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NZ Herald
21-06-2025
- General
- NZ Herald
The Good Life: The mighty Greytown gum
Greytown has been celebrating trees generally for much of its life. Photo / Greg Dixon Greg Dixon is an award-winning news reporter, TV reviewer, feature writer and former magazine editor who has written for the NZ Listener since 2017. The sign is emphatic. 'Historic Tree', it declares, pointing at the tree in question, an old gum which is so enormous it almost certainly doesn't require a sign to get you to notice it. The giant exotic must be as tall as a four-storey building. This is the sort of thing you expect to find when promenading in Greytown, the most genteel of South Wairarapa's three main townships. The townsfolk appear to be very, very proud of their colonial heritage and are quite meticulous about labelling it. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that every house and business on the main street, which happens to double as SH2, has a small sign on it describing the building's provenance, proclaiming things like, 'This tōtara cottage was built in 1853 by the Rev James Cuckoo, the town's first religious crank. He was hanged in 1888 for blasphemy.' I might have made that up, but you get the olde worlde picture. In a town so interested in celebrating its colonial built-history, it comes as no surprise to the visitor that the village's current burghers also honour – and festoon with signs – the more notable colonial plantings, as well. This isn't something new. Greytown has been celebrating trees generally for much its life; the country's first Arbor Day was marked in Greytown on July 3, 1890. Which brings us back to the 'Historic Tree'. It, along with a slap-up lunch at the White Swan Hotel (make sure you have the dumplings and the crème brûlée) was what brought us to fair Greytown on a fair winter's Saturday. Listed as 'the Greytown Gum', the Eucalyptus regnans is one of the six finalists in the fourth annual Tree of the Year competition, a contest run by the NZ Notable Trees Trust. Also competing this year is a Morton Bay fig in Auckland Domain called 'The Fairy Tree', the 'Phantom Rātā' in Bay of Plenty, a redwood at Rangiora Borough School, 'Te Herenga Ora', a cluster of tī kōuka (cabbage trees) in Christchurch and 'the Chook Tree' at Waianakarua in North Otago. The last is a macrocarpa which looks a bit like a giant chicken. To strengthen that claim, it has a giant fake egg next to it, which is chicanery if you ask me. To qualify for the competition a tree has to be 'special' to a community and also have a bit of a story to it, which Greytown's 'Historic Tree' most certainly has, according to one of its three signs. It reads: 'Samuel Oates Gum Tree 1856'. The story goes that our gum tree was one of 12 seedlings pushed in a wheelbarrow over the Remutaka Hill track from Wellington in 1856 by a bloke called Samuel Oates, a task given to him by one Charles Rooking Carter, whose name now graces nearby Carterton. As anyone who has ever driven over the Remutakas will tell you, they're bloody steep. So it is no surprise that on arriving with the seedlings in Greytown, Samuel Oakes decided to wet his whiskers at the Rising Sun Hotel (since deceased). It was while slaking his thirst with local ale that three of the 12 seedlings were pinched from his wheelbarrow by person or persons unknown. What is known is that all three were then planted in various parts of Greytown. Now, 169 years later, only the one with the three signs remains, making the Greytown Gum the sole survivor of not just history, but of a highway robbery. Which means the emphatic road sign has it all wrong. It shouldn't say 'Historic Tree', it should say 'Historic Crime Scene'. While Michele and I were admiring the Historic Crime Scene, two young women stopped to have a gander at it as well, so we told them about the gum being in the Tree of the Year competition and encouraged them to vote for it before the ballot closes on June 30. One shook her head. 'I'm going to have to vote for a native,' she said earnestly. There was a pause. Then she turned to the giant gum. 'Sorry,' she said.
New Statesman
18-06-2025
- Entertainment
- New Statesman
From Barbara Demick to Emily Kasriel: new books reviewed in short
Daughters of the Bamboo Grove: China's Stolen Children by Barbara Demick China ended international adoption less than a year ago. Today there are around 160,000 internationally adopted Chinese children, the majority of whom are girls. Foreign adoption of Chinese babies was so popular in the 2000s that Mattel partnered with the White Swan Hotel in Guangzhou, China, creating a set of limited edition white dolls holding an Asian baby. These were given to the families staying at the hotel, meeting their new baby for the first time before taking them home. Well-intentioned adoptive parents believed they were rescuing babies who had been abandoned under China's strict one-child policy. A much darker truth is explored in Daughters of the Bamboo Grove. Drawing on the story of two identical twins separated between China and the US as infants who reconnected in adulthood, and supported by two decades of reporting, Barbara Demick shows that many of these babies were taken from the arms of their parents by government officials and trafficked. With details fudged during the adoption process, and Chinese bureaucracy opaque, many families are still unable to find their lost children. Granta, 336pp, £20. Buy the book By Catharine Hughes Poor Ghost! by Gabriel Flynn Losing a Harvard PhD, a blossoming romance and dreams of literary fame brings Luca's coming-of-age narrative crashing down. Back in a reality that he desperately tried to escape, Luca finds himself in his hometown of Manchester, unemployed and sofa-surfing. He thinks he is above the place of his youth but has little to show for it. The city's grey skies, broken glass and hollow gentrification (its 'artificial smile') are as much of a burden on Luca's supposed destiny as was his father, a troubled academic and alcoholic. His father's substance abuse only worsened after a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis (MS) when Luca was a child, eventually leading to his dad's suicide. Luca tries to find purpose in Andy, who is looking for a writer to pen his memoir before he too is incapacitated by MS. But this is mainly self-serving; Luca's haughty manuscript and its projections of ruin – his own, his father's, the city's – run counter to Andy's laddish contentedness. Their dynamic is tricky and at times uncomfortable, but it's a more compelling arc than the author's exploration of Luca's romantic fatalism. Reinforced by stinging deployment of similes and metaphors, Poor Ghost! is a solid exploration of trauma, class and people's sense of place – wherever that may be. Sceptre, 272pp, £18.99. Buy the book By Harry Clarke-Ezzidio Deep Listening: Transform Your Relationships with Family, Friends and Foes by Emily Kasriel We have lost the knack of listening properly, says the academic and author Emily Kasriel, and in a divided world one of the things we are distanced from is our own agenda: what is it we want when we talk to another person? Our ears may be open but our thoughts are not always on what is being said but elsewhere – too often waiting for our own turn to speak. The need to engage properly in these fractious times hardly needs stating, but how to do it is a different matter. Here Kasriel outlines a method to enable deep listening which includes techniques to encourage curiosity about another person's thoughts, to help lose our fear of conversational silences, and for deeper reflection. The very act of listening properly, she says, is a recognition of both respect and empathy. She has used, and taught, this approach in assorted areas of stress – from families to war zones – and reinforces her method with both science and real-world examples, from Nelson Mandela to Antony Gormley. Her tone is equally considered, eschewing the woo-woo for calm and reasoned elucidation. Thorsons, 320pp, £16.99. Buy the book By Michael Prodger The Buried City by Gabriel Zuchtriegel, translated by Jamie Bulloch Why do people feel compelled to visit Pompeii? Are we just accumulating experiences like stamp collectors, ticking off the greatest artworks and monuments of antiquity to collect the complete set? Or could Pompeii be about something more, something living, a way for us to see ourselves through the lens of a city buried under volcanic ash and frozen in time nearly 2,000 years ago? Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe As director-general of the archaeological park in Pompeii, these are not just abstract questions for Gabriel Zuchtriegel. 'Explaining a work of art, an ancient city or an entire culture is like planting a seed,' he writes, urging readers to look beyond temple floor plans or artefact inventories. 'The fertile ground is your audience's capacity to let this seed grow.' Yes, The Buried City is about history: the Romans who lived in Pompeii, how they lived and died, and what archaeological secrets this unique site is still offering up to those willing to keep digging. But it's also about now. Issues of identity, citizenship, community, belonging are explored through rescued artefacts and ruined buildings. This isn't a book about antiquity. It's a book about what our love of antiquity can teach us about ourselves. Hodder & Stoughton, 256pp, £22. Buy the book By Rachel Cunliffe [See also: The ghost of Muriel Spark] Related
