Jillian Sullivan - Map for the Heart: Ida Valley Essays

Published by Otago University Press

Te Whare T o Te Wnanga o tkou

533 Castle Street

Dunedin, New Zealand

www.otago.ac.nz/press

First published 2020

Copyright Jillian Sullivan

The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

ISBN 978-1-98-859256-5 (print)

ISBN 978-1-99-004822-7 (EPUB)

ISBN 978-1-99-004823-4 (Kindle mobi)

ISBN 978-1-99-004824-1 (ePDF)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of New Zealand. This book is copyright. Except for the purpose of fair review, no part may be stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including recording or storage in any information retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. No reproduction may be made, whether by photocopying or by any other means, unless a licence has been obtained from the publisher.

Published with the assistance of Creative New Zealand

Editor: Imogen Coxhead

Cover: Rachel Hirabayashi, Central landforms, acrylic on canvas. www.rachelhirabayashi.co.nz

Author photo: Darren Simmonds

Ebook conversion 2021 by meBooks

for Brian

The loveliest places of all

are those that look as if

theres nothing there

to those still learning to look.

Brian Turner

Contents

Late autumn , and once again its time for the firewood we gathered through summer jaunts across the paddock to the old willows, cracked and split in storms, for the branches they delivered on top of fence lines and into the damp gullies. Fire crackles and brightens the room at night, though in Auckland, perhaps, warm still rules. Here, the wind presses up to the windows, whoos and blusters around the house. The clouds foretell a time soon to come when snow will lie on the hills and rocks and, if the wind is from the north, on my boots on the verandah and the twigs for the fire.

Before my first big snowfall here, the locals had checked with me: Are you ready for the storm? Yes, Id said, but I had shifted down from Motueka and didnt know the power of cold. On the first morning, the snowplough half-buried my car. Snow lay half a metre thick over my unprotected firewood pile. In the village, gutters collapsed under the weight of it, and in the hills, farmers and volunteers, helicoptered to the tops, tramped pathways in a chain to bring the sheep down to safety.

To live here is to come to terms with the dominance of nature. When the snow melted, the Ida Burn stream on my boundary thrashed and swirled over its banks. My paddocks, from the first ditch to the neighbours hill, became one writhing stretch of water. When it was over there were new grey shapes by the trees, sifted sand delivered by the flood. I took Roman architect Vitruviuss words to heart. Where there is no pit sand, we must use the kinds washed up by rivers or by the sea, he wrote over 2000 years ago, and other problems we must solve in similar ways. Buckets of sand, carried from the stream, became part of the last coat of earth plaster on the house (one part sand, one part clay, one part straw, one part water, half a part sawdust). Rubbed on by hand, baked by sun, it became a thick, undulating shell protecting the straw walls from rain.

I didnt know what vernacular architecture was when I drew sketches for my strawbale home. Ive since come to understand its the architecture that arises from place. It fits the weather, the landscape, the culture, the materials, and is often built with community help.

The early Mori who first came to this tussock-covered valley built round huts thatched with tussock. The goldminers and farmers built with rock and earth and limestone. If there was timber to be had for floors and ceilings, it came on the ships that brought the pioneers here. My strawbale house echoes the high-pitched roofs of the early cottages. The straw came from a farm near Gore, the clay from a site thirty minutes up the valley, the lime from a quarry over the Pigroot, an hour away. The milk for the lime wash came in buckets from a farm across Rough Ridge in Gimmerburn, fetched one foggy morning when the mist made dark shapes of the cows and the gravel road curved into cloud.

In fact, strawbale building came out of a vernacular tradition. When the baling machine was invented in 1820, the people of Nebraska, a place where little timber was to be had, turned to what was available locally bales of straw and began to build with those, incorporating the new structure of bales into the age-old method of using straw and mud to build shelter.

Building ones own home is not just an enterprise of the past. British architectural historian Paul Oliver wrote in 2003 that vernacular dwellings, built by owners and inhabitants using locally available resources, are presently believed to constitute about 90 percent of the worlds total housing stock. It is essential, Oliver said, that vernacular traditions are supported, to address our community and global shortage of housing. Bring on the earth, the straw and the grandmothers, I say.

The people who helped build my house came from across New Zealand, and also from right here: from next door, from up the road, from the next valley. When they walk in, the hints of their handprints are still in the walls. They know this house, from the scent of golden stalks to the acid cream of lime. Their kindness and strength is in this house, their mortality and mine in the walls that will continue beyond us, like the rock walls half formed into the sides of hills, the uncapped mud huts, the chimneys beside the Manuherekia all testament to people who arrived and shaped a dwelling for themselves and their neighbours.

In the days after my marriage ended and before my shift to Central Otago and all that ensued, I thought of American mythologist Joseph Campbells quote, that life is an unremitting series of deaths and births. Old life gone. New life begins. Campbell spoke of the journey a hero must make the quest that is chosen, or the path the reluctant hero must find. But how? And where?

Choosing

(for Nick and Bex)

How do you know

which hills and sky and water

will be your home,

the place where you long to return?

Theres the unexpected beauty of light

in city structures on a lengthening night

beside the sea,

the dark of furrowed loam,

an alabaster cottage, sheen of calm tide

through a wheelhouse window.

What of a river? Under the resilient arms

of willows, whatever the water says

over brown and shining stones,

youll know if it is meant for you.

How do you choose

which rocks and trees and soil

will be your own?

Sometimes just by standing still

there with your feet on earth where you have landed

youll feel the way two cogs within you

settle into unison,

power your heart, gain traction.

And when a bird lifts in the sky above you

something in your own heart

flings forward with a gust of joy,

the way a hawk soars, wing-feathers fanned,

riding the currents of desire

in a wide blue territory of sky.

I first saw the Ida Burn from a bridge: a coppery, shining pathway bounded by trees. Thered been nothing to tell me the swampy piece of land for sale beside the main road had anything of such beauty. Only a scrawl of willows along the far boundary. The Ida Burn it flows down the Ida Valley and, uniquely, is met by a stream flowing from the opposite direction, the Poolburn. Joined, it heads through the Poolburn Gorge between the Raggedy Range and Blackstone Hill, where viaducts rise and rail tunnels lead cyclists into the dark of the land and out again.