Thoughts on gold digging

In November 2009, just before I had problems with my prostate (though you didn't need to know that) I was staying for a few days at the former Waipiata sanatorium (now called En Hakkore) near Ranfurly in the Maniototo. One afternoon we walked up the hill to a cemetery that was situated on a slight slope overlooking the plains. The gravestones were scattered around the not-very-large walled-in area, and everyone of them spoke of people who'd been buried there around a hundred years before. There were no recent ones.

The reason for this was that the cemetery is all that's left of a small town that once stood up on this hill. Though the view is magnificent the inhabitants must have found it a rather windy spot. The town, called Hamiltons, came into existence because of gold, and died not long after the gold ceased to be found.

I found some information about Hamiltons on a Central Otago tourism site

The area is named after Captain Hamilton, who along with two others drew up and took up Run 204, know as Hamiltons Station. In late 1863, gold was reported and the field initially proved very rich, yielding thousands of ounces of gold. [I wonder how many gold bars that amounts to?] Some 2000 miners first worked the area, peaking at 4000 in 1864. Ironically, the surviving township of Patearoa once relied heavily on Hamiltons for shops and services. The town of Hamiltons, which included 25 liquor outlets and 40 stores, did not last long, although a few miners did stay and continue hydraulic sluicing.

Patearoa, as the extract notes, survived, even though its gold rush was comparatively short-lived. Perhaps its situation, down on the plain, is more sheltered and less exposed than Hamiltons.

This last week there's been a lot of celebrating going on in Lawrence, where gold was first discovered 150 years ago by Gabriel Reed. Lawrence's population was at one time 11,500 - it's now around 550. Gold digging must be one of the most unpleasant occupations a person can choose, even given the end results. Out in a lonely place, living in a tent or a shack of some sort (if you're lucky), often without friends, definitely without wives and children, and continually afraid that someone's going to steal what you've gained. And for the Chinese people who came here to search for it, it was an exceptionally difficult lifestyle, as they were despised and hated by the Europeans. You can still see some of their old shelters near Cromwell. The landscape around is pitiless, barren and rocky.

Obsolete!

What’s the most obsolete object in the UK now? It has to be the ashtray. They’re no use indoors anywhere since the new non-smoking law came in on the 1st July, and the smokers who go outside tend to leave their ash and butts on the ground, stomped out in heaps.
It’s interesting that at one of the local pubs in Roade, (the village where we’re staying), the owner was saying to a couple of her customers last night that since the 1st July, the number of diners per day has increased markedly. Of course they have. People enjoy not having to inhale smoke while they’re eating. Only smokers like it otherwise.
The bars still pong a bit around the country, and no doubt will for some time yet, but the air is starting to clear. It’s a great step forward, even though smokers might not appreciate being made to go out and get a breath of fresh air.

Lilburn and McGann

You can say ‘hypocrite’ if you like, but I have to admit that I’m listening to Lilburn on streaming radio at the moment. It’s his first symphony. Now let’s be clear; I haven’t changed my view that Lilburn at best is a master of movement without melody, as in this symphony, and even in this piece there are stretches where nothing is happening except rhythmic phrases. Time and again he seems about to break out into a real surge, a soaring, and time and again he breaks off. Given that, however, this piece is certainly more attractive than his later works, where he got into ‘modernism’ (of some sort) to such a degree that music flew out the window almost completely. And don’t even let’s go down the track of his electronic music. That stuff is akin to Stravinsky’s serial music, which he produced in his last years; music which is now almost never heard. I have some records somewhere of some of it, with Robert Craft (almost wrote Crafty) writing the notes in esoteric fashion. It’s all baloney, I’m afraid, as far as I can hear.

I’ve just noted too, while I was finding the streaming music on Radio NZ, that Brad McGann, the NZ film director, has died at the age of 43. For those who know more about him than I do, his other films will no doubt be remembered, but the only movie of his I ever saw was the brilliant In My Father’s Den, which came out only two or three years ago. A very strange movie, which could have easily gone so far into the ‘arty’ (as The Piano did) that it would have lost its audience, yet it somehow managed to keep the story in focus, and to offer excellent characters, and not a few surprises. It has to be regarded as a classic in the Crash Palace (with Bruno Lawrence) genre.

Wild Man

Watching Bruno Lawrence in Smash Palace again, after a number of years, I’m struck by how much he epitomises the ‘wild man’ so beloved of Robert Bly and his contemporaries. He rages, he lusts, he argues mightily, he gets angry. He has enough confidence in himself to offer not only the shirt off his back to his wife’s lover, but every other piece of clothing as well, until he stands naked in the street. He can pull the door off his wife’s house with his tow-truck if she won’t open it to him.
But he’s also gentle with his daughter, warm, and very loving. There’s only one scene in the movie where he gets angry with her, and at first we can’t tell whether he’s merely playing or is truly angry. His anger lasts for a moment, and he apologises to her, a seven-year-old child.
It could be said that these are all aspects of the character Lawrence plays, but this film would never have been what it is without Lawrence. He fits the role like a glove – or perhaps, the role fits him. Lawrence, in real life, was a wild man, thoroughly masculine, full of energy, crazy, often at odds with polite society. A bit scary even.

Re-Viewing Smash Palace

I've just watched Smash Palace again after some twenty plus years. It stands up well to the test of time, and though I remembered certain scenes quite well, others had gone completely – including the ending, thank goodness, which, when you think about it, is borrowed from Buster Keaton’s The General.
It has the feel of an ‘art’ film, rather than a commercial one – though it was a commercial success. (The Piano was also an art film, and borrowed heavily from the moody and gloomy 60s/70s European art films, borrowed without somehow taking up their intellectual depth.)
Smash Palace has the great advantage of starring Bruno Lawrence – and Greer Robson. Their scenes together are a delight (apparently she regarded him as a kind of a second father, her own father having abandoned his family sometime before she made the movie), and the film would never have been the success it was without these two. Anna Jemison (these days, for some reason, known as Anna Maria Monticelli) is good, has a kind of glow onscreen and is effective, but doesn’t receive the sympathy she perhaps should. Donaldson himself was having some marriage problems at the time he wrote the script and these are reflected in the way he treats the characters. You root for Lawrence much more readily than for Jemison, who comes across as being rather selfish.
In a documentary on the DVD version, someone notes that American actors such as Jack Nicholson greatly admired Lawrence for his absolute honesty and openness on the screen – and the raw emotion he could bring. The same person comments that while actors such as Nicholson have those same sorts of qualities, it’s unlikely any of them would ever do the scene in which Lawrence divests himself of all his clothes – except his gumboots – and stands there shouting (‘with his dick hanging out’ says the person) at his wife and her ostensible lover. The scene could have been ridiculous; somehow with Lawrence it’s believable. Even the kidnapping of the girl in the chemist’s survives – although it’s absurd – because Lawrence makes it work.
And there are a couple of wonderful lines connected to this scene: as Lawrence is dragging the girl out of the shop she weeps that she can’t go with him: she’s got a hair appointment at three o’clock. It’s so ridiculous in the middle of the tension that it works. Later, as Bruno lets her go, he says, ‘Hurry up, you’ve only got a few minutes.’ She turns to look at him, terrified that he’s changed his mind about letting her get away. ‘What for?’ she asks. ‘Your hair appointment.’