Fast Car

1988

One evening RTR Countdown plays the new music video of a song that will quickly gain regular radio airtime. It’s by an African American woman named Tracy Chapman who has short, spiky dreadlocks and it’s called “Fast Car”.

Something about the song strikes a chord with this scrawny pakeha kid from Napier, New Zealand, despite the singer and song appearing so very different to my life at the time.

You got a fast car
I want a ticket to anywhere
Maybe we make a deal
Maybe together we can get somewhere
Any place is better
Starting from zero got nothing to lose
Maybe we’ll make something
Me, myself, I got nothing to prove

While Napier is my entire existence in 1988, I realize it is merely a small part of a much bigger planet, but It’s a good starting point. At ten years old my life and the world lie ahead of me.

That’s 10-11 year old me in yellow, middle row, second from the left.

“Fast Car” will continue to develop and deepen each time I hear it over the coming years. Every time I hear it there will be different meaning in it for me.

1993-95

“You got a fast car
I got a plan to get us outta here
I been working at the convenience store
Managed to save just a little bit of money
Won’t have to drive too far
Just ‘cross the border and into the city
You and I can both get jobs
And finally see what it means to be living”

I got my first job at Onekawa New World supermarket – a “convenience store” in American parlance – in 1993 for about a year and started earning my own money.

Some time in 1994 I bought my first “Fast Car” – A ’69 (nice!) Ford Anglia, which my Dad helped me paint and get in good running order. The Anglia enabled me to “cross the border” between Napier and Hastings – the Tutaekuri and Ngaruroro river bridges. Owning a car is also a really big step on the way to “adulthood”.

My first car, Circa 1994

Chorus

“So I remember when we were driving, driving in your car
Speed so fast it felt like I was drunk
City lights lay out before us
And your arm felt nice wrapped ’round my shoulder
And I-I had a feeling that I belonged
I-I had a feeling I could be someone, be someone, be someone”

OK, my first car was nowhere near “fast”, I didn’t go very far, and I sure as hell never drove drunk, but owning a car did provide mobility – A highly intoxicating drug for any teenager.

Driving back to Napier from Hastings at night the city’s lights are gorgeous – all the house and street lights on Napier Hill (Mataruahou) look like a sparkling, multi-jeweled crown.

While I wouldn’t so much as hold hands with a girl until 1998 (not for lack of trying!), so snuggling-and-driving was out of the question, I DID feel like I belonged at home with my family.

We were a small unit, but we were tight, and we loved each other.

I wanted to be “someone”, too – A journalist with Napier’s Daily Telegraph newspaper, or a radio announcer at Bay City Radio, where I had gotten a taste of airtime as a “Co-Pilot” on their Sunday morning kids’ show.

Maybe one day I might even end up on TV?

I was a panelist on RNZ’s “The Panel” six times between 2018 & 2019.
The briefest of National Radio exposure

1996-1998

See, my old man’s got a problem
He live with the bottle, that’s the way it is
He says his body’s too old for working
His body’s too young to look like his
My mama went off and left him
She wanted more from life than he could give
I said somebody’s got to take care of him
So I quit school and that’s what I did

While my Dad wasn’t a drinker and Mum never left us, Dad did have a heart attack around 1997. As I’ve written about before, my parents had me quite late in life and Dad was nearing retirement age not long after I finished school. Not long after the heart attack he ended up taking early retirement. His work and hobbies had always been quite physical and taxing, so it wasn’t too surprising.

We still managed to live happily, never struggling financially despite Dad’s solo income or pension being far less than I would end up earning later in life.

Rather than going to university like so many of my schoolmates, I ended up working back in the same supermarket I had my first job in. I didn’t know what I wanted to do, but I knew I didn’t want to spend three years of my life and $30-50,000 on a student loan to STILL not know, so working on the checkout and stacking shelves provided a regular, albeit reasonably small, income and kept me closer to my parents who I was now starting to worry about.

(The line about quitting school to look after a sick relative also reminds me of Toby Morris’ exquisite cartoon “On a Plate” that (very rightly) never fails to anger me.)

In December 1995 I landed my dream job as a midnight-to-dawn radio announcer on Saturday nights at Hot 93 in Hastings after doing work experience and an in-house course at the station during my last year of Tamatea High School.

I worked at the supermarket during the day, went home, had dinner and travelled out to the station around 11pm to be on air from midnight until 6am. It was physically and mentally draining. Management decisions hardly helped.

At first we were allowed to talk between every few songs, like normal radio announcers. But a few months in we were told we were only allowed to play music. It defeated the purpose of being a “radio announcer“.

Aside from manually queuing up and playing the preset lists of songs on stacks of the station’s compact discs (things were far from digital in 1995/6) we also had menial tasks like doing the dishes and vacuuming the station offices. You got pretty good at being able to do certain tasks in the three and a half minutes it took for most songs to play, then get back into the studio in time to seamlessly start the next song. I didn’t mind doing the cleaning, as it was the sort of things the youngest/newest staff members just did when they started jobs, and it helped pass the long dark hours.

But after being silenced on air us midnight-till-dawners just became some sort of “manual automation”. Taking off secondary tax it soon didn’t even pay enough to get to Hastings and back every weekend, either.

Not long after I left midway through 1996 the graveyard shift was digitally automated/simulcast and what had been the entry point for regional broadcasters for years ceased to exist.

My dream radio career had lasted six months.

You got a fast car
Is it fast enough so we can fly away?
We gotta make a decision
Leave tonight or live and die this way”

2001-2004

“You got a fast car
We go cruising, entertain ourselves
You still ain’t got a job
And I work in the market as a checkout girl
I know things will get better
You’ll find work and I’ll get promoted
We’ll move out of the shelter
Buy a bigger house and live in the suburbs”

I got a job at Dymocks Booksellers in Napier in 2000. I met my future wife while working there in 2001. She ended up working there part time, too, and would go on to work in the book trade much longer than I did.

Our boss, Jeff, was very good and managed to organize it so we had our “weekends” (usually Wednesday and Thursday from memory) together. We had a fair bit of disposable income and planned to get a flat together at some stage in the near future.

In 2023 the store was bought by new owners, who interviewed us all and asked what our plans / goals were. I said after three years I’d like to move up and become some sort of manager eventually.

The new owners fired all the incumbent staff and took on new employees when they took over.

My wife got immediately head-hunted by a bookshop down the road. She would go back to working at Dymocks until its closure under even newer owners who took over after the owners who fired us failed.

I got a job as an Assistant Manager (the shop had only two staff including myself) at a video game store in the CBD a month after the bookshop let us go. This was “Big Money” in 2023: $10 per hour!

While still living at our respective homes the double income allowed us to regularly go out to the movies, have coffee and dessert on long Hawke’s Bay evenings and go for aimless drives.

We even found a flat with very good landlords who charged below market rates that allowed us to move in together in my childhood suburb of Tamatea!

There’s just something special about sunsets over Tamatea, as the big, golden orb dips below the Poraiti hills..

2004-2023

“You got a fast car
I got a job that pays all our bills
You stay out drinking late at the bar
See more of your friends than you do of your kids
I’d always hoped for better
Thought maybe together you and me’d find it
I got no plans, I ain’t going nowhere
Take your fast car and keep on driving”

In 2004 I was finally able to leave low-paying retail after a decade when I got a job in the same company (and office) as my (now fiancée’s) father and our income more than doubled.

I was only supposed to be for a year to cover maternity leave, but the lady who held my position previously decided not to return and I would remain in the job for the next 20 years – a massive change from what had been a natural three-year cycle in different retail jobs.

It meant job security and stability during some very unstable times in my life.

Between 2004 and 2023 my life was a rollercoaster of:

Not to mention all the interior and exterior crises of regular life, coming to grips with parenthood, and still trying to figure out how to be an adult.

I’ll certainly never be a “deadbeat dad” and have tried to be as involved as I can in our daughter’s life – Going on school trips, coaching her cricket team, doing all I can to ensure she knows she matters, is loved and can do her best.

I’ve sacrificed time, money, and opportunities for my family’s security, but that’s just what you do as a Dad. Right?

Sadly, security is no panacea for the feeling of stagnation when your own life and career goals fail to materialize after years and years of trying to effect change for yourself.

Despite two decades of loyal service and dedication to my job, doing odd hours and going above and beyond, often working solo and still meeting work targets, I still haven’t risen from the position I inherited 20 years ago.

Being unsuccessful in both internal promotions and finding a new career closer to what I actually want to do started to ulcerate some time ago.

I have had so many plans, but I’ve gone nowhere.

But there is still Hope.

Seeing people like Ke Huy Quan and Brendan Fraser win Academy Awards in 2023 showed that good guys with dreams can still get there in middle age, despite decades of feeling redundant or inadequate.

In 2023 Tracy Chapman became the first Black woman to have written a country music number one. She also becomes the first Black woman to win a Country Music Association award for “Fast Car”, 35 years after the song was first released, when Luke Combs’ cover of her song won “Song of the Year”.

2024

“You got a fast car
Is it fast enough so you can fly away?
You gotta make a decision
Leave tonight or live and die this way”

Throughout “Fast Car” there is a beat that ticks away like an old analogue clock, and a plinky-plonky acoustic guitar riff that repeats over and over and sounds like water dripping constantly, endlessly.

I can’t and won’t leave my family, as my daughter is the best thing I have. But I can’t keep going without catching a break.

There is a stage where the line “live and die this way” stops being a way of life and becomes an imminent threat.

The snare and high-hat tick away like a clock. The plinky-plonky acoustic guitar riff repeats over and over, like water dripping constantly, endlessly.

Topsy-Turvy AF

I’ve had a topsy-turvy time of it recently.

Bottle Rocket

While we avoided any damage or loss from Cyclone Gabrielle at home I did lose my Rocket Lab drink bottle, along with some other personal mementos when my office flooded with silt, mud and water.

I’d received the bottle in a “Thank You” package from the kiwi aerospace pioneers after writing a piece praising their efforts helping Hawke’s Bay reach for the stars that appeared in Hawke’s Bay Today years ago. I loved it and used it regularly.

I sent a message on social media to the comms person who sent me the original package asking if they had any more bottles to replace my lost one. I would be happy to pay for it.

They said they would send me one free of charge and the next week a box much larger than just a drink bottle arrived containing a coffee mug, tote bag, mission patch T-shirt, stickers, medallion… and new steel drink bottle!

It was a very cool, unexpected lift after a few wibbly-wobbly working-from-home weeks.

Napier in Frame in Print and Online

My piece about Napier’s Cyclone Gabrielle blackout and isolation was published in The Spinoff as their Sunday Essay on the 5th of March and was well received with good feedback online and in person (but I’ll have to wait until 2024 to see if the essay is nominated for a Voyager Award..).

I wasn’t immediately flooded with offers of employment or writing commissions, but I did coincidently get asked to write my first piece in a while for Baybuzz on Wairoa’s post Cyclone Gabrielle recovery for their May print edition.

There were some difficulties getting the article written, as finding the wide range of people we initially wanted to cover proved harder than expected. Some didn’t want to take part, others proved hard to contact (for many in Hawke’s Bay affected by the cyclone “Business as Usual” is still far, far away) and receiving responses on deadline day resulted in an article re-write while I was in the middle of a week’s leave from my day job in the first week of school holidays.

I got there in the end and my editor liked it, but for me it wasn’t accompanied with the usual sense of completion or satisfaction. 

I’ve been struggling for positivity recently.

Do not Pass Go 

I applied for a new job earlier this year. I had a basic screening interview for it, and a week later Cyclone Gabrielle hit.

Naturally plans and hopes of the new job went out the window.

My workplace was flooded and wrecked.

Fortunately, we had been told to prepare to work from home on the Tuesday the storm hit, so I had all the gear I needed to work from home with me. In the flooding’s aftermath our company’s owners said they were dedicated to continuing and rebuilding, so my job and income was safe.

I was back working remotely before some of my colleagues even had power restored. A little over six weeks after the cyclone we had new, temporary, offices to work out of. Some semblances of work normality, but a different location, different surroundings, different processes and habits to form. Familiar and unfamiliar. All just slightly unbalancing.     

A fortnight or so after Gabrielle my phone rang.

I got an interview for the new job I had applied for weeks earlier.

I felt the interview went well.

When they asked why I was looking at leaving my current job I answered honestly – Despite 18+ years of my dedication and service there was a lack of opportunity. I had been overlooked for a promotion recently and outright ignored for internal positions I had applied for previously.

They thanked me for my honesty and providing context and said treating established staff that way was not their company policy.

I though “Great – I’ll get a chance here!” 

I left feeling positive about the opportunity that was potentially before me.

But I also felt guilty to be potentially leaving my colleagues in these uncertain and unstable times.

I needn’t have worried.

A couple weeks later I received a call to say my application was unsuccessful.

When I asked why, or how I could improve my chances last time they said I had the skills and talent, but it was because I was “too negative” about my current job.

“Too negative”? 

If I was completely positive and happy about my current position why would I be applying for a job elsewhere?

During the interview they had said they understood why I would tell them my reasons for wanting to move on and that how I had been treated didn’t seem fair.

But now that was “too negative”?

I was being honest!

I was sick of being undermined, ignored or micromanaged by people who benefitted from my work more than I did – That’s why people change jobs!

This wasn’t just stopping me finally getting the sort of job I had been after for years, where talents I don’t currently get a chance to use enough could be recognised, developed and rewarded, It was basically saying I wasn’t allowed to feel aggrieved or call it out unfair treatment.

I somehow DESERVE to be denied career development or progress and spend almost 20 years doing the same thing every day, every week, every month, every year.

But I’m not allowed to be or feel “negative” about it?!

I give up!  

House Keeping

For the past year we have been negotiating to sell my childhood home to my in-laws, who want to subdivide the section and build themselves a new, smaller retirement house down the back of what must be one of the last (almost) quarter-acre sections on its street.

Selling my old home will pay off our mortgage (and every other debt, loan, credit card etc. we have) several times over (we bought our house almost ten years ago before real estate succumbed to surreal prices) and free us up financially – Something not many people can do these days. 

My in-laws plan to live in my old home while construction goes on down the back, and then sell it off to recoup some costs upon completion. With Cyclone Gabrielle reconstruction already pushing builders and building supplies to local limits, it might be quite a task!  

Nevertheless, they decided to go ahead with the plan a few weeks after the cyclone hit.

As part of the deal, we had to give our long-term tenants notice of end of tenancy.

I felt guilty as hell.

They had been our tenants since we’d had to move mum into care years ago and looked after the place wonderfully. They tidied the house and section up after mum had been incapable of doing so, even improving bits and pieces like replacing old kitchen benches and bedroom carpets.

It was our house, but it was their home.

Renting out the house was never about money for us and because they looked after it so well, we charged them about half what market rents apparently were.

But I still felt horrible giving them their 90 days’ notice – Especially having even just a general idea of Napier’s rental market and how much more rents were likely to be.

As it happened, they found a place in Havelock North (Napier was just too expensive) only about a fortnight later, so my overdramatized fears of them being out on the street were, thankfully, unfounded.

It did mean, however, that I had to get back in and totally clear out the last of Mum and Dad’s things that I had left stored in the garage and shed on the property, as they would all be coming down as part of the subdivision.

Dad’s shed and garage are still sacred ground that I hadn’t had the heart, nerve, or storage space to strip of their contents when we first rented my old home out. The tenants had been able to use these sheds, but so much of Dad’s stuff remained I didn’t (and to a degree still don’t) know how or where to start.

I started making slow in-roads over recent afternoons and weekends, initially muttering “Sorry, Dad! Sorry, Dad!” guiltily as I went.

I can already see the piles going to the tip, metal recyclers and auction house / charity will be immense. Never mind all the ancient paints, cleaners, varnishes and weedkillers that will need to be taken away by hazardous waste removal.

Always the tallest kid in class, I was also always at the back, in the middle for school photos.

First Star to the Left and on till Mourning

It’s not just the waste that’s hazardous – As I go through all the stuff I’m flooded with memories.

Memories of Dad and Mum, memories directly related to certain items and just memories of my first home.

Some memories clear and present, others foggy and indistinct.

Also, a fear of losing memories.

The former house of one of my Dad’s closest friends down the road from their place went up for sale recently. The people who bought it off him are moving on. I went to say “Goldfinch’s’ house is for sale!” out loud but stopped. Realising I’m the only living member of my family who would know what I was talking about.

My childhood was caring, loving, secure and fun. As an only child I was quite lonely, but I made up for it with creativity and imagination playing by myself and with my toys (and, probably, an unhealthy dose of 80s television, too..).

Now, at the age of 45 I realize it no longer just seems so far away now. It is far, far away.

Between plagues, floods and whatever the hell else we get thrown at us next that reassuring feeling of loving security our parents provided when we were young may as well be as far away as the stars.    

Reliving History

Recently I went to Onekawa New World, the supermarket I had my first job at. I go there reasonably often – it’s not far from (either) home. It has markedly changed since I worked there off and on between 1993 and 1998.

I had stopped outside the shop’s stockroom doors to check my list and was just idly looking through the door at the space beyond when a staff member inquired if I needed assistance. I explained that I used to work there (before they were born, it turned out) and asked if it was possible to have a look out the back to see what had changed.

They kindly obliged and for the next 15 minutes or so I gave them a run-down of what the space was like a quarter of a century ago (yes, I had to do the maths on that, too). Removed walls, doors, offices and toilets, but new shelving, walk-in chillers and freezers.

I walked both past and present tense simultaneously, occasionally going back and forth to ensure my memory was in the right spot. The two staff who ended up accompanying me on my modern historic tour seemed quite fascinated.

I felt both incredibly present and temporally displaced.

Many of the dreams and goals I had when I worked there and lived with my folks have changed so much. So many never eventuated at all (never mind recent career goals…).

So much has happened in all those years. So much life, love, marriage, (doing the same bloody job over and over..), fatherhood, activities and events all packed into them.

But there also feels like so much wasted opportunity and time that I’ll never get back.

I don’t feel (or look, apparently) as old as I am, but when I do it’s enough to instantaneously add even more grey hairs to my head.

Selling my childhood home makes me feel just that bit older and more distant still.

The fact it’s going to the in-laws will keep it in my extended family, but it will no longer be “mine”. Knowing they intend to sell the existing house upon completion of the subdivision and new house build adds a drawn-out sense of inevitability.

Other inevitable things have been distracting me this year, too.

RIP Eddie

When I had my tachycardia issues seven years ago I struck up a camaraderie with a fellow patient named Eddie.

While no one initially knew what was wrong with me, Eddie, who was 15-20 years older than me was waiting in Hawke’s Bay Hospital Coronary Care Unit to be sent down to Wellington for a stent to help clear a narrowed artery. It turned out he needed more than that and ended up down in Wellington briefly with me to receive a multiple bypass – a significantly more severe procedure than the mere tests, scans, pokes, prods and eventual biopsy that I was exposed to.

Being in coronary care has been compared to being in battle. You’re isolated from the outside world and are neither alive nor dead, but can be very close to being either during the time you are there. You can never know what it’s like unless you’ve gone through it, so you connect with others who have been through it with you.

I saw Eddie a few times over the years since our time in “Six South”. We would catch up and chat occasionally. I discovered he lived just around the corner from Mum and Dad’s house.

After doing some clearing out one weekend after our tenants had moved out, I drove home past Eddie’s place and noticed a lot of cars and people at his house. I had texted our tenant about something that day and he had replied he was at a funeral. He happened to work for the same organisation as Eddie and when I saw the congregation of people, I put one and one together and texted out tenant back.

Eddie had died suddenly earlier that week.

I was shocked.

“Suddenly” to me usually denotes a coronary incident, although the recent pandemic has also claimed many lives in similar sudden circumstances and symptoms.

If I wasn’t already feeling old, tired and useless enough, Eddie’s sudden passing just ramped up the downward spiral being so close to (figurative and literal) home.

Eddie was older and, back then, obviously far worse off heart-wise than I was. Losing Dad taught me that heart attacks seldom happen as unique, single occurrences and the first one is seldom the worst.

What happened to Eddie was unlikely to happen to me, as we were two completely different cases, but losing a comrade I had been through an experience like that with was shocking and unsettling in already unsettled times.

It didn’t ease my stress levels that around this period my cardiac fibroma happened to be front of mind, because Eddie’s passing happened just when I’d been scheduled for my annual echocardiogram to make sure the lump hasn’t changed or grown drastically – A fear that has been ever-present since its discovery years ago.

The scan came back unchanged in size, and my cardiologist decided we could move to two-yearly scans due to the continued lack of change, which eased heightened tensions.

But the quiet concern leading up to the appointment had just added fatigue upon fatigue, upon fatigue.    

Wibbly-Wobbly, Timey-Wimey,,, Stuff!

So there you go. Yet again we have somehow managed to fit about a year’s worth of issues, stresses, worries and natural disasters into a mere four months.

All perfectly normal and healthy, right?

So often in recent years there has been so much going on all at once and it all needs doing “Now!

Somehow, I always get it all done “now” (but have stopped bothering to hope for a reward, promotion, or new job out of my consistent, reliable performances) mainly by compartmentalising tasks – I’ll do this before lunch, and this in the afternoon. Or spend three days targeting three tasks – one task per day.

But the repetition, fatigue and detachment required to keep on keeping this up is taking its toll. 

I’m losing big bits of my past, presently stuck in an endlessly repetitious work cycle and having to be the one clearing out parts of my own history in the present, while unsympathetic job rejections and front row seats to drastic climate change don’t exactly put a silver lining on the cloudy future!

A City in the Dark

The following is the 6,100-word (very long) original draft of my piece that The Spinoff very professionally trimmed down to a more readable 4,000 words and printed as their Sunday Essay on 5 March 2023 as “Napier in the Dark”.

Thanks to Jolisa Gracewood and Toby Morris for the encouragement and advice to send it in and The Spinoff’s Editor, Madeleine Chapman, for agreeing to commission the piece.

Monday

The rain chases me into my car.

I left for work at 4am on the morning of what could later be called “Cyclone Eve”. It was dark and the weather was fine. I could hear the sea roaring off in the distance – not unusual, considering Cyclone Gabrielle was approaching the north-east coast of New Zealand.

But as I closed the gate with the car idling at the curb, I heard another sound.

This was closer than the sea. And getting closer still.

Then I see it – The glow of the bulb three streetlights away is suddenly blurred by a fog of heavy rain, then two lights away, then right next door.

I jump into the car, slam the door shut and buzz the windows up just as the squall hits my car broadside. Sheets of wind-driven rain lash the car as I drive to work through Marewa and Pandora, making vision difficult.

Rain is intermittent as I spend the next few hours at work. Gabrielle’s arrival was forecast weeks ago and management have engaged a cyclone action plan whereby staff at our site, just north of the Esk River, are to leave work by 4pm Monday and those who can are expected to work from home on Tuesday.

As the weather in Napier hasn’t improved and the bulk of my work is done by 8am, I leave earlier still to take my nine-year-old daughter to school in the rain.

Oddly, while all the city’s high schools have already announced over the weekend that they would be closed on Monday and Tuesday, many primary schools still run as normal on Monday.

School run done, and home to work from my couch as reasonably persistent rain falls outside. We keep a cautious eye on the creek across the road, which almost spilled over in the disastrous floods of November 2020. It’s up, but not by much.

So far, so good.

School pick-up is unremarkable in reasonably steady rain, but the wind has started picking up. It escalates even further in as Gabrielle nears.

The trees in our front yard twist and bend but remain upright and intact. Across the road on the creek reserve several branches have fallen from the willows and other trees.

We hunker down and go to bed, the falling rain barely audible over the sound of the wind.

Tuesday

I wake early and do some paperwork remotely as the rain and wind’s severity just keeps elevating outside, peaking around dawn.

I am keeping an eye on social media to see what is happening weather-wise around the region. Lots of trees are down, lots of rivers are up.

The Esk River has broken its banks, and the already rather feeble Esk River bridge, which I have written of before, is allegedly damaged.

Not long after 7am I lose working from home connectivity. Not unusual, as losing power at work would naturally cut off remote access.

I see pictures of Esk Valley on Facebook/Twitter. It’s no longer a valley, it’s ALL Esk River.   

I learn later that by the time I lost connectivity my entire work site is under about two meters of water.

Shit.

Other reports start coming in.

The Puketapu Bridge over the Tutaekuri River is damaged (we learn later that it has gone completely).

Shit!

This bridge is (WAS) about ten meters above the regular height of the river. At intermediate school, we conducted nature studies underneath it, measuring river water for clarity and speed. We measured how fast it was flowing by timing how long it took to float tennis balls downstream a given distance in a controlled situation.

But this situation is anything but controlled.

A Facebook friend posts that the Tutaekuri river has overflowed its banks near Waiohiki Bridge, by the Pettigrew Green Arena. It flows into the EIT Te Pukenga campus, the area surrounding Waiohiki Marae across the river and into the streets of Taradale.

Taradale is flooding!

SHIT!!

My In-laws, who live in Howard Road – the last cross-street between Murphy Road and Taradale’s main arterial route of Gloucester St – had become increasingly concerned about the river’s height throughout the morning watching social media updates, so they come to our place “for a visit” around 9am, just as the evacuation notice is given. They see the river water coming down Gloucester Street towards them as they head east to our house with police and buses going the opposite direction to evacuate people. 

We lose power before they arrive.

Redclyffe Substation, which provides Napier’s power from Wairaki in Taupo is underwater.

The Substation is on the banks of the Tutaekuri River, on Springfield Road out past Taradale and the EIT campus towards Napier’s Transfer Station (the city’s old rubbish tip) and Puketapu, in the foothills beyond.

When I was in primary school my dad worked for the NZED (New Zealand Electricity Department) before Rogernomics filleted, gutted and asset-stripped it to sell to private interests. He took us to Redclyffe on the way to or from the dump one day. We sat in the control room – it had a very 60s-70s civil servant aesthetic, even in the late 80s – and looked out through big windows at the mass of transformers and power lines corralled in meters-high chain-link and barbed wire beyond.

The defensive fences are there for a reason – millions of volts buzz just outside the window. Dad’s friend, who was the operator on duty, warned that anyone who went outside into the caged area risked being “instantly fried”.

But millions of litres of water flooding down the Tutaekuri river don’t care about fences of electric volts.

Power goes out and a city goes dark. 

It’s not just power that leaves Napier in the dark.

About four hours after losing mains power, the city’s cell towers, running on back-up batteries, start dropping out – and a society so inseparable from its cell phones and internet access loses connection with itself and the rest of the world. 

With the networks down and cellular devices straining to get a signal, phone batteries start running dry and dying across the city by the end of the day.

Napier started life on and around what was at the time an island: Mataruahou, later known as Napier Hill, where the settlement grew into a town and then a city.

In February 2023, it reverts to being an island again. The flooding Esk River to the north and Tutaekuri and Ngaruroro Rivers to the south cut off all state highway access to the city, and almost all communication links are broken.

Along with Coromandel, Tairāwhiti and a number of other regions where Gabrielle’s force is being felt the worst, Hawke’s Bay declares a State of Emergency midmorning on Tuesday, and soon afterwards, a National State of Emergency is also declared, but many of those under the state of emergency only learn of this on transistor radios and car stereos, listening to RNZ National Radio and some, but not all, of the region’s many commercial radio stations.  

Media watch:

RNZ: The National Broadcaster does its national duty. The Morning Report presenters and Kathryn Ryan on Nine to Noon are across the flooding coverage speaking with reporters and officials where and when they can contact them.

The Hits HB: Based in Napier, local breakfast pair “Adam and Megan” are on air thanks to generator power for an extended period, not just the usual few hours of their breakfast show.

The Breeze HB: The Breeze’s breakfast pair of “Martin and Jacquie” and on-air boss Justin Rae (apparently, they have no other on-air staff either?) are also on extended hours providing updates, information and interviews when and how they can.

A very “civil” Civil Emergency

With my in-laws temporary evacuees at our house, we hear from neighbours that Pak n Save Napier is open with generator power, so my mother-in-law, her sister (who happens to be visiting form Australia) and I gingerly make our way there – no power equals no traffic lights and Hawke’s Bay drivers are far from the best in optimal conditions, let alone emergencies – to acquire some supplies,

It appears around a quarter of Napier are doing the same.

It’s organised chaos.

The bare minimum is understandably operating – Lights, checkouts and, thankfully in a cashless society, Eftpos.

Freezers and chillers are no longer freezing or chilling and have largely been emptied or shuttered.

Everyone is stressed, but this is also a very “civil” Civil Emergency.

Queues are very long, but orderly. People say please and thank you and are helping each other.

Tension and stress are evident, but everyone seems to realise we are all in this together.

Along with the queue for the checkouts there is also a queue for Lotto, just not as extensive.

We make it home safely in time for lunch with a hint of blue sky between occasional showers the in-laws go back to see if they can access to residential Taradale.

They set off and due to the communications black-out we don’t hear from them immediately. We assume they made it home safely. They confirm the next day they did, though Civil Defence’s text notification for the all-clear doesn’t reach them until hours after the actual all clear is given.

We go over to our neighbours’ house to utilise their gas bottle and hob to boil up some two-minute noodles and broccoli for dinner.

They are fostering two puppies, whom my daughter absolutely adores and spends the time playing and running around with them.

There is some light in dark times.

From early evening news reports on the radio, it appears most of urban Napier has gotten off relatively lightly. While still without power or communications, our drinking water is safe and secure, and remains so for the duration of the emergency. To our north, Wairoa and Gisborne aren’t so lucky. Due to damage to their water system Gisborne’s supply will almost completely run out just as the Navy arrives with filtration equipment and suppliers a few days later.

We move our mattress into the living room, so all three of us can sleep close together in the powerless dark.

Our day of disaster ends with the setting of the sun.

Wednesday:

I am up just before the sun and into the car to listen to our one guaranteed source of information – the radio. I periodically turn the car on and leave it running in the driveway to refresh the battery and occasionally get some charge in my phone.

Media watch:

Newstalk ZB: has taken over Radio Hauraki’s Hawke’s Bay FM frequency. A smart, informative move. But when I tune in, Mike Hosking is moaning from his Auckland studio about unemployed people in Bay of Plenty. Seriously?

There will be more Hawke’s Bay coverage later in the day when the actual talkback part of the network opens to callers and texters, but for now, Napier’s lack of power and coverage still make for a giant black hole of information.

The Hits HB: Is off the air. According to ZB the station’s generator has run out of diesel and finding supply/fuel pumping capabilities is obviously very difficult.

The Breeze HB: The breakfast pair and “J-Rae” are still on air. Martin and Justin will be on air for 13 hours today – a mammoth effort in such conditions! Not that they have anywhere else to go – Both live in Napier and, with all bridges currently closed, they are trapped in Hastings, unable to return home.

RNZ: The forces of nature that are Kim Hill and Kathryn Ryan are raging like Tuesday’s winds. When a spokesperson from Transpower, New Zealand’s national electricity infrastructure company, says that Redclyffe is still underwater and restoring power to Napier could take two weeks, Ryan’s shocked response is like the crack of a lightning bolt. Kim Hill’s pen clicks with the speed of an anemometer in a tornado as she grills officials.

The Rock: Simulcast Auckland jocks are jockulating obliviously.

With such limited communications and no power, the repeated phrase “check out our Facebook page / this website for more information” on radio becomes torturous.

WE CAN’T!

The effects of Gabrielle’s flooding have yet to cease causing damage a day later. The rain has stopped but the sheer volume of water still coming down the regions rivers hasn’t, causing residents of the low-lying Napier suburb of Te Awa to be ordered to evacuate when there is another breach of the Tutaekuri river, closer to the sea this time, inundating the Awatoto industrial area, Napier’s sewage treatment plant, and golf course before heading towards the neighbouring suburb where our daughter’s best friend lives. Her family safely evacuate to a centre at Napier’s McLean Park.

I see pictures of Te Awa streets later that look almost identical in almost identical parts of Napier South to the scenes after the 2020 floods.

We go to check on my in-laws in Taradale mid-morning and we just miss them as they have gone to check on my sister-in-law.

No comms means all cars.

The sheer volume of urban traffic is quite amazing, but also concerning. With no power there are few to no petrol stations open, meaning fuel tanks will start running as dry as cell phone batteries if people don’t limit travel.

Despite Hawke’s Bay drivers not being the most diligent at the best of times, and lots of traffic combined with no traffic lights, we see the aftermath of only one intersection crash. Most of Napier’s main arterial route intersections normally governed by traffic lights are quickly transformed into roundabouts once road crews have been out with cones. There is more giving way and indicator use in these days of blackout than entire previous years.     

Taradale’s western suburban side looks like footage of Christchurch’s post-quake liquefaction in 2011.

The Tutaekuri’s overflow is everywhere and unmissable, with several centimeters of silt and mud across the streets, clogging gutters and evidently in some homes.

The smell of wet carpet is unmistakable.

We venture to Greenmeadows New World for supplies on the way home. There appear to be long queues outside, but they are all people just trying to connect to the store’s free Wi-Fi.

Access to the supermarket is easy, but the queue for the checkouts goes around the entire shop and then some. While those outside @ others on social media, those inside form the same symbol in a giant, orderly human-and-trolley conga line.

Everyone is still so calm and civil. No panic buying. Politely giving access to others and moral support to the staff, who must wonder just what the hell is happening. They too smile, but there is a look of tiredness and shock in many eyes.

A staff member stacking produce says “there is always someone out there worse off than you are” – a concept I am all too familiar with.  

Despite some essential products already being sold out (eggs, toilet paper, tinned baked beans and spaghetti) and the freezer/chiller sections blocked off and being emptied a day after their power was lost, we manage to get everything we need.

While we treat ourselves to a block of Whittakers chocolate, many trolleys appear to contain dozens of cans or bottles of beer. Can’t really blame them, to be honest.  

Later in the day, we reconnect with the in-laws for dinner. They need yet more supplies, so I go to Pak n Save in my old neighborhood of Tamatea.

Again, there are rows of people seeking Wi-Fi access outside.

Inside the shop it’s like Christmas Eve – not celebratory, of course, but that same level of urgency. The supermarket’s generators provide light, electricity, and working chillers.

For a moment you could have forgotten it was the modern Dark Ages outside.   

The first deaths are confirmed on the radio during dinner, including a child in Eskdale, which my daughter overhears. You naturally want to shelter your children from death, doom and destruction, but I also think she needs at least a little exposure to it to acclimatize to life’s perils.   

Inspired by those alcohol-laden New World trolleys, I liberate a few short-dated beers from my father-in-law’s now room temperature beer fridge with his permission.

Others won’t be so polite. On the way home we pass a local liquor store, using its delivery vans to barricade the big glass windows at the front of the shop. It won’t work: that night they are broken into and burgled.

It won’t be the last occasion of burglary or looting, with security systems down due to the power outage. Police presence will ramp up in the city and we will have the “Eagle” helicopter circling over our city regularly for the next few evenings and nights.

The shine is coming off the Civil Emergency’s civility.

THURSDAY

We empty the contents of our fridge into the bin.

The coastal route between Napier and Hastings via Clive along State Highway 51 reopened late yesterday to emergency traffic and essential travel, but with speed restrictions and stop-go points along the way. It closes for a time again amidst safety checks to the bridges.

Many Napier people have self-evacuated to Hastings to be with friends, family, or just to get fuel and power for charging devices. Some are trapped there overnight when the road temporarily closes again.

The queue of vehicles attempting to head out of Napier stretches along Marine Parade and George’s Drive, but they’re not getting very far.

We’re staying put despite some anxiety starting to creep in about fuel and food supply levels. 

Morning Media watch:

If every media network had to donate $5 for every time I hear the grammatical ulceration of “the Hawke’s Bay” (it’s “Hawke’s Bay”, no “the”) during this emergency, recovery efforts would be flooded with cash, not water and silt.

Newstalk ZB: Hosking is celebrating the resignation of Scottish PM Nicola Sturgeon and playing political soundbites of some US Republican presidential hopeful decrying the evils of socialism.

Not for the first time I wonder how could any media network allow itself to be cuckolded by a handful of opinionated announcers radicalised by conservative capitalistic cant?

The Hits HB: Is back on the air. Content is much the same as The Breeze. Spark supplies their communications, so they have better phone / text coverage and access to the internet than the majority of Napier it appears. They don’t seem to get that, no, we still can’t check your Facebook post, or link to that website.

The Breeze HB: Martin, Jacquie and Justin are still doing the mahi. Martin and Justin managed to get back to Napier and see their families last night. The emotional toll is understandably starting to show. We hear that full power connectivity for Napier could still be up to two weeks away. The news hits hard.

RNZ: Corrin Dann and Kim Hill are still doing what Morning Report does best – asking hard questions and getting answers. While Transpower still says full power could be weeks away for Napier the spokesman for Hawke’s Bay power provider Unison’s back-pedalling of the statement could just about generate enough power to light a small suburb. Unison is already working on a way to essentially hotwire Napier’s power grid to Hastings’ which is more secure and fed from the south.  

The Rock: The Auckland jocks are still jockulating obliviously <Click!> There’s some power saved!

I crack one of my father-in-law’s beers while listening to updates not long after lunch.

We don’t need the radio to know there’s a lot going on today – sirens are constant throughout the day.

We live one of the main access roads to the Civil Defence centre based at the Napier Fire Station and see some, but not all the emergency vehicles going past. Fire engines mainly, but other rescue vehicles as well. A convoy of four-wheel-drives pass our house towing trailers stacked with Surf Rescue IRBs (Inflatable Rescue Boats) heading AWAY from the beaches. It’s all we need to know that things haven’t improved much.

Helicopters have been droning back and forth overhead for the last few days, too. The big RNZAF NH90s make a notably deeper “thud-thud-thud” as they fly overhead.

I give an excited “whoop!” when an Air Force C-130 Hercules passes over Napier, as I’ve been hoping airlifted supplies would start streaming in soon. It’s just doing reconnaissance and the bulk of defence force emergency supplies will, in fact, come via sea on board Royal New Zealand Navy vessels that start arriving on Saturday later news bulletins tell us.

There is even a privately-owned Sikorsky Blackhawk – a rare sight in New Zealand. We later learn it’s here to help re-establish power with its heavy-lift capabilities. 

We spend most of our day at home, go for the occasional walk around the block, and visit the puppies next door.

I establish some degree of communication by borrowing a Spark cell phone from our neighbour. I text a friend in Christchurch to get updates and let people know we’re OK.

Vodafone is going to lose a region of customers after this.

We help our neighbours clear out their freezer by going over for a BBQ that evening. Our typically finicky nine-year-old daughter discovers a new favourite food in honey soy chicken kebabs.

Small bits of normality in abnormal times.

We listen to damage reports and updates on the radio during dinner.

We still have no real idea of the extent of this disaster three days after it began – and we’re at the centre of it!

With the speed the media world cycles through news, there will be events and images from the worst of the initial flooding that some Napier people will likely never see or know about.

We read in the twilight and go to bed with the sun again, but I wake up at 1am and lie there wide awake for some time. This will be something that continues over the next few days.

Friday

Is it Friday? Who can tell?!

Up before dawn. Still no power.

But after going social media cold-turkey for three days, I finally have limited data connectivity on my phone again!

I scroll and scroll in the early morning darkness as my daughter and wife sleep and the load on local cell towers isn’t high enough to lose signal or drain my chronically low battery.

Looks like I inadvertently caused a bit of panic yesterday: The last tweet I sent, about Taradale flooding on Tuesday morning, was stuck in the ether when the networks went down and wasn’t posted… until data coverage was restored on Thursday afternoon. Luckily several people quickly picked up on the glitch, assuring everyone it was old news.  

I also have an email from a TVNZ Breakfast producer (from Tuesday) and a Twitter direct message from an Australian New York Times reporter (from yesterday), both requesting insight into the situation in Napier. But the cyclone’s news cycle is spinning so fast that when I finally have sufficient phone coverage to see their messages and send a reply, I never hear back from them.

Lots of messages of support flow in, but we don’t need it – those in the areas surrounding Napier do.

I finally get to see some of the pictures of devastation.

Quite possibly the only thing that saved the Esk River bridge, was the Esk River went everywhere AROUND it.

Geez.

It looks like the entire Esk Valley is buried under one to two metres of silt and mud. From aerial photos, my workplace appears to be a big, wet, muddy mess. We won’t be going back there any time soon.

Bridges are out everywhere – Puketapu, Waiohiki, Brookfields Bridge, linking Meeanee with Pakowhai in between the Tutaekuri and Ngaruroro rivers. All gone.

The Waiohiki Bridge

Aside from the wholesale destruction in Esk Valley, State Highway 5 – the Napier-Taupo Road that runs through the valley – looks to be wiped off the map and hillsides in several places further up towards Te Pohue and Taupo

The rail bridge at Awatoto – the main East Coast line – is gone.

This is going to require engineering and construction on a national scale. Reinstating the Ministry of Works really looks to be a valid concept. Formally reconnecting Hawke’s Bay to the rest of New Zealand is just too much for one region, or one contracting company, to achieve.

Media watch:

I don’t listen to the radio as much today. We play family games and go for walks, getting weary of news while we’re still in the dark.

Newspaper: A special, free edition of local paper Hawke’s Bay Today is delivered to dairies and other sites around the region. We walk down to our nearest dairy to get a copy and see the queue of cars for our nearest service station, now open on generator power for the first time since Tuesday, is nearing a kilometer long down Taradale Road.   

Newstalk ZB: Reverts to Radio Hauraki sometime during the day. When I flick through the channels trying to find new information in the afternoon, their regular “matey-mate-mate-mates” on the afternoon show are blathering away as arrogantly and irrelevantly as ever. 

The Hits HB: Are doing good mahi, but with phone coverage still so bleak it is hard going. Their interview with visiting Prime Minister Chris Hipkins cuts in and out and eventually drops out altogether. Local coverage gives way in the afternoon to the Auckland-simulcast drive time show, so I don’t bother listening to that.

Both The Hits and The Breeze are playing various versions of “Your official /number one Civil Defence radio station” self-promotional ads. Their networks’ execs in Auckland HQ, never attentive to the regions at the best of times, apparently think disasters are another great opportunity for some sort of ratings war.

The Breeze HB: These guys have set the standard, but boss Justin Rae is the star.

He has been venturing out to get information in the mornings and hosting most of the afternoons. Authorities have finally twigged that everyone is getting their information through radio (it has been the most reliable, least interrupted source all week), so they start funnelling more information out through it.

Rae is finally joined by an additional on-air voice – Max, a younger member of staff is providing updates and information.

Justin breaks down a bit on air, saying he “feels guilty” he can go home and be with his family when they finally get out to visit him at the station in Hastings from Napier.

The Breeze opens their land line phones up for information in and out – This is taking me back to the awesome days of 90s regional radio where stations had local staff on-air 24/7 and were a real community hub!

I do hope these events trigger some sort of longer format, live and local, relevant regional radio renascence in Hawke’s Bay at the very least.

We hear on an afternoon news report that power has started being restored to Napier via Hastings. The CBD and Napier Hill have electricity again. Hopefully the rest of us can’t be far off.

In the evening a police car passes our house at barely subsonic speed. There is a major, armed incident on the other side of our suburb. Eagle circles the scene. The police are not messing around. 

Saturday

I am awake again at 2am.

After half an hour of darkened doom-scrolling I go back to bed and get a few more hours’ sleep, but not without lying awake again for some time.

As the Saturday sun rises, I go out to the car to pass an hour listening to the radio.

Newstalk ZB / Hauraki: I simply don’t bother.

RNZ: Corin Dann is hosting a special Saturday edition Morning Report, but there isn’t anything new or crucial to report. The rescue aspect of the emergency has been largely completed and now it’s into recovery mode. The confirmed death toll is slowly rising.

The Hits and The Breeze HB: The local hosts appear to be having the weekend off (I only listen around 7am, so they could have been on later), which is reasonable given their recent workload.

But with most of the hour being largely uninterrupted music and ads, this feels like the commercial media’s news cycle has turned and passed us by after their ever-present updates during the week.

To make things worse The Hits are playing the oxymoronic “Best of Jono and Ben”. <Click!>

We finish cleaning and clearing out the refrigerator, leave the door open to dry it out, and go visit the puppies next door.

We need petrol and some more food so, with power now on in town, I head to Countdown.

No, not THAT Countdown, the Countdown across the road from it.

But first I go into the CBD.

It’s been almost a whole week in our state of powerless lock-down and I need space and sea air. I wrote some time ago that Napier’s CBD revitalises me. Even when it’s almost completely deserted and most of the shops are closed like today, just being in town lifts my mood.

I park on Marine Parade and take a short walk along the seaside Rotary Pathway, from Tom Parker Fountain to the Veronica Sun Bay and Soundshell.

There is storm-washed driftwood on the high tide mark and most of the way down to the waterline. Nowhere near the volume seen in Tairāwhiti, but it still goes on for as far as the eye can see.

This is also different to the wood clogging Tolaga Bay and other East Coast beaches. Rather than cut radiata logs and forestry slash, these appear to be whole and shattered willow and poplar trees and other riparian plantings. Knotty branches and root balls torn from riverbanks and hillsides by Gabrielle’s deluge and raging rivers.    

As I walk towards the Soundshell a completely different sight catches my eye: two women fully dressed in 1930s “flapper” dresses are sitting on a blanket having a picnic.

With everything else going on (and off) I’d completely forgotten it was supposed to be Art Deco Weekend!

The event was understandably canceled on Wednesday when the practicality of receiving and hosting tens of thousands of tourists in the city looked as likely as instantaneous power restoration and bridge repairs.

The weekend usually includes the New Zealand Defense Force in a ceremonial capacity because when the 1931 earthquake struck the navy’s HMS Veronica was in port. Sailors from the ship were key participants in immediate rescue and recovery and humanitarian efforts. Neither Napier, nor the Navy have forgotten this partnership. The Royal New Zealand Air Force Display Team is also usually present doing aerobatics and fly pasts, along with privately owned vintage aircraft.

This weekend all three branches of the New Zealand Defense Force are back, just in a more practical format, providing aid, assistance, and supplies to a region recovering from disaster, just like the crew of the Veronica 92 years ago.

My intended short supply trip stretches into over two hours. Not because of supermarket and service station queues – there is next to no waiting for either – but because I keep meeting people I know, and every time we spend about ten minutes each filling each other in on the week’s events that we haven’t been able to share the (up until Tuesday) “regular way”.

I am in trouble with my wife for my unnotified tardiness when I get home, but the criticism is cut short when there is a beep and a buzz.

Power has come back on!

We use it sparingly, lest its return only be temporary – and it is on Sunday, with power dropping out a few times, most likely as other areas had their supplies safely switched back on.

Power won’t be fully restored to all of Napier until Tuesday afternoon – over seven days since it was lost!

My In-laws’ house is one of the last areas to get power back, by which time some people have already returned to work, while many others continue to work to help friends, loved ones and strangers recover from the floods.

For some of us at least, life will quickly return to a relative “normal”. For others it will take a longer time, and for others it will never be the same.

Aftermath

Thousands of cubic meters of mud, silt and debris will be removed over the coming weeks around the region. As Hawke’s Bay’s weather returns to its more traditional summer settings after Gabrielle departs, all the silt, mud and entombed particulates will start to dry, harden and blow away as dust when moved.

By the following Tuesday you can already smell, taste and even see it in the air around Napier. The immediate health threats of flooding may have passed, but others will remain for some time.

Hawke’s Bay schools start reopening on Tuesday and Wednesday.

I go back to work remotely and sparingly on Sunday, catching up to where I should have been mid-morning last Tuesday a week later.

I see aerial photos of my work. It’s a mess. I am told our office is flooded and likely little will be recoverable. But they are fully insured, and our company’s Japanese owners have pledged full support for rebuild and recovery. The site suffered a similar fate during Cyclone Bola in 1998, and the 2011 Japanese earthquake and tsunami wrought even greater levels of destruction to facilities over there, so the owners have experience with this. Their support also gives job security and income stability to those working for one of Hawke’s Bay’s biggest employers.

It won’t be the same for everyone.

I feel guilty having gotten off so lightly. We were only powerless, but I have friends whose houses are a mess, uninhabitable, or gone completely. Others whose businesses are wrecked, or jobs and income no longer secure.

We go to an appliance store on the Tuesday to get something our daughter needs for her return to school on Wednesday, and see an old acquaintance leaving. They are there to replace their fridge, washing machines, and more after being flooded out. Unsurprisingly, even while we are still in a National State of Emergency, there already aren’t any left in stock in Hawke’s Bay.

Restocking and relacing all these key household appliances for all those households will take some time, with basic household tasks potentially remaining as if the power was still off for months.

Building products like plaster board, already having run out in New Zealand last year due to staffing and logistical issues brought on by Covid-19, will be in high demand and short supply.

New Zealand doesn’t have enough builders and tradespeople for new builds and repairs as it is. What will this do to that situation?

I hear from friends who usually commute between Napier and Hastings that the usually 15-20 minute trip along the SH2 Expressway now takes a minimum of 40 minutes with speed restrictions, detours and congestion, and a maximum of over two hours!

Travelling north by road from Napier to Taupo and Auckland will have to be done via a major southern detour through Palmerston North and the Central Plateau.

We aren’t going anywhere in a hurry.

With numerous stretches of rail and bridges out, no Kiwirail freight will be going to or from Napier or its port for some time.

Freight logistics will be a nightmare.   

While many of us weren’t overly affected by Cyclone Gabrielle, the after-effects could well have  many long-term detriments for the region and its inhabitants.        

Hawke’s Bay will be tested.     

Leaving Narnia

 
Like C.S. Lewis’ Pevensie children most Napier people find ourselves emerging unscathed from the wardrobe seemingly just an instant after we entered. We have power, internet, work to do, school runs to make, just like any other day.


Yet we are older, wearier, and more jaded having gone through so much, and not quite sure what to make of ourselves. A week of our lives has both vanished and been burned into our memories.


We feel guilty for not being as badly affected as so many surrounding us, but also feel thankful for the exact same reason.


I would like to think we are more tolerant, kind, and considerate having looked after each other for that week – Smiles and elevated levels of politeness are still evident some days after. But tensions, trauma and nerves are starting to crack cheery facades.   

We look forward hopefully to the future, but also realize that this severe weather is likely only one of the first such events we will witness or be impacted by as our climate changes.

But it may take a while to fully process and understand what a week in the dark meant to our region and ourselves.

We’re Not in Kansas Anymore, Toto!

“Napier to the left of him, a funnel cloud to the right of him, into the Bay of Hawke rode NapierinFrame…”

I never thought I’d say or write this when I was younger, but I saw a tornado, or “funnel cloud” just northwest of Napier last week!

(For those playing at home a funnel cloud is a tornado that doesn’t touch down – Just like meteors only become meteorites when they impact the earth.)

I was driving home from Bay View on Thursday (19 January 2023), still digesting New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s resignation announcement, and noticed some menacing clouds off to the west of Napier.

This is not at all unusual, as afternoon thunderstorms are quite common in recent years as Hawke’s Bay’s summer climate appears to have become more and more tropical. I often take photos of different or threatening-looking cloud formations:

A storm approaching Napier, October 2021

But these ones looked different.

I stopped my car in the sea-side layby opposite Napier’s old shipping beacons, just north of Hawke’s Bay Airport’s runway and got out for a clearer look with my phone in hand.

Along with the squally, showery cloud down to hill-level there was another odd-looking cloud.

It was long, and cylindrical – It was a tornado!

As is the way these days I immediately started taking photos and shooting “citizen journalism” videos with my phone:

The funnel cloud didn’t last long, but I had managed to time things perfectly, as I was able to get several photos and a couple short videos recorded which came out fantastically clear, despite being at full zoom.

As it dissipated I got back in the car and continued home where wifi coverage sped up connection speeds and uploaded the footage I had taken to my social media channels.

There was, understandably, a fair bit of interest including from media networks who requested copies for broadcast/print.

Apparently I’m not good enough to be head-hunted by New Zealand broadcasters to provide Hawke’s Bay content as a full time career, but they’ll happily harvest my social media content I guess?

Despite growing up in calm, sedate Napier, New Zealand and not America’s “Tornado Alley” around Oklahoma, Kansas, or the “Texas Panhandle”, this isn’t the first “twister” I’ve seen in Hawke’s Bay (not counting the fantastic 1996 Jan de Bont blockbuster – I still have the soundtrack on CD and it’s still a banger!).

In April 2021 I stepped outside of my daughter’s swimming lesson at the Onekawa Pools for a breath of non-chlorinated, less humid air to see a waterspout touring over Napier as it made its way across Hawke Bay, briefly making land fall at the Port of Napier!

With our climate undeniably changing (where did summer 2022/23 go?) and weather events like cyclones and rainfall events becoming more and more common I thought it was only a matter of time before Napier and Hawke’s Bay had more and more freakish acts of nature like tornadoes!

I just never expected it to happen this soon.

The best we can do is prepare ourselves to deal with the changes we already face and try and mitigate any further future change.

Here’s to You, 2022!

2022.

Of all the years we’ve had, it was one of them!

I DIDN’T travel outside of Hawke’s Bay, win Lotto, or change jobs to something higher paying and more in line with my skills and dreams, and I only ticked off 6/10 of my goals for the year.

I DID catch Covid, albeit thankfully all but asymptomatically, made more money here and there, and did some things I wanted to do and bought some things I wanted to get.

It wasn’t a fantastic year, but it wasn’t terrible either.

So here are some of my highlights, events and thoughts from 2022:

Loveliest moment of 2022: Planting Harakeke with my daughter.

As part of my job I’ve gotten to volunteer to go out once a year with a primary school for Conservation Week. We go on a bushwalk at Hawke’s Bay’s White Pine Bush, then do a tour of the Guthrie Smith Arboretum at Tutira and plant some native flora there.

I’ve done this with my old school, Tamatea Primary and, this year, when I saw my daughter’s school on the list I offered to go with them. A week later (without telling her what I was doing at work) my daughter said we had to give permission for her to go on a field trip. “Oh, where?” we asked. “To White Pine Bush and Tutira” she replied. 

She seemed happy that I was coming along, but I was expressly “forbidden from embarrassing her on the trip”! (she still has a lot to learn about parenting) and on the day I sat on a different part of the bus to her and her friends, but I was allowed to help chaperone her group on the bushwalks.

The penultimate event before heading home is the plantings, and she wanted me to help her plant her harakeke – NZ Flax, which I did, then we planted another spare flax and I took a selfie of us to commemorate the occasion. I loved it!

 A Year of Constructive Confidence…

I got to make lots of stuff this year, stuff I had wanted to make for a while, stuff I’d only dreamed of making, and other stuff I just did to prove to myself that I could.

A long-held vision of recreating the Tomcat vs. MiG 28 “Inverted” scene from the movie Top Gun was finally realised. After a few production delays I decided to go DIY and the multi-media (plastic, wood and metal) result I came up with was even better than I’d expected.

 After only being able to dream of owning one as a kid, I finally got to buy, build and run my own Tamiya radio-controlled car! I even bought and decorated up a second body shell just to prove I could do it!

Finally, a-semi spur-of-the-moment idea resulted in a fantastic looking “Beached Spitfire” diorama and involved my first experience using clear casting resin and making gel waves.

I was fortunate that (almost) all the models I built this year went together so well – It was a boost to my confidence in using known and new skills in creating cool stuff!

..But a Writing and Wireless Wasteland.  

After being commissioned to write two or three items a year over the past few years for local magazine Bay Buzz, I had just one commission this year – focusing on the local music scene and how it was dealing with Covid and event restrictions. I really enjoyed writing it and the finished product looked really great, but that was it.

Bay Buzz has been able to employ a number of journalists in the last few years under the Public Interest Journalism fund, which is great for keeping multiple sets of investigative eyes regularly focusing on and writing about Hawke’s Bay regional issues which NZ’s commercial media networks have failed to do over recent decades. But I have still missed being involved and getting commissioned to write more.

I still appear to be persona non grata with Radio NZ and still don’t know why and, as for local commercial network media, it can’t be long before our regional paper becomes a couple Hawke’s Bay pages in the NZ Herald and local airwaves regurgitate Jono and Ben 24/7 across the country. Spare us!

This year I did rediscover that even “almost seven years old, Still a bit six” me on Bay City Radio in 1984 could do a better job on local radio than those cronyism clowns can on any of their many simulcast shows across multiple commercial networks.

I do still hold out a faint hope for the TVNZ/RNZ merger, despite commercial networks’ and executives’ worst, self-interested lobbying efforts to scuttle the bill.

I have kept writing, too. If for no other reason than my own entertainment, or to keep myself sane and not feel like I’m just completely, continually screaming into the void.

And I do still seem to be pretty good and capable at it:

A piece I wrote on the sorry state of Hawke’s Bay roading infrastructure, and the State Highway 2 bridge over the Esk River apparently being suddenly unfit for purpose garnered over 1700 views since publishing in August.

Movie of the Year: Top Gun: Maverick

I think I only saw three movies at the cinema this year – Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness, Top Gun: Maverick and Thor: Love and Thunder.

Doctor Strange and Thor both had their good points – I got to see Love and Thunder in a cinema all to myself, after taking an afternoon off work to see it, and the Guns n’ Roses soundtrack throughout was gloriously nostalgic – But were reasonably cookie-cutter Marvel fare overall.

Sitting in the darkening cinema as the opening credits started rolling for Top Gun I wondered for a second if the whole movie was just going to be the 1986 original remastered and played in full as the Top Gun Anthem again crescendoed into Kenny Loggins’ epic and timeless “Danger Zone”.. Until F/A-18 Hornets and F-35 Lightning IIs rolled through the carrier deck steam.

The movie was great, and packed with yet more nostalgia, but also more emotionally mature themes – Pete “Maverick” Mitchell had grown, as had his original audience, but still held some old scars and memories, as did his audience.

A scene I loved was where Pete and his old flame and love interest in the movie, Jennifer Connelly’s ‘Penny Benjamin’ are getting intimate when Penny’s teenaged daughter (from a previous, non-Maverick, relationship) comes home unexpectedly.

Pete and Penny are nervous and embarrassed, not wanting her daughter to learn about the rekindling of their relationship, Penny makes Maverick sneak out her first-floor window like a teenager, comically slipping and falling off the roof. He stands up, dusts himself off and come’s face to face with Penny’s daughter – The audience laughs – Busted!

The daughter, stone faced, tells Mitchell “don’t break her heart again” and the laughing stops dead because the audience has been there, too, since 1986.

But, yes, awesome flying scenes, CGI, explosions and a fair chunk of heart also helped make Top Gun: Maverick my movie of the 2022.

Mood of the Year: S.A.D.

Hawke’s Bay saw one of its wettest winters on record in 2022.

Not that it was completely a bad thing – I remember “proper” wet winters growing up in the 80s and, by comparison we’ve had insanely dry years over the past decade where it rained in April and that was it until October, turning Central Hawke’s Bay hills peroxide blonde by November, and outright dead and dirt brown by February, so rain wasn’t altogether unwelcome.

But rain for days and weeks on end made many people sad, or even S.A.D.

Not to be confused with “Unhappy”, though the two can go hand-in-hand, Seasonal Affective Disorder is a form of depression that is often triggered by a change of the seasons, usually in, or towards the winter months.

And in 2022 the winter months just seemed to go on, and on, and on.

Days and weeks of persistent (rather than heavy) rain disrupted events, canceled sports and ruined thousands of plans.

It was the last thing we needed after thinking we had recovered sufficiently from Covid for normal life and events to largely recommence.

All the while the skies remained a morose overcast grey and rain continued to drizzle and drip, dragging the “winter blues” into spring and summer as well.

Score of the year: A Kane Williamson Signed Cricket Bat!

I bought myself a Funko Pop! figure of Indian cricketer Virat Kohli for my birthday this year.

Well, I actually bought TWO.

They were on special at EB Games in Napier for only $15 each, and one’s box was a bit smushed so, in the spirit of my “Year of Creativity” I bought a second one intending to put it into a cricketing diorama of some sort, like I’d done with a Marty McFly Pop! recreating a scene from Back to the Future a couple years ago:

But before I even did the diorama, I made another creative change.

Looking at the figure I realised it wouldn’t take too much to change India’s cricket captain into New Zealand’s captain, Kane Williamson!

They both have similar hairstyles and beards and are both renowned batsmen, so it wouldn’t take much to change one to the other with some paint and finer details.

So that’s exactly what I did!

Other than repainting the head, hair and body the other changes I made were adding Gray-Nicolls stickers to Kane’s bat to make it look like his current NOVA blade and using 1/72 scale model aircraft decals for his shirt number (22) and “New Zealand” branding.

I was happy with the prototype and hoped to show it to and get it signed by the man himself when Napier got its sole men’s international game for the season but, sadly, captain Kane had other plans.

Never mind. I ended up being busy with work and other projects, and the Pop! went on display in my house.

Coincidently I entered a competition to win a signed Kane Williamson bat through Auckland’s Players’ Sports on Instagram a few weeks later..

AND WON IT!

It was a great, fortuitous way to finish off the year!

Now I just have to figure out what sort of display case I’m going to design and make for this full-sized cricket bat in 2023!

Here’s hoping your 2023 is creative, fortuitous and supportive, and thanks for reading Napier in Frame in 2022!

AF

Twelve Days of Christmas Deliciousness 2022 (Kiwi) Edition!

The inspiration: A Pukeko in a Ponga Tree
Adapted by Kingi M. Ihaka and illustrated by Dick Frizzell

For almost 15 years now, Mrs InFrame has been coming up with a special 12-day menu to celebrate the “Twelve Days of Christmas”.

She alternates each year between the traditional and the New Zealand version, otherwise known as “A Pukeko in a Ponga Tree”.

This year was the Kiwi Christmas Deliciousness Edition!

Most of the dishes usually have a direct correlation to the songs (Five Big Fat Pigs = Pork/Ham/Bacon), others use a fair chunk of artistic license as, if we stuck COMPLETELY to the original “Twelve Days” song’s days’ feathered features, we’d be swimming in poultry with French Hens, Swans a Swimming, Geese a Laying etc. etc. otherwise.

I’ll do my best to explain the pairing concepts as we go.

So sit back and enjoy as I reveal to you what my true love made over the Twelve Days of Kiwi Christmas Deliciousness for 2022

A Pukeko in a Ponga Tree

Pea Soup

Pukeko, otherwise known as the “Australasian Swamp Hen”, when not testing physics by riskily residing on or near roads in varying forms of dimension from three to two live, as their name suggests, in wetlands and swamps – represented here by the pea soup.

Two Kumara

Kumara and Chickpea Burgers

Kumara are a sweet potato. This dish combines kumara and chickpeas for a vegetarian burger!

Three Flax Ketes (“Kits”)

Orange Saffron Syrup Cake

Harakeke, the New Zealand Flax plant has a distinct red/orange flower/bloom That my wife thinks looks like Saffron – the stigma of the crocus plant’s flower.

Woven flax Kete are used as baskets and bags to carry things like food. This cake held a lot of Saffron syrup!

Four Huhu Grubs

Chocolate Cupcakes with Peanut Butter Icing

Huhu grubs are a creepy crawly larva-like delicacy usually served at most “Wild Food” festivals. They are renowned for their gooey-squishiness when you bite into them. Lots of people compare the Huhu grub’s taste and consistency to the equally gooey-squishiness of peanut butter.

The Chocolate cupcake represents the mud/dirt/ground cover or rotten tree trunks the grubs reside in.

Five Big Fat Pigs!

Self-Saucing Chocolate Pudding

Pigs like to wallow in mud and this pudding – a Frame Family favorite, wallows in a rich, sweet, “muddy” chocolate sauce.

Six Pois a Twirling

Stuffed Onions

Poi are little bags on woven string used in Maori dance and cultural performances.

We think stuffed onions look like Poi, E(h)?

Seven Eels a-Swimming

Stuffed Sausages with Mushroom Gravy

The Longfin Eel are native to New Zealand. and can be found in lots of muddy waterways – even the creek that runs past our house. These eel-like stuffed sausages swim in a muddy mushroom sauce, with green baby spinach along its shoreline.

Eight Plants of Puha

Detox Green Juice

Puha is a leafy, green, wild vegetable that usually grows near water, so a verdant detox drink made of celery, cucumber, spinach and green Granny Smith apples seems appropriate on liquid and color categories.

Nine Sacks of Pipis

Seafood Pie

Pipi are a bivalve mollusc like cockles. We went a little more up-(fish)market with salmon and prawns in our pies!

The flaky pastry, when puffed up, looks like a sack, too!

Ten Juicy Fish Heads

Snapper Curry

The image painted by Dick Frizzell in the Pukeko in a Ponga Tree picture book is of Snapper heads. These can be a bit stinky (as well as reasonably visually horrifying) when left out, and we have more than enough flies in the house this time of year, so fresh Snapper fillets simmered in a curry sauce was a far better alternative.

Eleven Haka Lessons

BBQ Whole Beef (and Vegan Pulled BBQ Pork)

The Haka is, of course, synonymous with New Zealand’s national rugby team. 

Mrs. Frame thinks the All Blacks and others who perform haka have strong, meaty/beefy legs, which gives the quad-slapping motion lots of haka have that distinctive muscley sound.

Twelve Piupiu Swinging

Tamales

Piupiu are a Maori grass skirt, as can be seen in the iconic Poi e music video. When the dancer wearing it sways or spins the individual threads spread out and sway.

To make Tamales we had to strip down some corn husks into long strands, much like harakeke flax is stripped down to make piupiu, to tie the bigger corn husk Tamale casings together.

We hope you’ve been inspired to try some of these, or your own version next Christmas.

From the Napier in Frame family to yours, we wish you a Merry Kiwi 2022 Christmas and a safe and happy 2023 New Year!

Because I Was Inverted

Do you feel the need?

The need for SPEED?!

Ever since the 1986 blockbuster Top Gun catapulted Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, Nick “Goose” Bradshaw and their Grumman F14 Tomcat off the deck of an aircraft carrier and into action film folklore with Kenny Loggins’ Danger Zone blaring through the speakers I have loved the movie and, especially, the F-14 Tomcat.

With twin engines, twin seats, and variable-sweep wings (they move – “Swing” in and out: Out-stretched for slower and more stable take-offs and landings; Swept back, like an arrow for getting places faster than the speed of sound), in my opinion, the Tomcat remains one of the sexiest pieces of aeronautical jet engineering ever.

Undeniably the coolest scene in Top Gun is in the opening minutes when Tom Cruise’s Maverick flips his F14 Tomcat upside down and flies very close to scare off the newly discovered “MiG 28” enemy fighter jet that is locked onto, and has spooked, his wing-man Cougar.

Maverick says “Greetings!” and flips the bird (gives the finger) to the enemy pilot, while Goose takes a close-up polaroid photo of the enemy aircraft from his RIO’s back seat (for military intelligence purposes).

The plan works, and the MiG “bugs out”, leaving the American jets to return to their Aircraft carrier, the USS Enterprise.

I have long dreamed of recreating that “inverted” scene as a model diorama, but there were several hurdles in the way.

I had made a number of model Tomcats over the years in different scales (1/72, 1/48 and 1/144), but had never been able to find one with Top Gun markings until I was on my way home from my last trip to Auckland and stopped for breakfast in Taupo.

With the sequel “Top Gun: Maverick” on the horizon Airfix had re-released their original 1/72 scale movie kits and I grabbed this kit the moment I saw it in Taupo Hobbies.

I took my time building it slowly and carefully, not wanting to make any errors. It came together really easily and well! There were no problems from construction to painting.

I even masked and painted canopy lines for the first time ever, with the results far better than I had expected!

The decals went on without issue and, again for the first time, I sprayed clear coat over the plane to seal them and stop the decal insignia from eventually flaking off like has happened on a few of my older kits.

I even painted the figures with colored helmets to resemble Mav’ and Goose, tilting their heads back with pliers to look like they are looking (up/) down on the MiG’s pilot.

Aircraft anoraks will readily tell you that the “MiG 28s” in the original Top Gun weren’t MiGs, or even Russian at all – They were American Northrop F-5E (single seat) and F-5F (twin seat) Tiger IIs.

The continuity in Top Gun’s opening dog fight scene flips and flops a bit – The plane that Maverick sneaks up on is rather clearly a single-seat E variant from the distant shots:

But then, seconds later, as the inverted Tomcat and the “MiG” are almost canopy-to-canopy, the MiG has miraculously morphed into a twin-seat F-5F!

(We’ll forgive them – It was the 80s and lots of movies that tried to replicate Top Gun’s aesthetic made far worse errors – At least Tony Scott had the same model of plane…)

Try as I might, I was unable to find an Italeri F-5F – the ideal twin-seat kit for what I wanted, but I was able to get a single-seat “MiG 28” from Twitter friend Justin Ryan who had ordered some kits from Japan and kindly added a Hobby Boss F-5E kit to his order for me.

Once again, an easy uncomplicated build, paint and marking job had two elements of my dream diorama all set.

Now for the diorama itself!

I had seen a couple model recreations of the “inverted” scene online that used clear plastic rods as the supports for the planes, with the rods drilled into a wooden base and heated and curved up and around before slotting into the planes’ jet exhausts to give them a near-horizontal (the rods inevitably drooped under the weight of the planes along the long length of the acrylic rods), mid-air appearance.

But these displays were all open and uncovered – A disaster waiting to happen when it came to dusting, which they would inevitably need in short order.

So I started thinking of covered alternatives.

Boxes were too cumbersome and framing could block some angles of view or wreck the illusion of flight that in was trying to replicate.

So I considered a clear plastic tube, or perhaps the whole thing in clear plastic!

In Napier we have a plastic fabricating company called Classique Plastics who I previously used for the clear sheet on the front of my recycled Rimu Pint Sized Hero display case.

When I went to scope my.plans out they happened to have a cut-off of the exact diameter and length of clear tube I was after already in their stocks!

I asked for them to make an all-acrylic display I had planned amd sketched out, but they ended up being very busy with commercial jobs and after a few weeks I decided I wanted to try something different, as i was uncertain the plastic rods would hold the weight of the planes as I had imagined.

So I designed something more multi-media.

I bought a slightly longer than originally planned length of clear plastic tube from Classique (this alone was over $100, so I dread to think how much the whole thing in clear acrylic would have cost!) and went in search of some round Rimu and stainless steel rods.

The rods I couldn’t source locally, but found and ordered from Bay Hobbies in Tauranga.

I got recycled Rimu floorboard “plug” ends made to fit on a CNC machine by local woodworkers Stim Craftmanship.

I had one edge of the round Rimu trimmed flat so the display could stand by itself without rolling everywhere.

Then I took one of the plug ends to my father-in-law’s workshop and very carefully measured and drilled holes for the stainless steel support rods to fit into, making sure they would be close enough together to replicate the inverted scene from the movie, but not so close that the planes touched.

The results were pretty neat perfect:

I’ve been fortunate this year to have a very successful streak of crafty creations.

Aside from a few speed bumps along the way with this project everything went exceptionally well and i am really happy with the result!

Radio (Controlled) Car-Car!

When I was younger, I dreamed of owning a Tamiya radio-controlled car.

At the time they were far too expensive and technical for my pocket money, or engineering ability.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve become more confident in my creative capabilities.

I also earn slightly more pocket money now than I used to when I was ten…

So, when I was able to cash in on some of my favorite childhood toys I took the opportunity to fulfill my Tamiya target!

As usual, I went to my local hobby shop, Cool Toys, who have a fantastic range of radio-controlled kits and ready-to-run vehicles.

After watching far too many YouTube videos I decided to get a Tamiya TT-02 kit, as it is very adaptable to different forms of bodies and on-road and off-road formats.

I must say I was still quite intimidated when I opened the box and was confronted with numerous bags of screws, multiple sprues of parts and an instruction manual the size of a novella.

The first part of the kit I made were the shock absorbers.

I had been tempted to get oil-filled performance shocks but decided to start off easily (and cheaply – Oil-filled shocks are over $100 for a set of four). They were also an easy part of the kit to build and give a sense of the kit’s construction being well under way.

(This wouldn’t ACTUALLY be the case until I started on the drivetrain.)

Gears, grease, screws and repeat, gears, grease, screws and repeat!

This is one of the parts of the build I feared stuffing up the most, as it appeared so fiddly.

As we know, however, appearances can be deceiving, and everything seemed to fit together without too much hassle, stress, blood or hair loss.

Next the motor went in (and out a couple times later on testing out the wheels), and the gear housings covered up all the greased-up bits.

The shocks I made up first off were no longer held in suspension (see what I did there?) as they were finally attached to the wheel assemblies on either end.

Universal joints and drive shafts will also provide power to all four corners of my RC beastie!

Giving the car some direction was next.

Steering set up was another rather intimidatingly technical bit, not least because I had heard and read several times about over-tightening screws de-threading softer plastic parts, so there was some added caution in this part of construction.

I think I got it all Goldilocks – I.e. not too loose, not too tight, JUST RIGHT!

On went the wheels (the smell of Tamiya rubber tyres has always been intoxicating!) and we were pretty much done! (after disassembling and reassembling half the bloody drive assembly because I unknowingly had the driveshaft and wheel bearings around the wrong way until trying, unsuccessfully, to fit the rims on..)

With the steering servo connected up It was time to give the chassis some cover and curves.

The kit I chose came with a 1998 Ford Escort shell.

The early 90s WRC Escort Cosworth was one of my favorite rally cars of all time. I made the scale model of the 1994 Cosworth RS many years ago, so this was an easy choice.

After buying the special curved polycarbonate scissors from Cool Toys I carefully cut around the exterior of the body shell to get it the right shape.

This body came with the wheel arches pre-cut, which made life easier, and the kit look smoother than my later work on the other body I bought.

After masking up the windows (also one of the more stressful parts of the build – you don’t want to get this far then ruin its appearance!) I sprayed the body (you spray the INSIDE of these models – the plastic body helps shield the finished paintwork) in four coats of Tamiya PS16 Metallic Blue giving it a similar color to the Subaru Impreza WRC rally car of the same era.

I managed to avoid any paint bleed under the masking and once that and the outer coating were peeled off and decals were added to the outside of the body the results were STUNNING!

I sprayed the windows in Tamiya PS31 Smoke to help hide the electronics inside the car.

One of the underlying reasons I chose the Escort and painted it in metallic blue is that my first long-term car (my very first car was a Ford Anglia that Dad and I partially restored in my last year of high school until it died of rear crossmember rust about a year later) was a metallic blue 1983 Ford Laser – kind of the Escort’s Mum/Dad.

It was an awesome, incredibly reliable car that served me really well, so I built this kit as a homage to that Laser.

I even used a label maker to recreate its number plate!

Is it a Bird? Is it a Plane? Not it’s V8 Supercar!

While scoping out my RC car purchase, I noted that Glen at Cool Toys had a Tamiya TT-02 Ford Mustang body shell and an after-market sticker sheet with the livery for Dick Johnson Racing modern Kiwi legend Scott McLaughlin‘s Australian V8 Supercar:

Despite being a fan of DJR arch-rivals Holden Racing Team from back in the Peter Brock and Mark Skaife days I couldn’t resist – I had to have a go at replicating the awesome looking DJR Mustang!

So, once I had completed the Escort, I moved onto the more complex task of cutting out, masking and painting (, and masking and painting, and masking and painting) Tamiya PS1 White, PS2 Red, PS6 Yellow and PS31 Smoke onto the Mustang to give it DJR’s iconic three-tone paint scheme.

With several coats, different colors, respraying, decalling and a few whoopsies I was finally able to make a realistic recreation that looked pretty bloody awesome if I do say so myself (just don’t look at the back of it..)!

Final Thoughts

Over-all this was a really easy, enjoyable experience with almost everything going right!

If anything the one big downside of the build is that I’m really annoyed at and disappointed in myself that my fear of inability kept me from building one of these kits a lot earlier in life!

(This is probably moot, though, as it wasn’t until recently that I had anywhere near the disposable income to afford making one.)

My Twitter friend Justin Ryan very kindly donated a hand controller and receiver he had spare to help get me going, so now I just have to get a nickel metal hydride battery, and I can start burning RC rubber!

Old Pain, Financial Gain!

MASK produced a series of children’s books which I collected. These were bought by a guy from Philidelphia, USA last year!

Nostalgia has been getting the better of me of late.

Whether it’s appearing on radio as a child, or dreams of building radio-controlled cars I could never afford, the past has been a bit of a focus for me recently

I had a bit of a clean out a few months ago.

I’ve slowly been whittling down the stockpile of 80s toys I grew up with and the most recent collection I divested myself of was my MASK toys.

MASK, or “Mobile Armored Strike Kommand” (sic) was an American toy line and kids’ cartoon series that began in 1985 and featured regular-looking vehicles that transformed into fighter planes, helicopters, boats, submarines and other types of offensive and defensive mobile weapon platforms.

It was very cool and very popular!

I was fortunate enough to collect several of them over the years, mainly on birthdays and Christmases (I got Rhino for Christmas in 1985 or 86), eventually holding onto four that I liked the most:

Condor – The smallest, cheapest and first MASK toy I got turns from a cool green motorcycle into an even cooler mini helicopter!

Thunderhawk – Quite possibly the coolest, Thunderhawk was the “hero vehicle” of the series and the prime vehicle of MASK leader Matt Trakker

Jackhammer – The only VENOM (Vicious Evil Network of Mayhem), “baddie” vehicle I got, but also one of the coolest looking, being a black Ford Bronco 4X4. I got this for my 8th birthday.

And finally, the biggest and best:

Rhino – MASK’s big-rig mobile command vehicle. Huge, with lots of chrome, buttons and spring-loaded features!

While they were very cool and I loved them, they had also spent the better part of 30 years in boxes in various wardrobes, seldom seeing the light of day, which was a shame because they should be out being appreciated and enjoyed.

YouTube is full of videos of toy collectors’ hordes in brightly lit glass display cases.

I decided my MASK toys deserved that and, maybe, the money I made from selling them could help finance my new radio-controlled car goal, so I shared some pictures of them on an 80s Toys Facebook group I belong to and, from the reactions listed all four of them on Trademe.

With starting prices amounting to around $250 (not unreasonable given their age, rarity and great condition – I loved and looked after my toys) I was stunned to earn over double that when the auctions ended!

All the toys were ultimately bought by the same bidder, so it was good to be able to keep them all together in their new home.

With the money raised I had enough to buy the Tamiya RC car I desired!

But that is a tale for another post...

A Blast From the Radio Past!

Napier’s “Broadcasting House”, now renamed for current tenants NZME. Bay City Radio occupied the top floor. The studio I did the kids’ show in was the windows directly above the main ground floor door.

Years and years and years ago I was on the radio.

This is before appearing on RNZ’s The Panel a mere six times in 2018-19.

Or doing midnight-till-dawns for six months on Hot 93 in Hastings in the dying days of local radio in the mid 90s.

Or even volunteering at Radio Kidnappers Access Radio while in high school.

In August 1984 I got to be the “Co-Pilot” on Bay City Radio’s Sunday morning kids’ show.

Bay City Radio 1278AM was THE local radio station for Hawke’s Bay for years and years. This is back when radio was broadcast locally, the announcers were locals (and some became minor local celebrities) and its constant focus was the local community.

There was a weekday breakfast show, talkback radio from about 9am until midday, with music in the afternoon and evenings.

On Saturday mornings all the upcoming local sporting fixtures for the weekend were promoted or dissected and commentary of big games, like the HB Magpies playing at McLean Park were often broadcast live in the afternoons.

On Sunday mornings there was a kids’ show, which had a local kid as co-host, or “Co-Pilot” (I don’t remember pressing any buttons, or taking charge of any controls, though.)

The Tamatea Hawks! I’m middle, back row (as always) Robert Stewart is to the left of me with the rounded collar. That’s his Dad, the radio announcer who coached us that year.

My friend Robert Stewart’s dad worked at Bay City Radio for a bit (they moved away not long after) and I though radio was pretty cool – I listened to the kids’ show every week, so must have written in, like so many others, asking to be part of it and I got selected.

I remember excitedly reading the letter we received confirming my selection in the driveway of our home one Saturday morning.

There was a few weeks’ notice of my appearance on the show, but I don’t remember much more than that, or the events of the big day itself.

Dad took me to the station early on Sunday morning (it was after dawn, but not by much), while Mum stayed at home and recorded the event on a cassette tape (kids, if you don’t know what one of these is, ask your parents…. Actually, you might be best asking your grandparents.)

I had found the tape when I was clearing out things at Mum and Dad’s place years ago but more recently looking through the mementos in my shed, I couldn’t find it and thought the tape was lost to the ages.

A couple weeks ago we gave away a large pinboard we had been given by a friend, but never got around to using. It had been leaning up against some garage cupboards that I had limited access to.

In one of these cupboards I found the metal cash box I wrote about originally finding amongst my folks’ possessions.

I looked inside the cash box AND FOUND THE CASSETTE TAPE!

However, I didn’t know if it would even still work – We no longer had any cassette players in the house, the tape itself was close to 40 years old, and I remember it got tangled up at least once or twice during replays years ago, so I wasn’t certain if any audio was recoverable.

I took the tape into Dean Mardon at Electric City Music in Napier, just down Dalton Street from Bay City Radio’s old studio, now “NZME House” (see top picture, ECM is down the road to the left in the picture) to see if he could digitize whatever was on there for me.

The condition of the tape wasn’t nearly as bad as I had feared and there was almost a full hour of recording!

I gave the file to a work colleague, who happens to be a former TVNZ audio man to clean up and, to avoid copyright infringements, remove any songs so I could upload it to YouTube.

For those playing at home the songs removed are: The Beatles’ Yellow Submarine, “Flick the Little Fire Engine”, “You’re a Pink Toothbrush “, Rolf Harris’ “Two Little Boys” (hindsight is 20/20 etc…), “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” from Mary Poppins and the show closes out with, quite prophetically, Kermit the Frog singing “Rainbow Connection”.

You can listen to the edited version of it here:

I cried listening to it for the first time in over 35 years.

It’s a bit funny, a bit cringey, certainly nostalgic and, today, a bit sad, because I can hear my Mum’s voice, or rather her speech patterns in how I talked back then, and I can remember Dad sitting quietly in the corner of the studio, over my right shoulder, pleased as Punch.

For years I remembered it as my friend Robert’s dad as the host of the show, but it was a man named Colin Harris.

We talk about my school, Tamatea Primary, my apparent bus driving career aspirations (??), what I was doing in the school holidays (my studio stint was in the middle of the second and third term of the year – there were only three school terms back then), I say “Hi!” to my friends and <Gasp!> girlfriends (I was only six, OK?!)

I even got to do the weather!

Time has sadly robbed my memory of some of the finer details – I have no recollection whatsoever of a couple of my friends and one apparent “love interest” mentioned, and the fact I had to Google the movie “Sword of the Valiant“, which I say I wanted to see (most likely at the State Cinema diagonally across the Dickens / Dalton Streets intersection from the station) probably indicates I never got to see it.

Mrs Unwin’s class, 1984. I, back row, middle, look like a serial killer in waiting because the photographer kept telling me to “look down” so I would fit in the picture. I took stage instruction seriously.

My first foray in front of a microphone probably wouldn’t win many awards with several long, thought-filled pauses (dreaded “dead air” as it’s called in the industry), but there are still some moments of brilliance for an almost seven-year-old that make the likes of today’s simulcast announcers sound like a pack of un-funny men-children (#SpoilerAlert: That’s not hard to do, but sadly no one better is given the chance to!)

It was, however, the start of a lifelong dream for me to be on radio. A dream that has mostly only seen failure over the last three decades, as local radio in Hawke’s Bay has been cut back and cut back, undermined and undermined.

I have said that I don’t suffer from the “old pain” of nostalgia, but some recent events do poke at old wounds, gnawing “what-ifs” irritate and sometimes you just miss your Mum and Dad who did lots of little things like taking you to a radio station, and recording you on a cassette tape years ago.

I would be “almost seven, still a bit six” in this photo