A MEMORY

I've been listening to the excellent Steve Braunias series on National Radio where Braunias reads from his book Twenty Places on the Edge of the World.

Today's story was about Tangimoana. Tangimoana is a Manawatu seaside community just north of the Kapiti Coast and is about a couple of hours drive north of Wellington (5 hours if you are in a car with Richard or Robert driving).

It's a small backwater community of about 200 people who seemingly get by with the help of cigarettes, drugs and alcohol. As a backwater it attracts alternative lifestyle people from the damaged to the artistic. It seems that Braunias (who spent 3 years travelling and researching his book) is attracted to this alternative New Zealand and it certainly makes for good listening.




Tangimoana is the location for the Tangimoana Station, a radio communications interception facility run by the New Zealand Government Communication Security Bureau which feeds information to USA and UK.

Nicky Hager outside Tangimoana Station

There have been protests against this facility over the years and some antagonists believe that it makes New Zealand a terrorist target.

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My first experience of Tangimoana was in the early 1960s. The Wallaces were a neighbourhood family in Wellington who always seemed to have more than others. Back in egalitarian New Zealand of the 1950s and 1960s it was the Wallaces who were the first to have a television set (groups of neighbours would gather at their place to watch) and the Wallace kids always seemed to get the best Christmas presents. Old Man Wallace was a builder, not some sort of tycoon but he must have been doing something right (probably doing cash jobs). They were also the only ones we knew who had a holiday house known in those days as a bach. This bach was at Tangimoana or 'Tangi' as they called it. In my limited knowledge of Maori (now Te Reo Maori) Tangimoana meant a watery grave.






One summer the Wallaces invited me to go with them up to 'Tangi' for a week. This was pretty exciting for a 9 or 10 year old as normally school holidays involved going to stay with relatives in Marlborough or Canterbury and Christmas time meant being packed into the car for the yearly 'road trip' up north.


I remember having a great week staying in the bach which was close to the sea. Tangimoana has a great fishing beach and miles and miles of dunes which were great to play in.

The Wallaces' bach probably looked like this. That sign is prophetic.

New Zealand baches were and are nice and simple being shonkily built and added on to over the years. A good example to see is the display bach on Rangitoto Island which has been preserved for tourists to visit. It has all the Kiwiana of the 1950s and 1960s in situ.

On my first night in the batch I went to bed to sleep on sagging springs and a lumpy kapok mattress with slightly musty flannelette sheets and a candlewick bedcover. One of the Wallace kids got out a cricket bat and, alarmingly started to whack his bed before getting into it. When I asked what the hell (I didn't say 'fuck' in those days) he was doing he told me that rats sometimes made their nests inside the mattresses. I don't to this day know if he was winding me up or not but I can tell you that I hardly got any sleep that night and slept 'suspiciously' for the rest of the week.