Notes from a Badland

Scott Hamilton

RS: The italicised passages in this text come from comments left on social media about Dome Valley.

---

Kawakawa part politely as we enter Dome Valley. The plant's pitted green tongues seem to be trying to say something, but when I stop to listen I can only hear the wind's beautiful nonsense. I wonder whether I will be able to impress Robert with this place. He has been telling stories about the outback of his native Canada, about kayak rolling and lumberjacking. This wilderness must seem quaint after the Canadian Shield, Hudson Bay, Terror Point. Dome Valley and the Waiwhiu Ranges that surround it cover only fifty square kilometres, but they have become crammed with myth. More than a few of the inhabitants of Warkworth/Puhinui, the small town town just south of the valley, refuse to venture here, especially at night. This is a place where UFOs hover over treetops, where skeletal hitch hikers flag down cars then evaporate, where ghosts flare through the fog and rain.

My auntie saw these little guys come out of the trees. Like very short people, but not people. She freaked. She's a slow driver, a typical granny in her Morris Minor, but she went from sixty to a tonne in three seconds. She was out of there man.

Two winters ago a Youtuber camped in this valley, having heard of its reputation. He had appealed for scary stories from locals, and scary stories had poured into his facebook page, along with a number of warnings. The late Ross Gibson had a name for places like this. Gibson wrote Seven Versions of an Australian Badland, a superb book about the so-called 'horror stretch' of road between Mackay and Rockhampton, a place Queenslanders associate with motiveless murders and highly motivated ghosts.

Before we reach Pōhuehue Stream, Robert and I can hear the riverine murmur of State Highway One, which enters Dome Valley a kilometre or so to our north. Local media have nicknamed Dome Valley 'the killing fields', because so many cars that enter it become two thousand kilogram coffins.

Not sure if it's supernatural exactly but everyone's heard about the spooky weather. Like a wall of fog is suddenly there disguising a bend. A car ends up wrapped round a trunk.

Fantails follow us down to the stream, and I tell Robert about the local belief that they contain the spirits of car crash victims. In some Māori traditions, tīwaiwaka are messengers between the human and supernatural realms. It was one of these tiny birds that defeated Māui, by alerting Hine-nui-te-pō, goddess of the underworld, that the grandiose trickster was trying to enter the cave of her vagina. The goddess closed her legs, crushing Māui. Fantails trailed the Youtuber through the valley, even climbing onto his camera.

There was a guy a few years ago who parked his car on the side of the road in beautiful weather. Left the door open. Walked into the bush and just disappeared. Lots of UFOs seen there too. They're black and triangular. Might not be alien though - could be a secret weapons programme. The Americans would never tell us.

In his report from Dome Valley, the Youtuber discussed local sightings of a goatman, a stinking creature with hooves and a shaggy body, and horns that curve like waves. This goatman might be a bogan version of the faun-god Pan, but he also has Māori precursors. In Atua Wera, his epic poem about Papahurihia, the anti-colonial prophet and tohunga to Hone Heke, Kendrick Smithyman describes a Hokianga goatman, a being Māori inhabitants of that district have glimpsed on remote roads at dusk. The goatman might be an avatar of Papahurihia, or a creation of his spirit; only those who are soon to die can see him. Judith Binney records the same creature in her study of Papahurihia traditions. Are the nightmares of two peoples fusing in this valley?

This stream flows into the Mahurangi, a river whose name is foreign to Ngāti Manuhiri, the people with mana whenua over this part of Aotearoa. It belonged to another iwi, one not specified in oral tradition. Ngāti Manuhiri call their awa Waihē. I love the name of the ranges that have made this valley. Waiwhiu combines the word for water with the onomatopoeic whiu. Whiu: the sound of streams rushing. Is there a more watery toponym in Aotearoa?

Don't run out of gas there bro.

'Why isn't this area better known?' Robert asks. 'It's beautiful.' The Waiwhiu Ranges rise rather than tower over Warkworth. If their hills were in Denmark or Tonga or East Anglia they would induce vertigo. Painters would set up easels before them. Poets would salute their fearful heights. In Aotearoa, a land of mountains, they are almost invisible. South Islanders might dispute whether they even deserve to be called ranges. In Janet Frame's State of Siege, a novel that dwells on the irreconcilable differences between our islands, a southern character mocks the way inhabitants of Te Ika a Māui give the title mountain to puny peaks.

But height is relative. My mother grew up in the far north of Victoria, near Mount Wycheproof, which she learned to call the smallest mountain in the world. It rises only a few score metres, yet gives panoptic views across the Mallee Plains. When one of my uncles from the Mallee visited Wellington the city's hills and windy climbing roads made him sweat with panic. He vowed never to return. I once trekked with some students from that flat island Tongatapu up the modest highland of the neighbouring but little-visited island of 'Eua. They were very fit, but soon began to puff and take rest breaks by the trail. Not only their bodies but their minds were unaccustomed to any sort of altitude.

-There's a hermit who lives in there. He likes to freak people out. He'll light fires and the smoke looks like ghosts. He'll jack your car if you leave it for a walk.

- How do you know the hermit isn't a ghost smartarse?

Robert is reading a puriri. He closes his eyes and runs a hand over the braille of its trunk, dipping fingers into the bulletholes made by moths. It wasn't until I visited the grim grey cube of London that I realised how necessary trees are to my existence. I was able to live in Tāmaki Makaurau for most of my life only because it is both a city and a forest, whose groves and orchards disregard fences and roads with their roots.

Beyond Robert's friend I see a poplar: an anomaly, a statistical error, amidst the natives. Half its leaves have gone. I've been teaching my youngest how to say deciduous. It might be my favourite word. The first syllables are trembling branches; the third comes from the back of the mouth and drops like a tomo; the last makes the soft sad sound of half-wet leaves underfoot.

By the time Van Gogh painted his poplars at Saint-Remy members of Te Kooti's Ringatū church were planting the tree in Te Ika a Māui. Today sacred groves stand tall near the prophet's last home at Ohiwa, and on the site of the village he established in exile in the King Country, and near marae he opened across this island. Te Kooti never came to this valley, but this poplar reminds me of him nonetheless. He was a paradox, a man who executed prisoners but preached peace, and he seems to have made the poplar a paradoxical symbol. Te Kooti taught that the cross on Golgotha was made from the tree; he also carried a whip made from a poplar sapling.

I firmly believe that intentions count. If you go into the forest and do stupid shit, starting fires and shooting birds, then the forest is going to freak you out later when you curl up in your tent. You'll hear things and maybe see things that will make you regret what you did. You will not stay another night. But if you are a kaitiaki, if you take away nothing but photographs and leave nothing but footprints like we did, then you will be sweet. You will have an easy ride.

Indo-European languages have dominated Europe for millennia, evolving and splitting and reinventing themselves, but the continent's maps and literature are haunted by ancient, enigmatic names. Odysseus is the most famous of all Greeks, real or imaginary, but his name was bequeathed by a pre-Hellenic people, a nation destroyed or assimilated or driven away by Homer's ancestors. The Māori name for The Dome, the highest peak in the Waiwhiu Range, is Tohitohi-o-Rei. Rei is, some local traditions say, short for Reipe, who was a female tohunga on Hawai'iki, the island that shimmers beyond the borders of every map of the Pacific. Reipe's whakapapa is disputed, and no one is sure who brought her name to this rohe. Old toponyms can be doors into the dark.

Biased colonial ethnographers associated tohungaism with men, and the association has become fixed in many minds. But the maunga above us silently dissents from this consensus. 'It's only a few miles, but we feel a long way from town' Robert says. The stream has disappeared, and the shrubs and small trees press against us, like a crowd of tipsy well-wishers.

It's all bullshit about the Dome being special. There are ghosts everywhere.

Ross Gibson used Freud to argue that whatever colonists repressed returned in new guises. The crazed carjackers on that Queensland highway were psychic descendants of Aboriginal guerrilla parties that raided the plots of armed, vicious, and terrified pioneers. The indigenes were chased off the best land, and later kidnapped Melanesians who had toiled to build up sugar plantations were deported en masse, with only a few escaping into the bush and becoming the ancestors of today's flourishing South Sea Islander community. Fin de siecle Queenslanders were, Gibson argues, obsessed with racial purity and the danger of violence. Disturbed by the persistence of indigenous and South Sea Islander communities in the bush beyond their farms, outraged by friendships and marriages across the colour bar they had tried to raise, conservative Queenslanders needed psychic protection. They found it in the notion of a badland, a place where the violent retribution they feared they deserved could be contained, quarantined. The highway and its environs became that badland. They could focus their fears on a strip of tarseal and its scrubby margins, and make their plantations and their tight little towns seem safe.

Does Dome Valley serve the same function, for some of those who fear it? In 1865 hundreds of Waikato prisoners of war escaped from internment on a hulk off Governor Grey's Kawau Island. They paddled waka supplied by Ngāti Manuhiri and another local iwi, Ngāti Rongo, landing on the Tāwharanui peninsula at a place that became known as Māori Bay. The fugitives roamed through this district, building a hilltop pa on the maunga Tamahunga, raiding homesteads for food, upsetting settlers' ideas of racial hierarchy. Some eventually returned to the Waikato and Te Rohe Pōtae, but others intermarried with Ngāti Manuhiri.

There were other intruders. In the 1890s the local council waged a xenophobic struggle against 'Austrian aliens'—Dalmatians who came here to escape conscription in the Ottoman army and to dig gum. 'Gum Rangers' were appointed to hunt down and arrest Dalmatians who entered gum reserves meant for 'British' New Zealanders. Today at least a part of the population of Rodney District remains prejudiced and fearful. Billboards on the road to Snell's Beach advertise the anti-Māori outfit Hobson's Pledge, and warn that Pākehā could lose access to beaches and forests to a 'radical minority'. Shane Jones packed out the Warkworth Town Hall when he came here to mock environmentalists and decry the 'wrong' sort of immigrant. Perhaps some Warkworthians need a badland in which to sequester their fears.

Some freaky shit for sure.

Robert and I follow the track away from the river, through long grass in fields that are framed by old, knock-kneed fences. Kānuka reconnoitre this newly acquired parkland at the edge of the forest. We are heading west, towards Streamlands, the area where soldier-settlers laboured to turn swampy overpriced blocks into farms in the twenties. The trenches of the Somme and Gallipoli were redug as drainage canals; barbed wire was spread to stop stray cattle, not Turks. Old newspapers carry reports of suicides and mortgagee sales. Aotearoa teems with ghost towns: kāinga destroyed by war or confiscation, and memorialised by a ring of karaka trees or kūmara pits; miners' towns that did not outlast mineral deposits; bush clearings where 'shirkers' from conscription found refuge.

Were the old soldiers at Streamlands troubled by the way they had fought their war? Many had served in the Middle East in the Auckland Mounted Rifles. The Ottomans called these men 'devils on horses', and their behaviour could be satanic. The devils fought their way through Sinai, Palestine, and Syria, and are remembered today for massacring scores of civilians in the Palestinian village of Surafend, weeks after the end of the war. That was not their only atrocity. Now we puff our way uphill, as the kanuka drop off and cow turds lie like mines on fields of short grass. I would like to find a thread, as obscure and real as the Waihē, that flows from the repressed histories of this district—the Kīngitanga fugitives and paranoid Gum Rangers and massacres in distant lands—to the ghosts and monsters that haunt Dome Valley today.

_