays, the brash “new” secondary school. Employment was mostly mundane—Kaiapoi is not exactly replete with hit men and theatrical types—and a man could rise to prominence as a pharmacist. That was Kaiapoi’s charm and its innocence, but almost fifty years after I lost mine, it lost its. The earthquake of September 4 destroyed literally and figuratively much of what Kaiapoi stood for. Ironically it wasn’t the epicentre of the quake but it was the centre of devastation and the people of Kaiapoi have a right to be aggrieved at the unfairness of it all. I am told that many of them are still in shock and the television pictures don’t do justice to the injustice. But if Kaiapoi has lost its innocence and temporarily its charm, it has not lost its resilience. The people of Kaiapoi are bouncing back already, determined to rebuild their town and their lives. And if Kaiapoi is now to be forever remembered for its quake rather than its woollen mills, I hope it will also be remembered as the little town that rocked, then came back.

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The Town I grew Up In

The town I grew up in, Kaiapoi in Canterbury, was very much like any other small New Zealand town in the 50s. It was the epicentre for the largely rural community that surrounded it. The biggest businesses in town were the pubs and the stock and station agents. Kaiapoi also had the world famous (genuinely) Kaiapoi Woollen Mills, but that produced no distinction, no worldly view; Kaiapoi was, like every other small town, proud, parochial, xenophobic and crushingly boring.
Given that, the large cities were also like that, as I remember them.
These days, the cities, with the exception of Hamilton, have changed and changed for the better. Vastly more cosmopolitan, cities have lost all those traits of the 50s including, sadly, pride, particularly in Auckland. But they are at least better; the small towns are not. New Zealand’s small towns are still parochial, xenophobic and crushingly boring but any pride that is left is self-delusional. They are no longer the providers for the back-bone of New Zealand; the backbone of New Zealand is no longer the backbone (one is challenged to find out what is these days) and much of the towns’ workers gravitate temporarily, and their young people permanently, to the cities. They add nothing to those cities, other than a force of worker-ants, but they detract and diminish the town.
Until recently, that trend seemed to be reversing as more and more city dwellers, attracted to the rural lifestyle, were moving to the country, and places such as Rodney where I live growing expotentially and dramatically. But the declining economy put paid to that; people stay put. And the towns, after a brief renewal of hope, have resumed their sad decline.
There was one policeman in the town I lived. He was Jack Highstead. I doubt very much that he ever rose above the rank of constable. But he ruled the town and he protected the town and he didn’t need a stab-proof vest to do it. He’s gone now, of course. But his police station—that epicentre of both fear and reassurance remains. Only now it is a museum; much like the town and much of the country it served.


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