More lambs in springtime

Taihape landscape

I am feeling much better today after a sofa bound week. I made another little lamb painting to celebrate.

They say shingles lasts 3-5 weeks and I have had it 4 weeks, so I am hoping this is the elusive corner I have been waiting to turn.

Lambs in springtime

Here are some lambs in springtime, painted from a picture taken years ago in Taihape.

Ewes and lambs in Taihape

My brother, who has had shingles twice, told me yesterday that he got better very gradually, not suddenly as perhaps I had been expecting. I got a watercolour pad out as diversion therapy during the gradual improvement.

Soul in Taihape

Tea at Soul

It is hard to choose a favourite cafe in Taihape because there are three excellent cafes in town but the cafe I particularly like is the Soul Cafe on the main street. They serve the best coffee between Auckland and Wellington and excellent food to boot.

The cafe has that je ne sais quoi ...that certain something that makes cafes work. There is an eclectic mix of chairs and tables, including old treddle sewing machine bases, and a wood burning stove, very popular at this time of year.

The guests are a mix of locals and travellers but the cafe itself feels very Taihape to me. I've been spending a lot of time there for coffee, for lunch.

I will miss their excellent coffee when I leave.

Oven with warming fire

Gumbooted guest with back to the fire

Mt Stewart reserve

Giant gumboot in Taihape

Taihape has made it's name as gumboot capital of the world with a giant corrugated iron gumboot sculpture and annual gumboot throwing competitions.

I took the competition with me when I left and we held gumboot throwing competitions at our street parties in Hamburg amid much mirth. If you have ever tried throwing a gumboot you'll understand about the mirth.

Path up through My Stewart reserve

Today I climbed the path up Mt Stewart which starts just behind the giant gumboot. It is a climb worth the effort because the path through the bush is lovely, though muddy and slippery at the moment.

The view from the top is stunning. You look out over the valley all the way to Mt Ruapehu is covered in snow today.

Mt Ruapehu with Mt Stewart
in the foreground.

Taihape

Sign on a shop door in Taihape

' I must have been mad to come at the coldest time of the year', I thought to myself as I drove north to Taihape but now I am glad I did.

It is true, it is freezing here, as the sign on the shop door says, but there is no wind (a welcome relief after Wellington gales) and the sun is shining.

The first thing I did on reaching Taihape was to drive up Dixon Way to the cemetery which is perched on the top of a hill overlooking the Ruahine Ranges. This after all was the reason for my trip, a visit to my parents grave.

It was glorious on the hilltop, as it usually is.  Looking out over the snow covered Ruahine Ranges under a bright blue sky I understood my parents never wanting to leave, even when so many friends moved to warmer places to retire. We children fretted for them but they were adamant.

The view to the Ruahine Ranges

As I looked around  the cemetery I couldn't help but think they'd be happy now with this glorious view.

Grave: View from above

My mother was an avid gardener and a practical woman and had put some potted succulents, grown for years in her garden until they overflowed the pot, on the tomb of my Dad. We added another for her and there they are, still growing as she knew they would.

All the names on the tombstones were familiar, a reminder of the community that surrounded my parents which they didn't want to leave.  I have the same feeling visiting my grandmother's grave in the hills near Hunterville. The names on the tombstones there are names familiar from my mother's stories, although I never knew the people personally.

Nowadays people have their ashes scattered or their remains are buried in places with time limits on the tombs. How transitory we have become.

Snow but no ice cream

Converging highways in Bulls

Travelling north from Wellington you drive past the several coastal towns of the Kapiti Coast, then along flat (or comparatively flat) ultra-green pastures until you reach Sanson and Bulls. By then it is time for lunch and the Mother Goose cafe on the corner of converging highways in Bulls does a good lunch in pleasant surroundings.

Then on through Hunterville where I thought I would have an ice cream for old times sake (the ice cream in the photo on my profile was from Hunterville) but time thwarted my desire as the ice cream shop has closed. Closed, shut, gone. (Insert sad face here).

Front page, Dominion Post

I drove on to Taihape wondering how low the recent snow might be. Newspapers and TV are full of reports of the weekend snow storms which caused hundreds of power poles to collapse.

Luckily for me the storm was a little north of Taihape which has no lying snow, though it covers neighbouring hills, and still has power.

It would be very cold without heating in this weather and I feel very sorry for the folks affected.

Wool for warmth

Woolly layers

Thank heavens for wool. The first snows have fallen on the ranges to the south of Sydney and we can feel it in the air, even here on the Central Coast. I am grateful for my winter woollies, mostly from the wool shop in Taihape, New Zealand.  

NZ Met Service website

In New Zealand they measure the cold by telling you the number of layers you will need to feel warm. The Met Service website shows the temperature is currently 11C in Wellington but feels like 8C. They recommend three layers plus a windproof layer..
 
Three layers for 8C! That might be adequate for those hardy Wellingtonians, but what about we folk whose blood has run thin after a long hot summer?  Our forecast temperature is 17C for tomorrow, but I am needing three layers even today when it has been warmer. I wonder what the NZ met service would recommend for the thin blooded?

Hamilton Ghost

Top of the charts: Sol3 Mio

I had arranged to stay at my recently-deceased Mother's house for a month, sort out her things and get her house ready for sale. I was also saying goodbye the Taihape, the village I grew up in and had re-visited often as my mother lived there until she was ninety  four.

As I drove out of Taihape I felt the weight of the goodbye sitting with me so I slipped Sol3 Mio into the CD player. It features three New Zealand Samoan singers, two tenors and a Baritone, and is currently top of the charts in New Zealand. They have wonderful voices and they sang me across the desert road. 

My last days in Taihape had been hard ones but I had expected my feeling of oppression to lift as drove north. That didn't happen although the weather was beautiful and as I looked over at Mt Ruapehu rising gracefully from the tussocked hills, I felt sorry to feel so oppressed while in such a beautiful place. Beauty doesn't always help and suddenly I was reminded of the oppression I had felt when driving through the beautiful Bavarian countryside, past the signpost to Dachau.

I drove on past beautiful Lake Taupo, remembering all the holidays we had spent there as children. The waters are crystal clear but it has been a cold summer in New Zealand and the children in the water were hugging their arms about themselves and shivering.

I expected a drab experience in Hamilton where I had booked a bed but it didn't turn out that way.

My accommodation was in a charming old house called Forty Winks in River Road, on the Waikato River. Across the bridge in town the eating houses were buzzing and as I ate my excellent antipasto I realised I would have to  revise my opinion of Hamilton. 

Jim Cooper's ceramics

Opposite the restaurant was the Waikato Museum, with a display of work by Jim Cooper in the Foyer. 

I had to smile when I saw it. You can't help but have your spirits lifted by Jim's work, with its brightly coloured figures and flowers. This display featured a birthday cake and the accompanying text read Unlike other birthday parties this one wont end. It's joy is unceasing. 

Jim had been my ceramics teacher at Dunedin Art School and I have seldom met a more generous person.  

The Waikato River from the bridge in the center of Hamilton.

 The Waikato Museum is open and fresh and has a magnificent Maori canoe on display in pride of place. It is a replica of one used by Maori on the Waikato River but hidden from the destroying settlers during their wars with the Maori in the 19th century.

 As I wandered back over the bridge I nodded to a small rotund Maori woman sitting on a seat nearby.  Ten meters on I stopped to take a picture of the Waikato river, imagining the canoes that would have plied their trade up and down it's banks. 

Then I heard a voice from behind me call, 'Aren't you from here then?'

I turned around to see that the woman had risen and was walking towards me.

 'No,' I said, 'I'm from Sydney.'

'Oh right. Well its a nice view. I grew up here.'

She told me that there were local problems but that all the street kids now had shelters to sleep in so you didn't see them on the streets at night. It had changed since she had lived here as a teenager and had been a street kid herself. Later she had become a mum to lots of other street kids, twenty nine of them in all who still called her mum. She was on a spiritual journey now, she said. She was finding herself, had come down from Ngauruwahia for the night and had slept rough for old times sake. That explained the bits of bush stuck to her cardigan.

I told her I had grown up in Taihape, that my Mother had died two months ago and that I had been back to prepare her place for sale.

'Oh,' she said, 'now I know why our paths crossed. I didn't know before, but now I do.'

She gave me the sweetest of smiles. She was a small woman with a round brown face and she beamed up at me showing a set of perfect white teeth.

'It was hard in Taihape,' I told her.

She nodded and said, 'I want you to know your Mother is fine. I have a gift you see. That is something I can do and I am here to tell you that she wants you to know she is fine.'

The tears rolled down my cheeks and she smiled and patted my arm. I suffer from dry eye syndrome and had wondered if I had lost the ability to weep, but now I knew the tears were still there.

'Yes,' I said. 'I know she is fine where she is. She wouldn't want to be still here. But it is not so easy.'

 My companion asked me which way I was walking and I pointed along the road in the direction of Forty Winks. She said she was going that way too and on we walked.

'Don't be too hard on yourself,' she said, 'you are strong.'

Her own Mother had died at 44 when she was only fourteen and then her Dad had died and she had developed into a teenager with attitude.

'Oh I swore and was bad and I thought I knew everything in those days,' she laughed. 'I was just a pup, was all. But now I am on a spiritual journey myself.'

She asked me if she could use my name, Elizabeth, in her diary and I said of course she may.

Ring made by Mike Ward

She saw the ring on my finger and asked, 'What's that ring then? What is the story there?'

'It came from Nelson,' I told her. 'I found it in an artist's studio. Mike Ward was the name of the artist.'

'Oh Mike Ward,' she said. 'Yes I know him.'

Mike is a New Zealand identity and politician as well as an artist so I was not surprised she knew of him. He was MP for the Greens Party and is now a City Councillor in Nelson. I told her I had bought the ring but that Mike had given me back some of the money and told me he was giving me the pounamu and I was just buying the setting.

'Well,' she said,' pounamu just comes to you. That's right. You should keep wearing that ring. Let it remind you that your Mother is fine where she is.'

We got to Forty Winks and I told her that this was the place I had stayed the night.

'How much is a bed?' she asked.

'Twenty five dollars,' I replied, wondering if she might decide to stay there instead of sleeping rough. I wondered briefly if I should give her the money, but the thought seemed out of place. Then her phone rang and I made to go as she answered it. She smiled as she nodded and turned away.

As I drove the car out of the drive I looked down the road to watch her disappear, but there was no one there. Had she been a ghost I wondered turning to look the other way. No, she hadn't been a ghost; there she was walking back in the direction we had come, a small round figure talking on her phone. Continuing her own journey.

Taihape sunset

Taihape Sunset

Aerial cables are a feature of New Zealand. Cables are buried for aesthetic reasons but I have become fond of aerial cables as I think they add an old fashioned charm to rural towns. They also remind me of seeing deep holes dug for the poles near our farmhouse when I was a child. 

Did we not have power before the early 50s? I read that Nelson was the last region to join the NZ national grid in 1955, so I suppose isolated farms might have been connected in the early 1950s. It is hard to believe now that we are all so dependent on electricity.

This power pole is in Taihape just along from the garden planted by my mother. 

Rose from mother's garden

Ring Cycle holiday

Watching Harry Kupfer's Ring Cycle: what could be a better way to spend the days between Christmas and New Year. I have a Wagner-loving friend staying and we are spending our afternoons with the Ring, . Our mornings are spent at the local library or drinking wonderful coffee (Allpress) at the Soul Food Cafe. I can't think of a better recipe for a holiday.

It was such a pleasure in particular watching the Kupfer Rhinegold. I could feel the images of the recent Melbourne mardi-gras Ring (that I had so disliked) being overwritten in my brain ...

'tis the season

Mooo!

 Seasons greetings from the hills of Taihape!

Hills behind Taihape at dusk

Springtime in my Mother's garden

Irises on the day of my Mother's farewell

At the end of September winter gardens begin to stir in Taihape. The first daffodils flower but leaves are still furled and the dominant colour is still green/brown. Then in October gardens burst into flower with an unexpected abundance. I had been in my mother's garden in October when it was showing the first signs of life; the very first daffodil was out and the tulips were growing. Three weeks later I was there again to bid my Mother farewell (previous post) and the change in her garden was astonishing. Huge irises, luscious cherry blossom, flowers of all shapes and sizes. Suddenly I realised I had not been there in spring before.

Springtime in my Mother's garden, 1 November 2013.

Cherry blossom on the day of my Mother's farewell

New Zealand publications

Why is it that New Zealand has interesting and informative newspapers and magazines while Australia does not? The NZ Listener is a case in point - full of informative articles that are easy to read and leave you better educated. I even became engrossed in the Dominion Post last week - reading a background article on Chechnya that explained the Boston bombing and another one about ways that progressive farmers are adapting their farming practices to help against global warming. I had a look to see if it is online as I would subscribe to a paper that had decent news coverage ... but the articles I read in the paper are not online. Perhaps it is syndicated? If I can't read the interesting stuff why would I subscribe?

Dominion Post on a Cafe table made from old treadle sewing machine
(at Soul Food Cafe in Taihape)

Brown, white and mixed

Sitting in the cafe in Taihape looking at my coffee, I can't help thinking that the townsfolk and the coffee are similar .... a bit brown a bit white and a bit mixed. I  grew up in a truly bi-cultural place and when I return I am reminded why being Pakeha is such a significant part of my identity even after so many years of living far way from this place.

Coffee at Soul Food, Taihape (it was strong and delicious)

New Zealand Central Plateau

New Zealand, North Island Central District Highlands

The central plateau of New Zealand's North Island where I grew up is a spectacular landscape and when I return for a visit now I find myself continually reaching for my camera. I grew up on the road between Taihape and Napier and in hot summers we swam in the Rangitikei river,  a spot now popular with tourists for white water rafting.

This year when I visited the distant blue hills were augmented by early autumn colours.


This little old church in a field to the north of Taihape led me to contemplate the life of our forefathers, those who settled this area in the 19th century.

Power pole and old shed

Church in a field near Taihape, Rangitikei District

When my parents settled in the area there was no power but in 1954 the farmers brought it in themselves. I remember Dad and our neighbours digging very deep holes on the clay ground outside the house for the power poles; perhaps one of my earliest memories.

Roads had been cut into the clay to allow farmers to settle the land and some of them, like the road below, continue to make work for the local council when heavy rain causes slips.

Roads cut into the steep clay hills

I missed the hills when I left home and I also missed the enormous cumulus clouds that so often drift overhead. Somehow clouds in other places are never quite the same.

Old main road, north of Taihape in the Rangitikei

Bluebells in the Brown Sugar Cafe

Another of the cafes in Taihape that make excellent coffee is the Brown Sugar Cafe. Behind the cafe is a pretty garden. I painted the bluebells in the Brown Sugar Cafe in 2004. Here is a card of the painting

Brown Sugar Cafe, Taihape, New Zealand : Card
by elizabethgw

Soul Food in Taihape

Taihape has several cafes and they all make excellent coffee. One of them is the Soul Food Cafe in the middle of the main street. Their coffee is strong and dark and delicious!

Soul Food Cafe in Taihape, NZ.
Note the stove pipe... a fire would be very welcome on a cold winter's day.

High country New Zealand

The mountains Ruapehu, Ngauruhoe and Tongariro are just north of Taihape where I grew up. Below is a watercolour of Mt Ruapehu, painted from Waiaruhe Road just south of Waiouru on Highway 1, or what we used to call 'the main trunk road'.  New Zealand high country countryside is stunning and I paint it every time I visit.

Mt Ruapehu, NZ

I'll be back in Taihape later this month, visiting my Mother who still lives there. Her place is almost opposite the tall blue Taihape town clock .

Taihape, New Zealand Card by elizabethgw

The Hills of Home

This photo was taken from Cemetary Hill in Taihape looking south. It is cold there at the moment  - there is snow on the Ruahine ranges which you can just about see in the photo if you enlarge it, though small digital cameras don't see nearly as much as our eyes.

Its the view the alpaca and goats have from their paddock.

Alpaca and Goat

Farmers don't just farm sheep and cattle in Taihape (middle of the north Island in New Zealand) -  for years now they have farmed many and varied species. This photo was taken on a hill farm. The white alpaca was very friendly ... as was the goat who came over and wanted his nose rubbed.