With the Napier warrior queen’s whip in his hand and her prized red leather boots on his feet, the Hero of Heretuscany, Lawrencus Yulus Amalgamatus, led his conquering Amalgamation Army through the streets of Napierion.

The shining black chariot lurched as it clattered across the many potholes and uneven surfaces of the streets of Hustings. Bracing himself against the swaying sides of the vehicle, Lawrencus Yulus, newly re-elected consul of the Heretuscany District, slowed his sweat-soaked horses to a trot, nodding at a bystander who raised two fingers at him, presumably saluting Lawrencus’ victory in the recent senate elections.

As he hauled his chariot to a halt outside his headquarters, sunlight reflected off his highly polished breastplate, adorned with intricate brass mouldings of grapes and sweetcorn cobs framed by silver containers of beans.

Lawrencus was feeling quietly satisfied. Now that the tiresome elections were behind him he was looking forward to his final and, hopefully, most illustrious term of office. He had once again faced a challenge from his sole rival, Simon of Nixus, whose visions of lighter-than-air machines had not seduced rural Heretuscans who liked to keep their sandals firmly on terra firma.

Most of the old senate had been re-elected, along with six new faces. Lawrencus planned to bury the newcomers under piles of papyrus, leaving him free to pursue his goal of amalgamating Hustings with its rival northern neighbour Napierion.

He had played his amalgamation card a year earlier, wrongfooting political rivals and his own council by not mentioning it beforehand. But a hoped-for groundswell of support from the public had not eventuated. Several of his councillors, miffed at his lack of consultation, had even muttered about letting the people decide.

Not a snowball’s chance in Hades of that, thought Lawrencus. Too many ungrateful citizens had barely been able to decide whether he deserved a fourth term, so he wouldn’t trust them again. And Napierions couldn’t be relied on to have any vision of the future when they lived in a town whose architecture had not changed in 80 years.

Lawrencus strode through the stone entrance of his headquarters and on an impulse, turned left into the portico where portraits of past rulers of Hustings lined its roughcast walls. He paused to stare at the paintings of his most recent predecessors, a garment seller, a Celtic drainlayer and a teacher. Their portraits were the only visible relics of their terms in office. At least Lawrencus had the refurbished Operandus House and his still-unfinished colosseum on the town’s outskirts as his legacies to ratepayers.

But mere monuments were not enough. Lawrencus wanted to be remembered as the far-sighted leader who settled the long-running rivalry between Hustings and Napierion once and for all. His initial plan to let ratepayers decide the amalgamation issue in a year or two had been quietly shelved after they trimmed his majority in the elections. And now his hand had been unexpectedly strengthened by the toppling of the veteran regional forum leader Alanus Dickus in a bloody coup.

When the orgy of back-stabbing had finally stopped, only one councillor, Friendless Wilson from the northern hamlet of Wairoria, stronghold of the mercenary Mongol Mob, had been left standing. Critically weakened by its infighting, Lawrencus knew the regional forum and its untried leader would be no threat to his latest amalgamation plan.

It was now early December in Heretuscany and off the coast of Napierion, the great sea of Oceanus Pacificus had a heavy swell running. A pale Lawrencus gripped the wooden railing of his 40-man trireme as it ploughed through the buffeting waves. The movement of the ship made him queasy and he would have much preferred to be on his horse Trojan, advancing on Napierion from the land.

Behind him he could see another 10 ships of Heretuscan warriors brandishing swords and spears, supplemented by smaller numbers of slaves and rural workers armed with pruning shears, crutching gear and tanks of lethal spray. Ahead lay the Port of Napierion, key to the hilltop fortress commanded by the legendary warrior queen Barbarus Arnottus.

The Napierions had not noticed the invasion fleet approaching from the sea. Their eyes were looking to the south where Lawrencus had amassed a diversionary army of council engineers, their bright reflective jackets and orange headgear visible to the jeering Napierions on the hill above. The engineers were manhandling battering rams and huge wooden catapults into positions carefully marked with red cones and roped off with lengths of yellow ribbon.

Their missiles were earthen jars of putrid gas, bottled at the Stenchus Maximus sewage works on the coast. On the hills above the town, the Napierions were being whipped into a frenzy by Bertus, leader of the Status Quotus cult, staunch opponents of any contact with the outside world. They scattered in panic as the heavy jars began to smash through the roofs of their hilltop villas, enveloping them in sulphurous fumes.

A mile away on the coast, the ship carrying Lawrencus shuddered as it struck the shingle foreshore on the Paradus Marinus. The rest of the fleet was close behind and with savage roars, the Heretuscan hordes began swarming up the beach. Suddenly alerted to the seaward invasion, Barbarus Arnottus tried to wheel her chariot around to face the new attack only to find a multi-wheel chariot carrying tourists from a Germanic cruise ship blocking the narrow street. Within minutes the defending Arnottus army was gridlocked in a confused mass of horses, chariots and stein-wielding Germans.

As Lawrencus and his followers rampaged along the Paradus Marinus, Napierions realised that the battle of Heretuscany was over. Distraught Status Quotus followers began hurling themselves off the hilltop, striped blazers flapping like dying ducks, their straw hats fluttering down behind them like autumn leaves.

Barbarus Arnottus desperately turned to her loyal councillors to make a stand but they had already slunk away. Alone, the Iron Maiden of Marineland surrendered her sword, prized red high-heeled boots and her leather whip into Lawrencus’ strong hands. He would put them to good use.

There was one final battle to be fought. Lawrencus led his Amalgamation Army to the headquarters of the regional forum. Friendless Wilson’s makeshift Praetorian Guard, a handful of Mongol Mob mercenaries, slouched in the doorway. They took one look at Lawrencus, now wearing Barbarus’ high-heeled boots and slapping the whip against his firm thigh, and stepped aside.

Adjusting the leather belt around his girth, Lawrencus strode triumphantly across the blood-spattered tiles of the regional forum’s entrance. Its bulging coffers would now allow him to double the size of his colosseum near Hustings.

He would celebrate its triumphant opening with a week of gladiatorial contests, chariot races and his favourite sport, naked wrestling. And when he rode into the colosseum in his black chariot, the crowd would stand as one and hail him as the greatest leader of them all, Lawrencus Yulus Amalgamatus, the Hero of Heretuscany.

END

He returns anxiously to the car only to find the motorcycle gang consists of a group of middle-aged and extremely polite Dutchmen.

I know Joe doesn’t like motorcycles and motorcyclists. Nor, I imagine, do most people. Motor bikes are usually noisy, recklessly fast on open roads and menacing in large numbers.

Seeing a motorbike in your rear-vision mirror is like spotting an enemy fighter plane on your tail. One second the road behind was empty. Now there’s a blowfly coming at you fast.

Motorcyclists on the open road are like avenging robots, swooping out of nowhere to shatter the calm of drivers cocooned in their cars. The rider inside the helmet is as anonymous as The Stig. Hunched over the machine like a sprinter crouched at the starting blocks, it could be a robot. You can’t even tell what sex it is.

Then it’s gone, roaring past in a burst of noise that makes you flinch. In seconds the blowfly has flown away down the highway, diving in and out of the traffic until gone from view.

I’m not a Dutchman but I am middle-aged and often polite. And beneath my tinted visor, I am one of them. Mild-mannered father of four who secretly slips into his super-protective armour and becomes Super Blowfly. Yes, that was me who passed you on the Napier-Taupo Road the other day.

I haven’t been a blowfly all my life. In my teenage bluebottle years I cut my motorcycle gearbox teeth on an Italian Vespa, named after the buzzing wasp. I spent hours polishing its paintwork and painting the word Vespa on its rear mudflap.

Laughing in the face of wind tunnels, the same basic Vespa design has been on the road since the end of the Second World War. Its high metal front, designed to protect the rider’s legs, has the aerodynamics of a small front-end loader. The high front acted like a steel sail, adding another 5kmh to your top speed in a strong tail wind but halving it in a head wind.

Despite its vague suggestion of the hippie lifestyle being enjoyed by teens everywhere else in the world – except Hastings – in the l960s, my Vespa was never cool.

Another bike I owned was a two-stroke Suzuki 90cc twin, a bike with pistons the size of cotton reels and a shrill engine note that was beyond the hearing of dogs. It eventually died in various sheds as we moved houses and I eventually gave it away to someone from Central Hawke’s Bay who had ambitious plans to resurrect it. I’ve never seen it again.

My current bike is the mid-life crisis one, so non-bike riders tell me. They say it with a barely concealed note of disapproval. They think I should have spent the money on a sensible Honda Civic sedan, with airbags and ABS braking.

My bike is all chrome, metallic paint and grunt. I chose it because it was one of the few I could sit on and touch the ground with my feet. I didn’t think trainer wheels would be cool.

And I’m a paid-up member of a bike gang. I have a badge with my name on it, possibly in case I get lost. And when the rest of the gang have finished terrorising motorists and stop for their flat whites at a roadside café, they take off their helmets to reveal a lot of polite, middle-aged people. A couple of them are Dutchmen.

Out on the road, there is a curious culture that determines whether a motorcyclist will be acknowledged by fellow riders. Harley Davidson riders ignore everyone else. So do the hard-core motorcycle gangs with their open-face helmets, long grey beards and black scarves. But couples on touring BMW machines always wave to you, and so do those on enormous Honda Gold Wing tourers with their heated seats, intercom, satellite navigation systems and heated handle grips.

At the other end of  the pecking order, nobody waves to the poor souls on their Nifty Fifties, trundling along the cycle lanes in their fluorescent jackets hoping sleep-deprived truckies won’t run them over.

Getting ready for a ride is rather like a medieval knight putting his armour on for battle. There are thick protective plates inside your jacket and trousers, the boots are padded and the helmet encloses your head like a soft vice.

You waddle over the gleaming bike, swing your leg over and balance its hefty weight with your legs. No endless kick-starting sessions these days. A single turn of the key, a press of a black button with your right thumb and the gleaming beast rumbles into life.

It’s time for Super Blowfly again.

I cannot leave the house without being closely watched and followed. I am escorted to the shed and back. At night, unseen eyes monitor my movements from beyond the pool of light from the security lights. I have been stopped and searched while taking food scraps to the compost bin.

The all-seeing eyes belong to my foster son McIntyre, a short-legged but long-tailed Jack Russell with a dark past. He came to us under a cloud of suspicion — some would say compelling evidence — that he was responsible for the deaths of chooks on our friends’ farm just north of Wairoa.

The legal fraternity would offer the opinion, along with a hefty invoice, that finding him beaming amid the feathery carnage would persuade most juries of his guilt. Mind you, a jury of his peers, namely 12 Jack Russells from good rural stock, would throw the case out.

Not only were the chooks were not in an OSH-approved enclosure, not wearing high-viz jackets and not wearing safety boots, but a small dog with only passable eyesight could hardly be expected to differentiate between chooks and turkeys, the latter being popular hunting game on the farm.

If that line of argument did not have 12 canine heads nodding in agreement, their open jaws salivating in unison, then I would adopt rugby commentator Murray Mexted’s advice and go on offensive defence. I would attack the dubious character of the only witness to the alleged attack, a man with French blood in his veins.

We of Anglo-Saxon stock have always harboured a deep suspicion of the French. They invaded our home country, let everyone else invade theirs, make good cooks but bad cars, smoke too much and smell of onions.

Now the word of a semi-Frenchman, a Dreyfus-like cry of “J’Accuse!” has condemned my poor little dog as Wairoa’s worst serial killer, at least in the free-range poultry category. Having being plucked from Death Row and now facing a life of home detention with us, McIntyre has tried to turn his life around. He has become a useful member of society, ridding our parks of old dried chicken bones and the occasional discarded burger.

Once free to roam hills and valleys, McIntyre’s paddocks have been reduced to a backyard, although daily supervised walks on riverbanks and trips to a block of land we are trying to beat into submission, give some relief from his urban confinement.

He had a brush with the law when found trudging along the main highway north of Napier on his solo way to Hastings in the belief he’d been left behind at the block. An overnight stay in the Bay View police station, a bag of biscuits and a delivery trip home in a patrol car were all enthusiastically accepted. A large chocolate cake delivered to his uniformed rescuers ensured the matter went no further.

The only road McIntyre had ever walked along previously was a quiet shingle one in a valley. Now we dodge rush-hour traffic and drivers who make us wait 10 minutes to cross a street. But he learned to stand at the edge of a busy intersection and not move until he heard the pedestrian buzzer, trotting across in front of amused motorists.

A hunter by instinct, confronter of possums and rats, able to vanish out of sight down rabbit holes, he is also the most gentle animal with children and people of all ages. He can reduce swaggering Mongrel Mob prospects to smiles when he trots up for a pat.
But his life has changed again.

In December the Hastings District Council passed new dog control laws to stop children and anyone else being summarily mauled by dogs every time they step out their door. They require dogs to be on leads in all public places, except a few designated areas scattered around the district.

We made a submission against the bylaw at the time but knew it was futile.

So McIntyre’s morning walks, once a happy release of urine and pent-up energy, are now spent trudging along at the end of a lead. Morning walks now are like living in occupied France. Every ute or van with a council logo could be an informer.

The new bylaw also requires owners to pick up their dog’s droppings. Fair enough. But the flaw in the whole scheme is that there is nowhere to dispose of the bag and its contents. Do they really expect people to happily carry a fresh batch of warm dog droppings around until they get back home?

McIntyre now spends much of his day waiting for the late-afternoon trip in the back of the ute to officially dog-designated zones like riverbanks and the Pakowhai Country Park on the outskirts of Hastings. There are plenty of trees to pee on at the park, a river to cool off in and lots of dog backsides to sniff.

In fact there is only one thing missing from this canine utopia — bins for dog droppings. So the old concrete Pakowhai bridge, part of the Hawke’s Bay walking track complete with a small brass plaque, is always a minefield of dog droppings. It’s not a good look.

The council put out a press release saying it had been heartened by the fact that out of 208 dogs seen with their owners in public since the bylaw was introduced, 178 were on leads.

Flushed with its own success at bringing most dogs and their owners into line, the council will impose an instant fine of $300 for owners whose dogs are not on leads.
In which case there should be plenty of money for those bins they forgot to provide in their bylaw.

Ends

Barbarus Arnottus, ruler of Napierion, watched as vessels from the land of the Great Dragon unloaded their cargoes. Sometimes huge ships brought large people from the fabled Americas, to the delight of local merchants. She enjoyed watching the seamen with their brawny arms and sweat-soaked muscular thighs.

But control of the Port of Napierion had slipped into the hands of a wily opponent, her predecessor Alanus Dickus.

She realised now it had been a mistake to allow Dickus to establish himself again inside the walls of her city. She had not anticipated his ability to transform a minor regional bureaucracy into a formidable power base. His unassuming headquarters had proved to be a Trojan horse.

The regional forum led by Dickus had accumulated a huge war chest by selling water rights to the Udderus Plentus, a clan of cow herders who had recently moved into Heretuscany. Dickus had used his fortunes to acquire vital assets in the region. His forum controlled the once-abundant waterways that had produced the crops on which Hustings had depended for its survival.

Once a thriving fruitgrowing centre, Hustings was known as the Dustbowl of Novus Zealandus. As debts mounted, its leader, Lawrencus Yulus, was desperately looking for a quick nuptial with Napierion and hopefully a hefty dowry.

In the coming months, Barbarus would have to deal with his amalgamation campaign, but Napierions had no interest in amalgamating with Hustings or anyone else.

However Barbarus was wondering whether the clumsy tactics of Lawrencus could yet be turned to her advantage.

Distracted by his vain bid for amalgamation, Lawrencus might be vulnerable to an electoral coup that could radically reshape his council table. There had already been mutinous mutterings in the wealthy Anglo Saxon enclave of Havus Northus about Lawrencus’ grandiose plans.

Barbarus had quietly decided that an alliance with Alanus Dickus against amalgamation could deal Lawrencus a crushing and humiliating public defeat.

Cleopatra had worked her charms on Mark Anthony. Barbarous would have to use all of her wiles to woo a veteran campaigner like Dickus.

She cracked her whip thoughtfully.

A group of men in striped blazers jumped out of the way of the blades on Barbarus’ chariot as she thundered along the Paradus Marinus. She slowed as she passed the site of the museum that would represent her crowning achievement.

Even now, Barbarus smiled as she recalled how she duped Lawrencus Yulus for one million denari for the building of her museum. She had promised him one million in return for his Lawrencian Colosseum, but had never made good, saying that she was obliged to respond to the thumbs down given to the proposal by Napierions.

Lawrencus had been incensed at what he called her “democratic cowardice”.

To the south, the man who now called himself Lawrencus Yulus Amalgamatus stared at the chicken entrails lay spread out on the table in front of him

Lawrencus prodded a piece of blood-covered spleen with his knife. He had never understood how people could find omens from the gods buried in chicken bowels, but the Heretuscans had been doing it for centuries and had even taken to peering at sheep entrails for portents of the future. As a former shepherd, he had had seen plenty of things come out of a sheep’s backside and wisdom certainly wasn’t one of them.

But as he stared at the pile of fowl innards, Lawrencus began to see a pattern taking shape. A pile of intestine on one side vaguely resembled the ranges overlooking the Plain of Heretuscany. A knob of fat on the other side could, with a bit of imagination, represent Havus Northus, he thought.

Lawrencus felt his heart begin to beat faster. This was more like it. The gods were smiling on him after all, although he wished they wouldn’t post their messages in the backsides of fowls or sheep.

As he prodded with his knife, he spotted an ugly lesion. That must surely represent Napierion, he decided.

The viscera was proving visionary. A mucous blob, which he took to be Hustings, had oozed down the slightly sloping table until it had merged with the lesion.

That was it. The portent for amalgamation. The gods were finally on his side!

Now he would instruct his loyal clerks, the Numbus Crunchus, to produce a report showing that amalgamation would produce massive savings. With his partly-built Lawrencian Colosseum looking more like Stonehenge in Brittanica than imperial Rome, he needed some pretty fancy figures —- and fast.

Meanwhile, Alanus Dickus stood in front of his coffers. Golden coins glinted in the gloom of the vast vault.

He was back in Napierion, the city he had ruled as Alanus Caesar Dictatorious several decades ago. It had taken time to build up his new empire and he needed to reshape

the region’s map before the Torus ruling party did it for him.

An alliance now with the Iron Maiden Barbarus might woo her into a sense of security and when the time was right, he would do his own bit of amalgamating, outwitting both Barbarus and Lawrencus.

He wondered what the gods had in store. Taking a couple of gold coins from a wooden chest, he told a eunuch to go and find a freshly killed chicken.

It confirmed his instincts that this pile of rubble and half-completed seating was some form of monument, or temple, to the reign of the regional governor known as Lawrencus Yulus.

He guessed that the tarnished plate was to be placed on the building when it was completed. For some reason, the Lawrencian Colosseum had been abandoned, possibly about the time of the uprising that had followed the combining of the two settlements on the Plain of Heretuscany.

There was little left of the old settlements now. People had moved away over several hundred years, unable to afford new water taxes, grass taxes, the air tax and the crippling grandiose monuments levy.

Behind him in the distance, the arid hills looked like parchment. A handful of goats could be seen but otherwise the land was empty of livestock. He took measurements of the plaque and placed it in a box.

Around him long-abandoned vineyards had become entangled with empty clumps of orchards. Roads were largely empty. People living near the old port relied on tourist ships bringing visitors to see the ruins of the Artus Decus city of Napierion.

The more adventurous made the arduous trip to the old site of Hustings, only its partly-disintegrated clocktower rising above the ruins of its shopping malls.

Now a few organic farmers subsisted on produce grown on their small holdings and sold at a weekly farmers market. An enterprising few sold coffee beans to the great city of Jaffas in the north.

                                            . . . . .

Two centuries earlier, a centurion had been standing guard on the wall forming the border with Napierion.

He turned east and sniffed the air. A south easterly wind coming over the Hills of Havus carried a foul smell. The centurion knew it was marsh gas from the Tukus River winding along the valley below Martyr’s Peak.

The centurion, Incredulus, was scanning the Plain of Heretuscany for any trouble. The water wars which had wracked the region for a decade had briefly died down but now it was spring, the unrest would begin again.

The rotting smell seemed to be getting worse these days. The river had died several centuries earlier and as the seasons got warmer, it had finally oozed to a stop.

Its flow had already been choked off by the Waipukus people to the south, who had diverted its flow from the rugged mountains to the west. They now fiercely protected their valuable water behind thick limestone battlements.

The Waipukus were a tribe of stone collectors who had been stockpiling shingle around their riverbanks for centuries. When the land became denuded, the fine stones and lush loams of the Waipukus became highly prized for stone cottages, resulting in lavish stone-clad villas being built on the dry slopes of the bay’s hills.

Many of the older tribespeople had been teens around 60AD, a decade often regarded by historians as the Second Stone Age. Many still paid loud tributes to their stone collections at special gatherings such as weddings or 60^th birthday celebrations.

                                                               . . . . . .

The centurion walked along the wall above the river which flowed into the bay just a few hundred yards away. Incredulus was always uneasy when he was on duty near Napierion, with its solid, multi-storeyed homes looking south toward Awatotus, once a dilapidated collection of rusting buildings, now a giant dung works providing gas to the hilltop villas and heating public baths on the seafront.

Incredulus had reason to be uneasy. Only six months before, followers of the prophet Bertus had stormed the north gate, waving colourful cravats and brandishing umbrellas. Some had carried banners showing pictures of Barbarus Arnottus and the date 210AD.

Barbarus had been the Bodicea of the Antipodes, the Iron Maiden of Marineland, as Napierion had previously been known. She had single-handedly fought off the Hustings army of Lawrencus when it had swarmed toward her walls that year.

Lawrencus had made his move earlier, offering the Napierions six months of bottled water and a free braeburn apple tree to merge the cities into one big forum.

But Barbarus was not beguiled by the notches on Lawrencus’ belt. She liked her air salty, not sulphurous. Napierion’s port was its crown jewel.

Why shack up with a country bumpkin when you could get on board with a sailor? she thought.

Barbarus knew she could always rely on seafarers and ships to save her city. They had come to its rescue after the great quake of 31. In fact she had toyed with the idea of making the city’s slogan “Hello sailor.”

On the day of the ballot, as Lawrencus carefully girded his loins for his hoped-for forced marriage with the Napierons, Barbarus had slipped into her leather riding gear and raced down the twisting lanes of the Napierion hill in her chariot, whipping her councillors into a fighting frenzy.

“Friends, voters, Napierions,” she told them.

“We must fight for our honour, our leadlight treasures, our sunburst frontages and our Corinthian columns. We need a groundswell at the Soundshell.

“They want to put their clay sheep in our palm-fringed boulevards, swap our blazers for black singlets, our silk dresses for home-spun cardigans.

“They see us as some quaint seaside museum, inhabited by odd people who like dressing up like their great-grandparents and entertaining seafarers.

She tapped her riding crop for silence.

“So we have a choice: Their soldiers or our sailors?”

“Hello sailor!” roared the councillors.

– Labour’s Civil Defence minister Rick Barker defending his ministry after it took more than three hours to make any statement about a BBC report suggesting a tsunami could be heading for the East Coast. Now, cut to 2009.

The minister was fuming.
He had woken up to the screeching call of the kea on National Radio and news that an earthquake had triggered tsunami fears in the Pacific. He rang the national director of Civil Defence and after waiting several minutes, heard a voice come on the line.

The director sounded tense. His tone changed when he realised it was the minister. “What’s happening? Is a tsunami coming or not?” barked the minister. The national director shifted uneasily in his chair. He rested his marker pen on the most recent review of the National Civil Defence Management Warning System and gazed out at Wellington Harbour. The Interislander was heading out.

“It’s unclear at this point in time sir,” he replied. “Details are a bit sketchy. We’ve got the seismic boys analysing the data now. The situation is being closely monitored.”

“What does that mean? Can’t someone tell me what’s happening?” snapped the minister.

“We had exactly this scenario with Rick Barker back in 2005 when the bloody BBC seemed to know more about a tsunami threat to New Zealand than we did.”

The national director breathed deeply. “We see no reason for the people of Gisborne to get in their cars and drive to the top of Kaiti Hill like they did last time there was a flap about a tsunami,” he said. “On the other hand, it might pay for them to take basic measures right now, such as parking their cars facing the road so they can get away more quickly in an emergency, filling their pockets with tins of baked beans — simple precautions like that.”

The minister’s voice became menacing. “Listen, I’ll have bloody Sean Plunket interrogating me live on air in a few minutes. What am I supposed to tell him? That his guess is as good as mine? That we’re waiting for a bloody text from a Fiji resort manager to tell us a wall of water is heading our way?”

The national controller watched a plane climb unsteadily into Wellington’s grey skies. Inspiration struck him. “Perhaps we should send up an Air Force Orion so we can get visual confirmation.”

There was a choking sound on the other end of the phone. “Are you mad? It takes 24 hours to pull together something like that and anyway, all the Orions are non-operational. One is in maintenance being fitted with parts stripped from the rest.”

The national controller cleared his throat. “Rest assured minister, you’ll know as soon as we do,” he said, putting the phone down before the minister could answer. He googled “Fijian holiday resorts.”

The bay was calm and blue.
He sat in the firm’s van and stared out to sea. The white cliffs of Kidnappers were clearly etched over to the right. Away to the left, wisps of steam from the Whirinaki pulp mill and the blur of Mahia Peninsula barely visible on the horizon.

But no sign of the tsunami they’d been talking about on the radio. His eyes squinted as he tried to detect a line, a shadow on the shimmering sea. Nothing.

He wished he’d grabbed a coffee at the BP station when he’d bought the steak and cheese pie. It would be too far to go back now, He might miss the wave. The radio had said any tsunami would come on the high tide at about 10.30, which was four minutes ago.

There were already about eight cars scattered along the beach near him. Most were parked facing the bay, a couple were at an angle. It was school holidays and one dad had brought his kids, who stood on the top of the shingle, staring at the sea.

The digital clock on the van’s dash read 10.34 but still no wave.

He got out and walked down on to the stones. He checked his cellphone battery. He didn’t want to miss out on getting a shot if the wave did appear. He’d post it on YouTube. Might be worth good money. Anyway, it had better hurry up. He could only spare another five minutes before the boss would be looking for him.

He tossed the pie bag out the window as two more cars pulled up on the beachfront.

The regional ops room.
The digital clock on the wall of the region’s Civil Defence operations room read 10.00 as the deputy controller scanned his e-mails.

The walls of the ops room were covered in maps and charts. A large whiteboard with six different coloured marker pens stood at one end of the room. The deputy controller had written “quake” in black letters near the top. Then he’d added “mag 7.8” and underlined it with a zig-zag flourish.

He decided the board looked too bare for an ops room so he drew a long sausage, added a few blobs for islands and wrote Indo. A bulging line showed coast of Australia and two cigar shapes represented New Zealand. A large reverse shark fin, depicting the unconfirmed tsunami, was done in thick red lines. As a final touch, he drew three red arrows across the white expanse of the Pacific, their tips pointing at the two sausages. They made him think of barbecues.

There were several of them in the room now, two of them watching the deputy controller checking his e-mails. The controller was at his computer, carefully reading the media releases from head office. He was expecting a call from the mayor wanting to know whether the entire population should be moved to the top of Bluff Hill.

The ops room was under the regional council’s office block. It was the nerve centre in a civil emergency in the district, such as earthquakes or a tsunami. He was slightly uncomfortable about its underground location, in a city once levelled by an earthquake.

On the wall was the ministry’s bright yellow Survival Guide, listing the things to do if there was an official tsunami warning. It recommended going at least a kilometre inland or somewhere 35 metres above sea level.

He tried not to think about the ops room being below sea level, just two tar-sealed blocks from the foreshore.

He glanced admiringly at his image in the polished coat of arms at the door of his headquarters in Hustings, a city straddling the main road south. Its motto, Urbis Et Ruris Concordia, proclaimed town and country were in harmony, But he’d had enough of words. It would soon be time for action.

Once protected by swampland, Hustings had been turned into orchards during the reign of the fruit merchant Jamus Watticus and then into vineyards by later invasions of the Huns and the Vidals.

Those vineyards now stretched away to the foothills in the west, where as a boy Lawrencus had stood on his family farm overlooking the plains below. Like then, the only pieces of raised land were the rugged bluff occupied by the Napierions near the coast and Matyr Peak, rising above the wealthy enclave of Havus Northus to the east. Havus Northus had been absorbed into Hustings boundaries decades ago after a minor battle.

The next battle would be a much bigger challenge.

A parchment map lay on the heavy table in front of him. The two major cities were marked in big letters. Thick wriggly blue lines between them showed the course of the two mighty rivers, Tutaetus Curus and the Narus Rorus. They had been a natural dividing point for the two cities, but not for much longer if he could help it.

Standing on the town wall of Hustings, Lawrencus looked to the coast, where steam from a dung-drying plant on the shore at Awatotus sent a plume of steam into the blue sky. The mid-morning sun hurt his eyes, but he smiled quietly to himself. The Napierions would never expect him to attack into the sun and he would be at the golden Statue of Aphrodites on the Paradus Marinus before they had time to react. Once they had reached the fabled Sound Shell and the golden bell of Veronica, the city and province would be his.

His secret weapon would be thousands of gleaming coins, all bearing his face, which would be used to reflect the sun back into their eyes. He had forewarned them of his plan to unite the two cities, but they had laughed at him. Now he would have the last laugh.

Lawrencus knew that Napierion, destroyed in 31BC and rebuilt during the reign of Artus Decus, was vulnerable, relying on boatloads of tourists from Germanicus and sales of straw hats and old furs to survive.

Its popular ruler, Barbarus Arnotus, had declared that Napierions did not recognise anyone outside their walls, but Lawrencus suspected she was in the hands of a fanatical Napierion cult called Status Quotus, led by a man called Bertus, who wanted a return to the times of Artus Decus. His supporters were preparing for a week-long celebration in Februarius and Lawrencus planned to strike when the streets were clogged for the parade of the old charioteers.

The governor strode out of the red-tiled building to his chariot, frowning as he saw a scribe from an underground newspaper, Baybus, coming towards him. He knew this ferret wanted to question him again about the city’s planned amphitheatre on the outskirts of Hustings and the role of the moneylender, Sam the Celt, but Laurencus ignored him.

The amphitheatre, which would be named the Lawrencian Colosseum, was to be his legacy and a fitting reminder of his years of rule and conquest. He would soon pass the earthworks for the amphitheatre on his way to the chariot port on the northern outskirts of Napierion.

It was an important day. He had been summoned by the Minister of Regional Forums, Roddus Hidus, who shared his bold ambition to bring the people of the plains together. The minister had recently enraged the warlords of the northern city of Jaffus with his own plan to have a single ruler for the entire city.

Lawrencus had been impressed with the minister’s almost arrogant strategy. He wished his own campaigns had been as bold.

A costly, drawn-out battle over a proposed new settlement at the Beach of Oceania several years ago had left him scarred. He had hesitated in the face of popular revolt, but would not make the same mistake with the amphitheatre. While the townspeople had complained that the amphitheatre was too far away and only a few javelin throwers and members of local chariot clubs would benefit, he had determinedly pushed on. Even when Sam the Celt had swept his IOU off the table and walked away, he vowed that the Lawrencian Colosseum would rise from the fertile fields.

He didn’t need them any more because Lawrencus was cultivating friends in high places. His old Torus Party held the coffers in the capital, Wellingtonius, and he knew his bold move on Napierion would be seen very favourably by the minister. Who knows how far down the corridors of power this could lead?

As he boarded the chariot for the journey to the capital, Lawrencus looked up at the hills of Napierion, the light glinting off the now-vacant infirmary on its skyline. That had been the first real victory, the turning point in the long struggle for supremacy between the cities.

Gradually the boundaries had changed with Hustings now almost encircling Napierion.

Beyond the northern and southern borders of Hustings district, the rural hamlets of Wairoria and Waipukuraurus were desperate, burdened by rising land taxes for years, their lands ravaged by droughts. They would be next, thought Lawrencus.

As his chariot gained speed and the twin cities disappeared into the haze behind him, he began to think of more important matters. Like a new name for the amalgamated region.

Lawrencium sounded about right.

[Note: You can listen here to an unforgettable reading of this dramatic story by renowned historian and Latin scholar, Johnus of Newland.]

*Historical note: Local peasants might better recognize their Provincial Governor as Lawrencus Yulus Amalgamaticus, reflecting his mother’s lineage.

Wine empties and stubbies vanish forever in a waterfall of crashing glass, no longer sitting on the verge under the scrutiny of the neighbours. I don’t want to know where my unread circulars go or whether my empty merlot bottles will one day form part of Auckland’s northern motorway extension. I just want them gone from my daily life, and especially from my garage.

Anyway it’s not rubbish any more. It’s recycling, it’s helping the planet and it provides jobs for Chinese.

I grew up with rubbish rather than recycling. Our kitchen chip heater operated like a household industrial furnace, melting down vast quantities of household rubbish, including animal bones and mum’s baking failures. A44-gallon incinerator down the back yard handled the serious stuff. Our family’s incinerator always seemed to be set on smoulder. Kids played for hours in the backyard, wreathed in toxic fumes from melting linoleum, old cardigans and empty paint tins.

The incinerator is banned from the back yard these days. In its place stands the wheelie bin, which I trundle to the roadside every Tuesday morning for its rendezvous with Wheelie Bin Man.
 
I always hide because I know my bin is always grossly overweight, sagging on its plastic axles. Once he’s gone, I emerge from hiding and assure myself that my six-day old red Thai curry, now embalmed in congealed rice, will soon be fertilising Mother Earth, along with that whiffy chunk of cheese.

The green wheelie bin has not only replaced the incinerator, it has probably single-handedly killed off that flawed but legendary Kiwi invention, the home-made trailer.
I’ve owned two trailers in my life and both disembowelled themselves under the soggy weight of lawn clippings and dead mattresses that waited in vain, sometimes for years, to be taken to the tip.

Every post-war Kiwi trailer was different. All were experimental. Special tail-gates and axle assemblies off Morris Oxfords were welded, modified and welded again. Some trailers were made from the complete back end of Vauxhall Velox cars. Few had brake lights that worked.

My father always borrowed trailers that had no warrant of fitness, no current registration and safety chains with no shackles. Their tread-free tyres were slippery testimony to the thousands of miles they had already travelled on the family car. Dad always made our dump run late in the afternoon, hoping the lower angle of the sun would dazzle a parked traffic cop. The trailer was always illegally overloaded and dangerously secured by dad’s extraordinary collection of ropes, with knots so solid they eventually had to be sawn off.

Our destination, the old Roy’s Hill dump west of Hastings, is now just a few grassy hills entombing decades of city waste, sitting on the border of the region’s premiere red wine country. It may have a future life growing grapes on its shingle soils to produce a full-bodied brake-fluid red, with subtle hints of car battery and mattress.

Recycling day has given me an insight into how people live. On the morning dog walk I pass little piles of plastic bags, bottles and cartons of newspapers, some fastidiously bundled and tied with string by retired men in Summitstone units with safety screens on their doors. One box of the week’s empties had six empty scotch whisky bottles in it. My recycling studies suggest that Tui, followed by Export Gold, is New Zealand’s beer of choice.

When I lived on the edge of Havelock North, just inside the boundary, people started bringing their recycling to me. They were lifestylers who lived beyond the authorised ambit of the recycling truck. So the lifestylers would emerge from their pine-forested retreats at dawn, furtively depositing their household recycling in big orange bags, along with pallets of empty gin bottles.

I still get a lot of unwanted recycling delivered these days, even in the heart of town. It arrives in my letterbox which has become overcrowded since Harvey Norman, Noel Leeming and the blokes moved in, along with the friendly teams at Tremains, Pizza Hut, Farmers and the lady who drops off the returnable catalogue that we never open.

People more elderly than me hide repel the junk mail juggernaut with polite “No Circulars Thank You” signs, the capital letters indicating they’re being firm but polite.
I should get a “no junk mail” sign but I always hesitate to buy one.  I’m slightly put off by the fact it uses an American slogan instead of something more Anglo-Saxon and bluntly offensive.

Anyway, being polite doesn’t work. “No junk mail” signs still don’t stop Americans getting buried by 4 million tonnes of the stuff every year. I’ve got a far more direct phrase for direct marketers — but I’ll need a bigger letterbox.

Students in Dubai, Hong Kong, Australia, the Pacific Islands and New Zealand sit in comfortable classroom furniture designed by one of Hastings’ longest-established firms.

And a small Hastings firm is involved in the collection and recycling of thousands of litres of unwanted paint sitting in Kiwi sheds, and picking up the plastic wrapping from bales of silage on the nation’s farms.

These Hawke’s Bay companies are not relying on sheep, cattle, fruit or grapes for their success. They just like the Bay’s lifestyle and have the entrepreneurial flair to be able to run their businesses from here.

The province has always had its iconic images of hot dry summers, sheep and beef on rolling pastures, rows of orchards and vineyards, Mission Concerts and Art Deco architecture. The lifestyle those images conjure up has lured more than campervans and shiploads of visitors to visit the region.

They have also lured people who have opted for the Hawke’s Bay lifestyle, often for family reasons, but with a sharp eye for opportunities that don’t rely on the Bay’s primary producers. Often they operate below the region’s commercial radar, quietly building overseas export markets with innovative products.

When they talk about their reasons for basing themselves in the Bay, rather than Auckland or elsewhere, they have common themes. They enjoy living in the Bay; it offers good schooling for young families; the region has a good infrastructure of roading; the Port of Napier is a convenient outlet for exports; and most of the resources they need, including suitable staff, are available locally.

The region’s local government does not part a key role in their success, but those Baybuzz spoke to believed councils would give them any support they needed. Even the proximity of Napier and Hastings, often seen as an impediment because of their past political rivalry, is seen as providing the region with two distinct centres with their own roles to play.

Wrapping up recycling

Innovative Hastings firm 3R Group was founded by Graeme Norton and former Waipawa man Bruce Emerson in 2004. It was the first company to devise a commercial recycling programme that set about recovering an estimated 20 million litres of leftover paint that sit around in New Zealand sheds and workshops. It also developed a way of collecting and recycling the estimated 320,000km of plastic used to wrap bales of silage and the millions of plastic agrichemical containers used on New Zealand farms every year. 

The company’s name is derived from the words “responsible resource recovery”.  Both men had previously worked for All Brite Industries, so had a good understanding of the recycling industry. They considered that there were plenty of businesses picking the low-hanging fruit such as paper and plastic bottles, but no one was addressing some of the more problematic wastes such as old paint and on-farm plastics.

Shortly after the company was founded, 3R began to work with Resene Paints on a six-month trial to develop a recovery programme for old paint and containers in a controlled way. The result of the trial led to the development and rollout of Resene PaintWise. The programme has developed an impressive mobile paint decanting system and paint-can crusher. The PaintWise truck picks up the unwanted paint and packaging from Resene stores and other public outlets nationwide.

So far more than 300,000 paint cans have been collected, 120,000kg of steel cans recycled and more than 60,000 litres of paint have been donated to community groups to be used to cover graffiti.  Now there are plans to introduce the concept into Australia. 3R, in conjunction with Fletcher Building, Golden Bay Cement and Resene, have also developed a product called PaintCrete, which uses waste acrylic and latex paint in concrete to reduce the cement content while extending the life of the concrete.

The Agrecovery rural recycling programme, which collects plastic silage wrap and agrichemical containers, came about when 3R was commissioned to design a solution to on-farm plastics waste by a range of primary sector stakeholders. The Agrecovery Foundation was formed in 2006 to govern the programme which started in April 2007. Like the PaintWise programme, Agrecovery  has 50 nationwide collection sites and a purpose built truck which shreds the plastic  agrichemical containers.

3R director Graeme Norton says Agrecovery and PaintWise are not just recycling programmes; they are examples of product stewardship. Every product has a life cycle and product stewardship ensures that the producers of a product take a whole-of-life attitude also, which means taking responsibility for the eventual disposal of that product. That’s where 3R comes in — at the problem end of a product’s life.  “Putting a cost on the end of the life of a product makes people think about the recycling of it,” he says.

In Europe domestic appliances and other consumer goods have built-in costs or regulations covering their disposal. That cost encourages companies to look at ways of recovering that cost by looking at assembly methods and improving product designs.

Bruce Emerson said that in the case of Resene’s PaintWise programme, the first principle adopted was that everything was recyclable and all the ingredients coming back were handled on that basis. Developing the mobile separation and crushing technology was no easy task with the initial prototype being destroyed in six months. “As there was no precedent to follow worldwide we had to make it up as we went along, so we are now on our fourth version.”

In 2007 3R received the Sustainable Business Network award in Sustainable Design and Innovation for the PaintWise mobile crushing technology. A static version of the crusher has proved so successful that there are plans to sell the technology outside New Zealand. 3R Group also won the Supreme Business of the Year award at last year’s Hawke’s Bay Chamber Westpac business awards.

“We’ve been successful because we have an eye for opportunity, but also because we thoroughly plan what we do and execute that plan with passion,” says Bruce. “The challenge with that is to get everyone to share that same passion.”

“Philosophically, we’re learning we need to be more interconnected than we have been. It’s almost at the point where we’re so remote from activities that we don’t see their effects.

While the field of environmental sustainability is becoming better understood, the difficulty of growing a business and accessing capital should not be underestimated, said Graeme. Ideally he would like to see a system evolve which encourages Hawke’s Bay people to invest more in local businesses and feel they have a greater stake in their community.

3R Group also encourages its staff to become involve in community activities and self-improvement courses, introducing its Good Friday policy which allows staff to apply for up to six days of paid leave a year, on top of their other leave entitlements, for educational study, self-development courses such as Outward Bound, community and voluntary work or public duty such as the Territorial Army, jury duty or other public office requirements.

Bruce and Graeme and their fellow workers have cut firewood for the elderly and planted trees along the Karamu Stream for World Environment Day. They also support community initiatives such as Henare O’Keefe’s Tunutunu campaign to tackle violent crime and plan to do their bit by joining him on his regular community sessions, where the mobile BBQ  is dishing out sausages and meat patties to young people in need.

Graeme and Bruce could run their business from any part of New Zealand but Hawke’s Bay’s lifestyle ensures this is their base. “It would have been challenging 10 years ago to operate from here, but the living conditions here make it an attractive place to be,” [he?] says. “It’s reinforced for me every time the plane touches down at Napier.”

Old firm, new ideas

Another firm whose innovation is reaching out around the world started from modest beginnings in Queen Street West, Hastings, 75 years ago.

Furnware Industries is one of the Bay’s success stories. It began the same week that Jim Wattie set up his fruit-canning business and it has the distinction of having PO Box 1 as its Hastings postal address. “We’re very proud of that,” says managing director Hamish Whyte.

The company shifted from Queen Street to Omahu Road twenty-five years ago and now operates from modern premises in the Omahu Road industrial area, manufacturing school furniture that has made it a leader in its field.

Hamish believes Furnware makes the best school chair in the world and the company’s success with its range of school furniture is based on its extensive research in the classroom. “Everything we manufacture has been researched in the classroom. We measured 20,000 New Zealand kids and we know more about them than anyone.”

Generations of school pupils spent hours on solid plywood and tubular steel chairs, designed for ease of stacking rather than for comfort. Then about four years ago Furnware introduced its Bodyfurn chair, whose pliable seat and backrest are the result of 18 months of trialling in New Zealand classrooms.

Hawke’s Bay schools in particular became “a melting pot of knowledge” says Hamish. Pupils of Peterhead School at Flaxmere tried out prototype models of the Furnware’s desk storage system, resulting in a design which has its books storage in a tilting bin down one side, instead of the clumsy lift-up lid conventional design.

Once the company made its investment in the Bodyfurn range, it realised it had a global product. Now it is by far New Zealand’s biggest school furniture supplier and this year expects to triple its exports. It currently exports about 10 percent of its output but Hamish is confident that figure will rise to closer to 30 per cent this year. In the past two years Furnware has used a distributor in Australia but now has a fulltime representative in Melbourne. Its school furniture is being used in classrooms as far afield as Dubai and Hong Kong, where one school put in an order for $500,000 worth of Furnware products.

Some of that export success comes from New Zealanders who are principals in overseas schools and are familiar with the Furnware brand.

Hamish Whyte said the firm’s research-focused approach is its point of difference. With its roots strongly embedded in Hawke’s Bay, the company has never considered taking its operations elsewhere. “I think we’re very global in Hawke’s Bay,” he says.

Among the benefits of being based in the Bay are the loyalty of local staff and the region’s infrastructure, including the Port of Napier, with which it enjoys “a very good relationship.” Another appeal of Hawke’s Bay is the lifestyle balance, where work and relaxation in an excellent climate provide the best of both worlds.

While local government does not have a direct bearing on Furnware’s manufacturing activities, Hamish says local bodies in the region are willing to help if called upon.  “They’re very approachable”. Other organisations such as the Hawke’s Bay Chamber of Commerce and New Zealand Trade and Enterprise have been useful contacts for the company.

Hamish says Furnware had effectively reinvented itself in the mid-1960s after feeling the firm was “stalling” rather than looking ahead. It introduced a lean manufacturing process with the plastic being manufactured in Auckland and the rest of the components in Hastings. Now about 1000 schools throughout New Zealand have pupils sitting on Bodyfurn chairs, even though they are three times the price of other chairs. “We seriously believe we can be four times our size in five years,” says Hamish. “We’re trying to create classrooms that kids can learn in.”

Even the fluctuations of the New Zealand dollar have not deterred the firm’s export-led approach. “That’s not a reason not to go on,” says Hamish. And despite the worldwide economic gloom, he sees no reason the firm’s market share will not continue to grow, provided it makes prudent decisions on how it invests. “With a fulltime person in Melbourne and another one in the Middle East this year, we’re going for it.”

Right on track

TV viewers have been given updates on Tarly, a female loggerhead turtle currently swimming around 40km a day towards South America.

Tarly is fitted with a KiwiSat 101 Argos PTT tracking device donated by Havelock North-based Sirtrack Wildlife Tracking Solutions, an independent commercial subsidiary of the Government’s LandCare Research. It was set up in 1986 as an initiative of the Ecology Division of the former DSIR.

Tarly’s progress is being mapped on Sirtrack’s website as the once washed-up and dehydrated turtle makes her way to new feeding grounds and adds valuable data for conservationists to the little-known movements of these endangered sea turtles.  Elsewhere, in more than 74 countries around the world, a vast range of more than 550 species of wildlife, from whales to African lions, birds, Arctic foxes, lynx and zebras are being monitored with Sirtrack-manufactured telemetry. In New Zealand and overseas there is also a keen market for collar-mounted transmitters to keep track on pig dogs in the bush.

Tucked away down Goddard Lane, Sirtrack has been built on the experience and expertise of staff who pioneered wildlife tracking development in New Zealand back in the 1970s. Now the company has more than 40 staff, including two in the United States. In 1986 all of its sales were within New Zealand but now up to 85% is exported to Australia, the United States, Europe, UK and Africa. Most of the tracking equipment is bought by researchers and the company’s products include VHF transmitters, GPS collars and satellite transmitters.

The original DSIR ecology department devices were developed to track possums, stoats, rabbits and other introduced pests to understand their behaviour and thus support effective management plans to control their numbers. The company moved on from possums to foxes and bigger creatures, such as kangaroos and camels.  At that stage devices were being bought from the US, but as funding became limited it was decided to save money by importing the raw electronics and making the transmitters here.

By 1986 there was more money to be made selling the devices than doing research with them. While many of Sirtrack’s research customers are government or university-funded, private researchers and conservationists also buy them for game reserves in places like Africa.

In the past, the company has custom-made devices for its clients, but now has moved toward a more standardised range. The huge variety of sizes in the insects, animals, mammals, fish and birds that it has been asked to fit tracking equipment to has called for considerable skill and ingenuity from staff. Transmitters have been glued on insects and crustaceans such as crayfish, implanted in fish and taped or fitted in harnesses or backpacks on birds, including the Australasian gannets that make Cape Kidnappers their breeding ground. Sirtrack provides the hardware for its products while Argos satellites bounce the GPS signal back from collars used for tracking large mammals.

Rowan Calder, Sirtrack’s marketing manager, says the firm competes with about 15 other tracking device manufacturers in the United States and Europe/UK. He said one of the advantages of its location down a side lane in Havelock North is that electronics equipment testing often needs a quieter location than other manufacturing activities.

A South African who worked in the wildlife sector for 14 years after gaining his biology degree, Rowan says Hawke’s Bay’s lifestyle not only appealed to him and his family, but has been a strong drawcard for all of Sirtrack’s staff.

The enterprise has grown spectacularly from a cottage-style industry where the local saddler actually made the leather collars for the electronic devices they sold. Now Sirtrack is a mainstream manufacturing company whose staff have had to adjust to their global marketplace. It is a good example of a Hawke’s Bay-based company which has expanded outside the region to become a global niche supplier.

Causing a Riot

Napier-based RIOT Recruitment’s founding directors, Rohan Bowyer and Ian Beattie, set up their business in Hawke’s Bay after moving with their families from Auckland and seeing the growth potential of the region. The company’s name is an acronym of the four partners – Rohan Bowyer, Ian Beattie and their wives Odette and Tania.

Rohan has a technology background, having worked in Auckland with some of the bigger corporations including Deloitte’s, TelstraClear and Vodafone. He and his wife Odette returned to her Hawke’s Bay roots about four years ago, principally for the lifestyle and schooling advantages the region offers.

He says anyone moving from the corporate scene in Auckland to Hawke’s Bay had to have a degree of flexibility in terms of employment and salary expectations, but at the same time, there is a broader range of opportunities. “You can utilise your knowledge in different ways here,” he says. He became General Manager of Bayleys Real Estate and continues to have a board advisory role with the firm.

Unknown to them both, he and Ian Beattie at one stage worked in different parts of the same building in Auckland, but did not actually meet until they both shifted to Hawke’s Bay and ended up living six doors from each other in Havelock North.  Ian has a background in sales and marketing, both in Auckland and offshore, working in corporations such as Telecom, TelstraClear and Mainfreight. He also moved to the Bay about four years ago, becoming Advertising and Circulation Director for Hawke’s Bay Today.

The formation of RIOT Recruitment in 2007 by Rohan and Ian brought together their commercial backgrounds in a way that enabled them to sit down with firms and understand their businesses. They say recruiting top people for key positions is historically very transactional but simply placing people in a key job and moving on is not their way of working. In fact they will return their fee if the person does not stay in the job for three months and they cannot replace them.

RIOT specialises in recruitment in the traditional management layer and above. It also recruits people in the Financial & Professional Services, Technology, Sales and Marketing, Operations & Logistics and Supply Chain fields. “We build a strong relationship with our clients over a period of time,” says Rohan. Rather than work with one client then possibly their competitor a short time later, they prefer to deal with a smaller client base and help them to grow their business.

While it’s a term that is often over-used, Hawke’s Bay’s lifestyle was the main attraction for the pair, says Rohan. “The region has a wonderful infrastructure in its roading and utilities and great capacity to grow.” The spread of the population between Napier and Hastings may have some disadvantages, but it also means no traffic bottlenecks and a diversity in the two centres. Hastings is the service centre and attracts the bigger businesses while Napier’s strengths lie in its professional and tourism services.

Rohan says that when recruiting key people for firms in Hawke’s Bay, the region’s schooling is an important drawcard. “A lot of people see schooling as essential, particularly if they’ve come back from offshore, larger markets,” he says.

While there is a mix of both local and out of region recruitment, Rohan says highly specialised or top executive positions tend to be filled by people from outside the region. However he says he is constantly surprised at Hawke’s Bay’s “hidden gems” – people who choose to live in the Bay but commute to Auckland or Wellington for their work while they wait for the right job to come up here.

More than half of the job replacements they deal with are not advertised and remain in the shoulder-tapping or database-search categories. And in the current economic climate, there is no shortage of people both from New Zealand and overseas who are quietly putting out their CVs for a wide range of jobs.

Rohan feels that one area of Hawke’s Bay’s economy that remains under-utilised is adventure tourism but he sees infinite capacity for growth and innovation in the region’s traditional primary production sector. While the region is often seen as being a bit off the beaten track, technology was largely overcoming that and allowing people to work where they wanted to live, a trend that would continue to benefit Hawke’s Bay, he said.

The mega-trillion transfusions of freshly printed money being pumped into their ailing economies by United States and Great Britain are starting to make Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe look like a model of monetary management. Mugabe was clearly impressed by Adolf Hitler’s Germany, which churned out so many millions of inflationary deutschmarks that a pound of liverwurst cost the equivalent of six second-hand Panzers.

Prime Minister John Key and his colleagues have resisted trading in the big BMW fleet for a bulk buy of Hyundai Kias, but he has lightened our gloom by suggesting that we could give our long-awaited tax cuts to charities, presumably so they can give them back to us once we’ve lost our jobs.

Things are so bad that even State-owned enterprise TVNZ has been forced to reduce its legendary corporate largesse by $25 million. A leaked memo about its fiscal pruning, apart from axing 18 news and current affairs jobs, said the cost-cutting included “reviewing” Koru Club membership for staff, actually requiring receipts when they transport their well-tailored selves around in corporate cabs, and having their allowances for clothing and “grooming” audited. It’s got so desperate that TVNZ could be forced to make do with just one prime-time newsreader having to learn how complete an entire sentence on their own.

Mediaeval monarchs who were prone to gross overspending on wars and extravagant lifestyles finally had to back down to rioting peasants and belligerent barons and succumb to parliamentary approval, or in France’s case, literally face the chop. Sadly Occupational Safety and Health would almost certainly rule out the introduction of the guillotine here unless its blade was blunt enough to bounce off a soft-boiled egg.

I have always liked the idea of old-fashioned wooden stocks being placed in every city mall, with a plentiful supply of over-ripe Hawke’s Bay braeburn apples on hand to exact public retribution on taggers, skateboarders, boy racers and elected officials who fail to meet pre-set budgets. It would be a very cost-effective way of showing local bodies that there is a limit to what the district really needs and what it can afford. The healthy exercise of apple-throwing would surely qualify for a SPARC grant and the stocks could be hired out to the Black Caps for some much-needed practice.

It would be nice to imagine that council officers have been tapping the “delete” key on their calculators and rapidly revising their departmental budgets in the wake of the economic collapse. Hopefully the hum of their office air conditioners has not drowned out the cries of anguish from the streets outside, where Japanese imports gleam unwanted in the nation’s car yards and factory managers pore over empty order books.

Some years ago, when I was covering estimates meetings of the then-Hastings City Council, there was always nakedly keen competition to get the biggest slice of the rates cake. If you had a strong works committee chairman and a weak parks and reserves head, the city could look forward to 12 months of sewers and water mains being dug up while parks burst into fields of rampant paspalum.

Councillors and long-suffering ratepayers were always being told that the city’s 100 year-old brick-arch sewer mains had crumbled and a few hundred thousand dollars were needed to stop Heretaunga Street from erupting into a three-mile effluent pit.

After seeing his budgets chopped to save our sewers, the defeated chairman of the library and social services committee would retire to console himself from the mayor’s liquor cabinet and bitterly vow to make a stronger case for a bigger non-fiction section next year.

The works committee’s failsafe strategy was to keep a continuing base of work on hand, so that councillors began their estimates meetings believing the city would collapse unless it kept building 30 miles of footpaths, 60 miles of sewers and 300 miles of new water mains every year. One would hope that by now every last brick arch sewer on the Heretaunga Plains has been replaced with a gleaming ferro-concrete pipe the size of the chunnel, yet the uprooting of roads and footpaths to expose the city’s aged arteries seems to be going at a faster pace every year.

Much of this work is based on the assumption that there will be increasing residential and business expansion. But even Nostradamus would be scratching out his earlier predictions after seeing the scale of the economic collapse buffeting the world at the moment.

Yet local authorities are now undergoing their obligatory long-term planning covering the next decade. It’s a costly process which will almost certainly be a complete waste of time. Who can predict what we will need or be able to afford in three years’ time, let alone during the next ten?

Our parks could be covered with canvas towns, our big bore sewers turned into underground shelters like tube stations in the London blitz. Everyone could be walking around in council-surplus high-viz jackets and wearing orange cones on their heads while they pick up windfall apples from our orchards.

Forget the long-term plans. They are a bureaucratic make-work scheme to produce a weighty document that is obsolete almost as soon as it is produced. Replace it with a big whiteboard so targets and budgets can be re-written every six months.

Turn Nelson Park, Hastings’ most expensive vacant lot, into a communal garden so we can cut household bills by growing spuds on our allotments. Stop building roundabouts and sports parks and put the money into cycleways. It will cut fuel bills, pollution and remove the boy racer problem overnight.

And don’t order any more high-viz jackets. The op shops will be full of them shortly.

Certainly not fashion. Male teachers tend to fall into two sartorial categories. Those who have kept manufacturers of walkshorts and sandals in business long beyond their commercial lifespan, and those who had hair in the 1960s and now look like roadies for the Doobie Brothers. The most desperate try to dress like their pupils, with predictably tragic results.

Most of the teachers I know are secondary teachers who daily face classrooms of bored, blank and sloppily dressed teens, crackling with acne and twitching with hormonal overload. It’s hard enough for anyone in the workforce to put together a combination of clothes each day that makes them feel they look a bit different from yesterday. But knowing that the only thing that will momentarily get the sneering attention of pupils is your clothing must be soul-destroying.

Of course that’s not an issue for the walkshorts and sandals brigade, who have stood astride the peaks and troughs of fashion for a number of decades … although trying to decide between the fawn and slightly tan walkshorts must make many of them late for school.

The reason teachers are vital for any dinner party is that when you’ve run out of topics of conversation, you can drop in the observation that NCEA is a total waste of time outside the classroom walls or suggest teachers get more than their fair share of holidays. Put away any sharp cutlery and just sit back and let them hold forth for the next hour or two.

Once they’ve reached the stage of angrily pointing out that teachers are expected to do the job of parents, you can extend the entertainment but noting kids spend more time in classrooms with teachers than at home – so it’s still the teachers’ fault.
Because teachers tend to huddle together for mutual support, their dinner guests are invariably other teachers. So at least you know you won’t be invited back.

It has always struck me that teachers and librarians are very similar. In fact, a librarian is just a teacher who can’t be bothered with kids, but likes the books and trying to make people keep quiet. Both have a curious form of agoraphobia, which literally means “fear of the marketplace.” Wikipedia says many people with agoraphobia prefer seeing visitors in a defined space that they feel they can control – a fairly good definition of a classroom, except for the “being in control” bit. It also says that such people may live for years without leaving their homes, which, considering the numbers of weeks leave teachers get each year, must be rather stultifying.

When they’re not standing on roundabouts holding ungrammatical signs about wanting equal pay with some other branch of the teaching profession, they can be found in their favourite watering hole, the staffroom. Few outsiders get to see the school staffroom which, for all I know, contains punching bags shaped like pupils, a soundproof screaming cupboard, and sauvignon blanc on tap.

When I tell teachers that I would not want to join their profession unless capital punishment is re-introduced, they assume I mean corporal punishment. No, I don’t.
Having been corporally educated at Catholic primary and secondary schools, my academic career was a triumph of faith, hope and lots of caning by priests. [I now realise that smacking my firm young buttocks was for their benefit, not mine, and recent revelations involving the priesthood suggest I got off lightly.]

Admittedly the people who brought us the Inquisition had modified their corporal punishment techniques considerably when I first entered the world of the convent primer pupil. But when it came to the nuns who taught us, old habits died hard, as it were. Dressed in black robes, pale faces framed in white cardboard, a thick leather belt around their waist and a crucifix jammed into it like a Roman broadsword, the good sisters wouldn’t hesitate to rap five-year-old knuckles with a sturdy pencil.

The last time I got caned, it was for rolling an empty .303 brass shell up and down my tilted desktop as the whole class sat in bored and unproductive silence for some earlier misdemeanour by persons unknown. These days, pupils in the United States carry live .308 rounds to school in semi-automatic rifles.

Those teachers who overcame their agoraphobia and escaped to another job with more pay and even better holidays include Helen Clark, Michael Cullen, Phil Goff, Jim Anderton, Chris Carter, Trevor Mallard and Maryan Street. There seems to be a link between more teachers in politics and a decrease in educational standards and public behaviour.

The new Speaker of the House, Dr Lockwood Smith, who moonlights as a farmer, was famous in an earlier life as the schoolmaster-like host of a children’s education quiz on television. I suspect his decision to switch to politics came in a memorable moment in front of the cameras when a little girl was asked to define a group of molecules that support some form of life.
“Orgasm,” she responded brightly.

In 2005 it was footage of National leader Don Brash teetering along the gangplank to board the Earthrace boat. It became one of the most memorable moments of the 2005 campaign and a metaphor for Brash’s political future. Then there was the midget racing car clip with Brash trying to clamber over the steel roll cage and finding out he wasn’t a midget.

This election it was Helen Clark’s turn to star in New Zealand’s Funniest Political Videos. I will never forget the terrified look on that Riccarton Mall shop assistant’s face as the Prime Minister advanced toward her, only to trip, and after clutching vainly at a passing workman’s jacket, crash to the floor a metre or two from the counter. Like an Olympic gymnast after a bad dismount she was back on her feet faster than you could say Jackie Chan, stalking up to the frozen assistant and pumping her hand to restore her circulation.

John Key’s no-risks campaign meant little chance of him riding on to the stage on the back of a motorbike in the tyremarks of Winston Peters or bungy jumping off the Sky Tower. His walkabouts looked like he’d just popped out of the office for lunch. He even took fright at the prospect of running into Winston Peters in Tauranga. But then so did most of Tauranga’s voters, except those who could get out of the bus.

But Winston didn’t worry Massey University sexologist Michelle Mars. He had quite the opposite effect. She told the Sunday Star Times that Winston was the only politician in New Zealand who knew how to use sex to sell himself. He had that “little bad boy look” she claimed, and provided an inspirational model for men.  John Key, rated sexiest politician in June by North and South magazine, might have had money but just didn’t have Winston’s sexy gleam. I think she’s right. Key might wear the odd pinstripe suit but only Winston does double-breasted. While Winston has perfected his media scowl, Key is still nice to journalists, something that must be very unsettling for them.

But even Mr Nice Guy can’t match Winston for hair, either in quantity or style.
Key’s hair looks like it’s about to slide off the back of his head like an ill-fitting skullcap. The resentment many balding male voters harbour for Peters is probably more follicle than political. I can’t imagine Winston sitting in a big chrome and leather barber’s chair, surrounded by a shagpile of shorn hair, reeking of Bay Rum and talking about the weather and the next test. Winston’s hair looks high-maintenance and certainly more costly than the $15 I grudgingly pay for the odd No 4 shear. I suspect his annual hair-styling costs would be a major expense item on the Spencer Trust’s books, if anybody got to see them.

It would be interesting to know how much voters were influenced by hair in this election. Helen Clark’s three-yearly transformation is certainly calculated and even the woman who beat her to the Prime Minister’s job, Jenny Shipley, appeared on screen on election night as a slimmer, chestnut-haired reincarnation of her former self.

While Winston wins in the style stakes, I can’t help feeling that Peter Dunne’s difficulty in attracting more support for his party is that his extraordinary badgeresque hair totally distracts voters. Like former Japanese PM Junichiro Koizumi, whose great silver mane was dubbed the Tsunami, Dunne’s coiffure will be his most lasting legacy.

Election-night coverage by the two main channels from the moment polls closed gave earnest TV reporters the task of scouring echoing halls and rows of empty seats for indications of how the parties would fare. The Greens offered vegetarian pizzas with sundried tomatoes but in Camp Labour it was trays of sausage rolls and tomato sauce. But there were no free lunches at Peter Dunne’s headquarters and supporters had to pay for their own drinks from the bar.

Reporters camped outside Helen Clark’s Mt Albert villa had viewers on the edge of their seats as they revealed that mysterious boxes being carried inside contained curries for the PM’s night in front of TV.  Peering through the bars of John’s Key’s fortress they spotted hedges so uniform that they warranted national comment.

The payoff for viewers who sit through endless predictions and scenarios from political commentators on the night are the moments when supporters can be certain their party has won — or lost. Helen Clark’s elderly mum and dad looked a bit overwhelmed but remained stoic as Helen’s harem sobbed in each other’s arms.
Finally the gates opened and the victor finally emerged from Fort Key to be escorted to victory headquarters. He arrived smiling radiantly behind a gaggle of grim-faced men in suits whose presence was ridiculous amid a sea of cheering National Party celebrants.

But a fleeting TV moment after Helen Clark’s concession speech also stays in my memory. As she strode from the stage, hubby Peter Davis unexpectedly found himself on the receiving end of a fleeting peck from his wife. Clearly unused to such public displays of intimacy with Helen, he shut his eyes and puckered his lips for seconds but it didn’t happen. She had left centre stage for good.