The dark side

The Press

Dark deeds and dark art -- is it a South Island condition? PHILIP MATTHEWS explores the unease that lies beneath the stark beauty of Mainland life.

A family of four are on holiday in the Mackenzie Country. They're from up north; the boys, twins, have never seen South Island scenery before "the sheer valley sides and the towering bulk of Cook and Tasman". At that sight, even the boys go quiet for a moment.

They park the Volvo and stop for a picnic. Two men appear -- one called Tub and one called Mandrake. The second of the two has a sawn-off . 22 rifle. He shoots the boys. Mark dies instantly, Gordon takes a few more seconds.

Later they shoot the wife, Jill, "twice behind the ear", and roll her body into a ditch. As night falls, the husband, Hoagie, is left for dead with a wound to his leg, bleeding in a cemetery near Burkes Pass.

Timaru writer Owen Marshall published that story, which he titled Coming Home in the Dark, 13 years ago. It's fiction but it was inspired by grim reports of home invasions that Marshall saw in newspapers: "There might be a nice old lady just sitting there having a Horlicks and then someone on P decides that this is a door I'll bash in, strangles her and eats her bacon and eggs.

"The theme of the story was the random senselessness of violence. So I set it in a lovely, scenic, quiet place to accentuate the impact of that terrible violence."

But does Marshall think that there is something specifically South Island about killings like those? No -- such crimes can, and do, happen anywhere. The difference might be this: in the south, we may be more likely to remember it, and mythologise it.

It's easy to put together a list of mythologised South Island crimes. Baby farmer Minnie Dean, hanged in Invercargill in 1895. Stanley Graham, who shot seven men on the West Coast in 1941. Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme, who killed Parker's mother with a brick in a stocking in a park near Christchurch in 1954. David Gray, who killed 13 people in Aramoana in 1990. Gay Oakes, who killed Doug Gardiner in Christchurch in 1993 and buried his body in the garden. The five members of the Bain family, murdered in Dunedin in 1994. Ben Smart and Olivia Hope, abducted from Marlborough Sounds in 1998.

How many North Island cases have been anywhere near as high-profile? Perhaps only one: the Crewe murders.

Dunedin writer and researcher Lynley Hood remembers that the Australian writer Patrick White used to say, when he heard about a particularly weird or gruesome crime on this side of the Tasman, that it was "a very New Zealand-ish crime". But can we narrow that down to a very South Island-ish crime? The scientist in Hood isn't so sure.

But she can talk about the tendency to mythologise. She's had first-hand experience. "My late husband came from Gore. He was brought up with his grandma saying, you kids behave yourself or I'll send you to Minnie Dean.

"Everyone who came from Southland would tell you Minnie Dean stories with absolute straight faces. They weren't ignorant crones in backblock villages -- they were lawyers and policemen and journalists and schoolteachers. Their folk tales were straight out of Hansel and Gretel."

Only in the South Island have we built dark mythology around two childcare workers -- the other was the subject of Hood's fourth book, A City Possessed: the Christchurch Civic Creche worker Peter Ellis.

Both stories stir deep and irrational feelings -- the monsters who have come for our children. More rationally, Hood says, in both cases, New Zealand was the last stop for a tide of moral panic that was generated overseas.

In the Dean story, while "there was certainly some abuse and neglect", there was also the idea that women like her were signs of the Victorian failure to suppress the sin of fornication -- these pseudo-mothers took in the unwanted results.

As for Ellis, Christchurch -- as readers of Hood's book will know -- became the epicentre of a child sex-abuse industry, tinder waiting for a spark.

"As far as I know, Christchurch is the only place in New Zealand that has generated genuine mythology about a secret cult engaged in depraved sexual orgies that are so hidden that they leave no evidence."

By this, Hood means the widely rumoured "great Christchurch paedophile ring". The wild paranoia and "spurious weight" that was generated by the investigation of that urban myth fed straight into the Civic Creche case, she argues. As such, Ellis became a sacrificial victim like Dean nearly 100 years earlier.

"A reflex need for a scapegoat turns a crime into a high-profile, foaming-at-the-mouth crime." So she wonders whether Christchurch's class consciousness makes it easier to scapegoat -- to create them-and-us mentalities.

That's speculative, she agrees. But this need to find scapegoats is what intrigues her about stories like Dean and Ellis, and her new interest -- the allegations of sexual abuse at the Marylands residential school, formerly run by the St John of God brotherhood.

Scapegoats and exorcisms: there's a familiar, Gothic feeling to this. The mythologies around Stanley Graham and David Gray are such that films have been made about both -- Bad Blood and Out of the Blue. Both end the same way: the outraged survivors burn the killer's house or crib to the ground. Flames, pitchforks and fade out.

"I remember someone from overseas being horrified at this New Zealand custom," Hood says. "It's certainly got all sorts of mythological overtones. It implies the existence of evil in the place and a purification by fire."

The killer's crib burning into the night? That's South Island Gothic, an idea that was most famously taken for a spin in the Sam Neill and Judy Rymer documentary Cinema of Unease. That title has become a kind of shorthand now -- it says, all our films are dark and, therefore, so are we.

It's not quite as simple as that. The reality is that cinema of unease is a South Island idea. The film was subtitled A personal journey through New Zealand film and the emphasis was on the word personal -- a lot of it had to do with Neill's complicated feelings about emigrating to Christchurch as a boy. The Neills sailed from Britain to this unknown spot on the map where they discovered that someone had built a simulation of an English provincial city on the Canterbury Plains.

But there was something not quite right about it. Something uneasy. So we have Neill interpreting Christchurch's Gothic revival architecture as "the buildings of exile".

We have Neill feeling carsick on the Port Hills, intercut with scenes from Heavenly Creatures of the murderers Parker and Hulme swimming at Port Levy. We have Neill risking psychic contagion as he cycles past Sunnyside Hospital. We have Neill wondering if blood stays in the soil of Aramoana.

That was in 1995. About a decade later, Christchurch Art Gallery curator Felicity Milburn developed the idea and built an art show around it, named for Owen Marshall's short story Coming Home in the Dark. The opening lines of the associated text could have come from Neill's tele-prompter: "Lurking behind the South Island's legendary picture-postcard views and the stoic jaw of the Southern Man is a dark side -- a Gothic underbelly of paranoia, alienation and unease."

Certainly the art was dark enough to convince you of that idea. Alongside older figures -- Colin McCahon, Tony Fomison, Trevor Moffitt, Barry Cleavin -- were younger Christchurch artists who dipped into the dark side: Jason Greig, Tony de Lautour, Ronnie van Hout and others. The Auckland artist Ann Shelton contributed one of the show's greatest works: a photographic diptych which makes a mirror image of the path in the Cashmere Hills where Honora Parker was murdered. The split image might have suggested two choices: myth that way, reality this way.

"We weren't setting the south up as the murder capital of New Zealand," Milburn says. "But there's a combination in Christchurch that's interesting, where it's under the surface, it's unexpected.

"Christchurch is always presented as this very conservative, respectable city and how true that is, I have my doubts about. There's a gap between the perception and the reality and perhaps that gap is bigger in Christchurch."

In that show, the focus was limited to Canterbury. But South Island Gothic goes wider. There is the Dunedin-born artist Saskia Leek who, critic and curator Justin Paton wrote, "summons up her childhood sense of Dunedin as a ghost town -- a place of creaking mansions with spires and secret passages, of castles on the world's edge, of freshly dewed lawns and forests rustling with mystery".

There are the death paintings of Dunedin artist Simon Kennedy -- skulls here, there and everywhere. In the same city, there is photographer Ben Cauchi, whose dark, murky images look like recreations of Victorian spirit photography: floating candlesticks, ghostly shapes.

And there are recent films. Glenn Standring set his Gothic vampire thriller Perfect Creature in the heritage quarters of Oamaru and Dunedin. The late Brad McGann dragged Maurice Gee's novel In My Father's Den south from Auckland -- Henderson is no longer rural and spooky enough, so he went for central Otago. The storyline feels all too familiar: a 16-year-old girl goes missing and is discovered dead.

The West Coast's wild weather is a Gothic effect in Gaylene Preston's film Perfect Strangers -- Sam "cinema of unease" Neill is the charming stranger who abducts a woman on his boat and takes her back to his lair.

Christchurch Gothic rolls on, too. Auckland writer Paul Shannon grew up in Ashburton, Timaru and Christchurch and seemed to exact revenge on those places in his first novel, Davey Darling -- a kind of God Boy shifted to the cold flatlands.

"I chose Sockburn (as the setting) because it's right on the edge of town," Shannon says. "The landscape is very bare around there, nearly treeless, like the worst parts of the United States."

More recently, Christchurch writer Carl Nixon -- who resists the Gothic label -- published Rocking Horse Road, in which a 17-year-old girl is raped, murdered and abandoned on the beach at New Brighton.

So is there something in the air down here? "We do have dispositions but I don't think one consciously goes towards that," says Barry Cleavin. "I was brought up in Dunedin: earlier evenings, darker mornings, First Church, melancholia and so on. I believe that some of that infuses itself into you.

"I don't slouch around in a Gothic disposition, but a lot of the time I'm dreadfully bloody melancholic. I wish I wasn't."

For Cleavin, the difference between Auckland and the South Island is comparable to the different cultures of Renaissance art: the Germanic north had a darker feel than the sunnier Italian south. As he sees it, the flatness of Christchurch produces an introversion.

"People hunker down. There's a different kind of community spirit in Dunedin. But Dunedin is darker -- its imagery, its music."

For him, Christchurch is the flatlands and Dunedin is the darklands -- the two poles of his South Island. Oamaru? "Kindness can happen there." Invercargill? He almost shudders at the mention of it -- what's spooky about that place, he thinks, is the way that its neurotic grid layout produces weird perspectives, "giving you a great sense of unease. Shadows start doing peculiar things."

If Milburn could have expanded Coming Home in the Dark, she might have included photographer Laurence Aberhart.

Born in Nelson, Aberhart lived for years in Christchurch and Lyttelton before heading north to Russell, but his work has mapped out a New Zealand that seems to be receding into the past even as you look at it: old wooden churches and Masonic lodges, cemeteries and domestic dwellings, all photographed with an ancient black-and-white camera.

He resists the label "Gothic" but is prepared to venture that an image of a cemetery in Riverton, Southland -- a tiny stone angel dwarfed by a giant black yew tree, the sky turning dark behind it -- comes close.

"Gothic is actually running away from the other label -- contemporary. The South Island is very good at not bothering with contemporary, to its credit.

"When I think of culture in the south, it's resistant to the edge-of-now change that's always in the firmament in somewhere like Auckland."

And darkness in the South Island? It's not murders that come to mind but relative poverty as well as the tougher weather.

"When I think of darkness in the South Island, I just think of those southerly fronts that roll up and curl up the back of Akaroa or Lyttelton Harbour. Or places like Owaka (in Otago) and Tuatapere in Southland, the places which are getting south and up against the edge -- the coastal edge, which is raw, or the mountain edge -- they seem to have a darkness about them.

"Owaka's particularly grim in that way, but then so is a place like Masterton -- Masterton is much grimmer than anything the South Island could provide."

And what else? "Probably the perverseness of West Coasters. My personal opinion is that the West Coast is not fit for human habitation. People shouldn't try it."

When Aberhart talks about South Island Gothic artists running away from the contemporary, he might have someone like Jason Greig in mind. Interested in mortality and history, Greig wants to make images that people can't get out of their minds -- Goya meets Edgar Allan Poe in a dark alley. "Goya's brutal," Greig says. "Brutally honest and brutally holding a mirror back up to society."

He's been at it for more than 20 years and his Southern Man, a print of a skull-faced giant holding a grave-digger's shovel, was the grim poster boy for Coming Home in the Dark. Influences extend beyond the art world -- there's the dark melodrama of heavy metal (Black Sabbath and Judas Priest are favourites).

Sometimes, it's even less meaningful than that -- one of his shows was called Empty Mindless Spectres, a phrase he jotted down during The X-Files.

He came from Timaru, shifting to Christchurch to go to art school in the '80s. As an aficionado of the pre-modern, it made sense that he lived in Oamaru for about five years -- there's a particular Gothic poignancy in "the seat of money and power that the rest of the country forgot about".

It's a backwards view -- history is very present to Greig. He lives in Lyttelton, in a building that's 100 years old. When he looks at the harbour, he can picture the ships that brought settlers here.

"It's about what this relatively young country has been through," he says of his work.

"My wise older sister says it's a remembrance of the suffering and the blood that this place has seen. Two different races came in ships, suffering and toiling."

This takes us back to Owen Marshall's view of where Canterbury Gothic might come from. "Perhaps beneath the vaunted Englishness, there has long been in Canterbury repressed unease arising from a sense of colonial imposition on a very different landscape, history and culture."

For Greig, it's about the sinister side of colonialism, the ghosts of settlers, whalers and sealers. But is it still as dark out there?

"You've only got to go out on a Saturday night in Christchurch. This place has never been darker. It's like something's going to erupt. It's not pretty.

"I don't like to think about it too much."