Skip to main content

The Waiting Land


We drove south on Saturday to take part in the 125th anniversary of St. Saviour's Mataura. It's an easy drive down through Otago, across the Clutha at Balclutha, and then, at Clinton, taking the shortcut which wends through prosperous, green, well nurtured Southland farmland. After 40 km or so of gently rolling hills, relaxed bends, fat sheep and tight, evenly spaced hay bales there is a patch of broken roadway and the start of a collection of ragged houses. Mataura. It sits on a the banks of the river from which it draws its name: on one bank there is a massive freezing works, still functioning, and on the other, an even more massive paper mill, no longer functioning.

The paper mill used to function very well indeed, producing about 25,000 tons of paper a year, and employing around 250 people. Before its mothballing in 2000 it was the largest recycler of paper in the country, but rising costs, the problems of effluent disposal and, most significantly, competition from cheaper imported paper meant losses of around a million a year and inevitable closure. When the great machines ceased to turn, people moved on, shops closed down, services relocated and property prices plummeted. Now the once bustling Bridge St. is a row of tired looking shops, many of which are empty. There are some well kept houses but there are also many careworn and neglected ones. The magnet of very cheap housing has given rise to social problems of the type usually found in large cities. Nowadays we import our paper and export it again when it needs recycling. It's cheaper to do it that way, you see. But driving through Mataura, I couldn't help thinking that as a nation we haven't calculated the costs very well. Sure we pay a few cents less for a ream of photocopy paper, but the price we have paid is the loss of all that machinery and, more importantly, the people who know how to run it. For an immediate financial gain we have sold off our capacity for self reliance, flexibility and social responsibility. And we have jiggered a perfectly good little town.

And so, we arrived at St. Saviours, late in the afternoon to celebrate in the small church which has served the town in better days and worse. There was a small choir busily practising, the interior of the church was freshly renovated and just before the 5:00 pm starting time the pews filled with past and present members, there to sing evensong and gather round the celebratory dinner afterwards. I felt strangely at home. My first parish was Waihao Downs in South Canterbury and we lived at Morven, a town which had once been a major railway terminus for the loading of grain, but which was, when we arrived, a row of derelict shops, a couple of churches, and a rough scattering of very cheap houses. Our time there was full and rich, and so was this brief stop at Mataura. The service was warm and flowed well. The dinner was great. The company more so. The people who remain have deep roots into this community and a resilience which comes from adherence to values far deeper than globalisation.

There is a strength here which is the real hope of our diocese. And, when in a shorter time than many of us imagine, the global economy is seen to be merely a by product of the temporary phase in world economic history defined by an abundance of cheap oil, it will be the real hope of our nation.

Comments

Bill said…
Have you thought of writing a book on pastoral ministry? You have a fine writing style and from what I can glean, lots of pastoral experience as a priest and bishop..............happy Pentecost to you and your family from your Yankee friends here in the US.

Bill
Lee said…
This is an issue that I feel very strongly about.

At what point do oil costs rise enough to make those cheaper imports not-so-cheap anymore?

We're losing so many skills and so many towns and jobs to this sort of thing.

And while I understand that people overseas need to earn a living too, I can't help thinking the time is really near that even if things don't reverse ad jobs re-establish themselves here, the jobs that have been created overseas in our "cheaper competitor" are going to be in jeopardy as an even cheaper alternative in a third, or fourth, country down the poverty line is found.

And with every link in the chain, fewer dollars actually find their way into the hands of those who actually do the work.

As a consumer, I'd like to buy NZ-owned and made. But it's needle-in-haystack work these days :-(

Here's to a day when there are more needles than haystack!
Anonymous said…
Do you believe that an intelligent, educated person should have to spend his life in prison because his "girlfriend" chose to provoke him?
Kelvin Wright said…
Now there's a loaded question if ever I saw one. Educated and intelligent has nothing to do with it. And with regard to certain very serious crimes, neither does provocation. So, in response to this (I presume)totally hypothetical question: if, in response to the girlfriend's provocation the "intelligent" friend did something so profoundly stupid and self centred as to result in the girlfriend's harm,then yes, he probably does deserve all that is coming to him.
Anonymous said…
7/10 A bit hasty and taken in.
Wynston said…
Is it because people do not have the courage of their apparent convictions that they hide behind the name "Anonymous"?

Excellent response Kelvin, and one with which I wholeheartedly agree.

Wynston

Popular posts from this blog

Camino, by David Whyte

This poem captures it perfectly Camino. The way forward, the way between things, the way already walked before you, the path disappearing and re-appearing even as the ground gave way beneath you, the grief apparent only in the moment of forgetting, then the river, the mountain, the lifting song of the Sky Lark inviting you over the rain filled pass when your legs had given up, and after, it would be dusk and the half-lit villages in evening light; other people's homes glimpsed through lighted windows and inside, other people's lives; your own home you had left crowding your memory as you looked to see a child playing or a mother moving from one side of a room to another, your eyes wet with the keen cold wind of Navarre. But your loss brought you here to walk under one name and one name only, and to find the guise under which all loss can live; remember you were given that name every day along the way, remember you were greeted as such, and you neede

En Hakkore

In the hills up behind Ranfurly there used to be a town, Hamilton, which at one stage was home to 5,000 people. All that remains of it now is a graveyard, fenced off and baking in the lonely brown hills. Near it, in the 1930s a large Sanitorium was built for the treatment of tuberculosis and other respiratory ailments. It was a substantial complex of buildings with wards, a nurses hostel, impressive houses for the manager and superintendent and all the utility buildings needed for such a large operation. The treatment offered consisted of isolation, views and weather. Patients were exposed to the air, the tons of it which whistled past, often at great speed, the warmth of the sun and the cold. They were housed in small cubicles opening onto huge glassed verandas where they cooked in the summer and froze in the winter and often, what with the wholesome food and the exercise, got better. When advances in antibiotics rendered the Sanitorium obsolete it was turned into a Borstal and the

Kindle

 Living as I do in a place where most books have to come a long way in an aeroplane, reading is an expensive addiction, and of course there is always the problem of shelf space. I have about 50 metres of shelving in my new study, but it is already full and there is not a lot of wall space left; and although it is great insulation, what is eventually going to happen to all that paper? I doubt my kids will want to fill their homes with old theological works, so most of my library is eventually going to end up as egg cartons. Ebooks are one solution to book cost and storage issues so I have been  using them for a while now, but their big problem has been finding suitable hardware to read them on.  I first read them on the tiny screens of Ipaqs and they were quite satisfactory but the wretchedness of Microsoft Reader and its somewhat arbitrary copyright protection system killed the experience entirely. On Palm devices they were OK except the plethora of competing and incompatible formats

Ko Tangata Tiriti Ahau

    The Christmas before last our kids gave us Ancestry.com kits. You know the deal: you spit into a test tube, send it over to Ireland, and in a month or so you get a wadge of paper in the mail telling you who you are. I've never, previously, been interested in all that stuff. I knew my forbears came to Aotearoa in the 1850's from Britain but I didn't know from where, exactly. Clemency's results, as it turns out, were pretty interesting. She was born in England, but has ancestors from various European places, and some who are Ngāti Raukawa, so she can whakapapa back to a little marae called Kikopiri, near Ōtaki. And me? It turns out I'm more British than most British people. Apart from a smattering of Norse  - probably the result of some Viking raid in the dim distant past - all my tūpuna seem to have come from a little group of villages in Nottinghamshire.  Now I've been to the UK a few times, and I quite like it, but it's not home: my heart and soul belon

Return to Middle Earth

 We had a flood, a couple of weeks back, and had to move all the stuff out of the spare bedroom, including  the contents of two floor to ceiling book cases. Shoving the long unopened copies of Sartor Resartus and An Introduction to Byron into cartons, I came upon my  copy of The Lord of the Rings . Written in the flyleaf are the dates of its many readings, the last one being when I read it aloud to Catherine, when she was about 10 or 11, well over 20 years ago. The journey across Middle Earth took Catherine and me the best part of a year, except for the evening when we followed Frodo and Sam across the last stretches of Mordor and up Mount Doom, when we simply couldn't stop, and sat up reading until 11.00 pm, on a school night.  My old copy is a paperback, the same edition that every card carrying baby boomer has somewhere on their shelves. The glue has dried and hardened. The cover and many of the pages have come loose. I was overcome with the urge to read it again, but this old