Not home, exactly, but where we came from nonetheless

(First published in the Manawatu Standard, other Stuff regional papers and on Stuff.co.nz, July 10.)

“Welcome home,” I said to my wife.

Minutes earlier, our train had rumbled over the River Oder, which marks the border between Germany and Poland, although I didn’t realise that until we passed the next town. The sign on the station platform identified it as Słubice, revealing that we had passed from a Teutonic country into a Slavic one.

Jolanta corrected me, as she frequently does. “I never thought of Poland as my home,” she said, “any more than you think of Denmark as yours.”

She was right in the sense that although born to Polish parents, she never lived in Poland. Her parents were forcibly transported to Germany from Warsaw during World War Two to work in a labour camp and never went back. Jolanta grew up in Germany and emigrated to New Zealand with her family in 1965.

But in my defence, I was speaking figuratively. She’s undeniably Polish, after all; she grew up speaking Polish as well as German and regularly conversed in Polish with her mother, who died only recently.

So her roots are in Poland, just as mine – on my father’s side, anyway – are in Denmark. And while I’m not one of those people who become fixated with the minutiae of family history, one purpose of this trip to Europe was to connect with those roots.

For me, this involved visiting the towns my Danish grandparents came from and enjoying the very convivial company of distant Danish cousins. Similarly, for Jolanta it was a pilgrimage of sorts to Warsaw – although we had been there before – and an opportunity to re-establish contact with descendants of the few family members who had survived the war.

In Warsaw, by sheer coincidence, our hotel was only a short walk from No 2 Daleka St, the address of the apartment building where Jolanta’s parents were living when the Germans invaded in 1939, and from which they were evicted by Wehrmacht soldiers in 1944.

There’s no trace of the building now, because the Germans flattened the city as punishment for the ill-fated Warsaw Uprising and everything was later rebuilt. But we went there anyway, on a quiet Sunday morning, and just along the street came across a plaque marking the spot where 17 Polish civilians were shot in cold blood and their bodies burned. Such memorials are tragically commonplace in Warsaw.

We also took a bus across the Vistula River to the vast Bródno cemetery, a serene and beautiful place where Jolanta’s grandparents were buried in 1942. No trace remained of their graves, although they were still there when we last visited in 2002.

There was war in my family’s past too. Religious conflict drove my Protestant du Fresne ancestors out of France in the 17th century and eventually led them to the town of Fredericia, in Denmark, where Jolanta and I wandered around the simple but elegant church built by the French Huguenot community in 1735.

There are still du Fresnes living in and around Fredericia, although they use a different spelling: Dufresne. In the small town of Søvind we were lavishly entertained by the grandson of my great-uncle, who stayed in Denmark when my grandfather left for New Zealand in 1890, and his wife. Their daughter provided translation when needed. Most younger Danes speak good English; the older ones not so much.

Near Sønderborg, close to the Danish border with Germany, we went with another cousin, a Clausen from my grandmother’s side of the family, to the Dybbøl Mill – something of a national shrine, having been the scene of an historic battle between the Danish and Prussian armies in 1864.

Fighting raged around the Clausen family’s lovely old stone farmhouse, where Danish troops were accommodated. The house was severely damaged but was later repaired and still stands at the end of a quiet, leafy lane, only a short distance from where tourists swarm around the great mill and its impressive museum.

The Danes lost the war with Prussia, which is why some of the Clausens decided to emigrate to New Zealand. They didn’t want to live under Prussian (German) rule.

They settled in the Manawatu and are there still. Ironically, the part of Denmark that was ceded to Germany after the 1864 war reverted to Danish control after World War One.

My Danish relations were almost embarrassingly hospitable. A laughter-filled dinner at the home of another cousin in Sønderborg banished any notion of the Danes as a dour nationality.

So what’s the point of relating all this? Not much, I suppose, except that our European pilgrimage reminded us that all New Zealanders (yes, Maori too) are immigrants, or at least once were, and that many of our forebears came here to escape troubled pasts and start afresh.

It often took great courage, determination and resourcefulness. But most found what they were looking for here at the end of the earth, and that's something we should never take for granted.

A journey rich in nostalgia

(First published in Stuff regional papers and on Stuff.co.nz, May 15.) 

One definition of a pilgrimage is “any journey taken for nostalgic or sentimental reasons”. Well, I recently went on just such a pilgrimage.

It took me to the Coromandel. Note that I say “the” Coromandel, so as to distinguish the region from the town of the same name.

My pilgrimage satisfied the dictionary definition, being a journey that was heavily tinged with nostalgia. I was last in the Coromandel about 30 years ago, but my most enduring memories of the place date back to the early 1960s, when my parents got the camping bug.

On our first camping trip in 1960, when I was nine, we explored the East Cape. We set out from our home in Hawke’s Bay in a mini-convoy, Dad with some of the family in our old Austin 16, towing a trailer laden with gear, and the rest of us tagging along in my brother’s 1937 Chev. I was the youngest.

The following summer we were more ambitious, venturing further afield to the Coromandel. In 1962, we took advantage of the new Cook Strait ferry service to head to Nelson and on to Totaranui, in Abel Tasman National Park. We were usually joined on these trips by cousins, uncles and aunties.

But it was the Coromandel Peninsula, with its pristine sandy beaches, bush-covered headlands and mangrove inlets, that became our favourite destination.

My parents generally eschewed established camping grounds, preferring to seek out relatively untouched places, always by the sea. At Whangapoua, on the east coast of the peninsula, we first camped on the Denize family’s farm. In subsequent years we pitched our tent (an old-fashioned square one, the only type you could get then, with no floor and a heavy wooden centre pole) in a sheltered hollow amid kanuka trees at the southern end of Whangapoua Beach.

The beach was a 30-second walk away through the dunes and Whangapoua Harbour, where we fished from the jetty, was reached via a track that led across a headland covered in pohutukawa trees.

Conditions were primitive. We cooked on the fire or on an old camping stove and we hauled water from the creek. Dad dug a long-drop dunny and we hung a safe from a tree to keep the food from getting fly-blown. We relied on the sea to keep us clean and about once a week we would take the tortuous metal road to Coromandel town for supplies.

It was much the same at Ohui, further south. There we camped on land owned by a Maori farming family, the McGregors. Our campsite was under an enormous karaka tree by a ford.

I remember when one wheel of my mother’s tiny Fiat 500 (we had acquired an extra car by then) slipped into a ditch outside the McGregors’ farmhouse. A giant of a man – or so it seemed to me at the time – emerged from the house and without a word, effortlessly lifted the car back onto the track that passed for a road.

My memory of how we spent our time on those holidays is hazy. We swam a lot and we sunbathed. We went fishing and we read. At nights Mum and Dad and any other adults present would play Scrabble by the light of a Coleman lamp.

There was a lot of laughter and a lot of singing, accompanied by a ukulele which was ideal because it didn’t take up much space in the car. Sad Movies was a favourite song one summer, and I remember my mother and her sister Winifred singing a popular song from their youth: I Was Seeing Nellie Home. I can't hear it these days without getting a bit teary.

I don’t recall it ever raining, but I’m sure it did.

It won’t surprise anyone to hear that it’s all very different in 2019. Whangapoua is still a magnificent beach – nothing can change that – but the land was subdivided decades ago. It’s all built up now and there’s a big general store-cum-café where you can get things we’d never heard of in the 60s, such as latté and pains aux raisins.

At Ohui I went looking for our old campsite but couldn’t recognise anything. What was once farmland is now subdivided into lifestyle blocks and covered in mature trees, exotics as well as native. Every narrow metal road ended in a sign that said “Private”. But you can still reach the beach via a public walking track and like Whangapoua, it’s still breathtakingly pretty. The day we were there, someone was having a wedding in the dunes.

Ohui remains relatively unspoiled, but everywhere else we went – Whangapoua, Hahei, Tairua, Kuaotunu, Whitianga, Coromandel town itself – the Auckland Effect was evident in the extraordinary proliferation of opulent homes, most of them vacant for 11 months of the year. It’s a display of affluence to rival the most fashionable parts of California.

Roads that were glorified goat tracks in 1961 – Uncle Bert’s Morris Minor barely got over the hill at Kuaotunu – are now wide and smooth. They have to be, to accommodate all the European tourists in their camper vans.

But it’s still a sublimely beautiful place, and not even the sight of a massive hilltop mansion with its own helipad at Whangapoua can erase memories of a time when things were different.

Where six degrees of separation become two

(First published in the Nelson Mail and Manawatu Standard, February 15.)

Things happen to you in New Zealand that I can’t imagine occurring anywhere else in the world. Let me give you a couple of examples.

In an earlier column I referred to a pending family reunion in Nelson. This took place on Waitangi Day weekend in Golden Bay - or, to be more precise, at Pakawau, roughly halfway between Collingwood and the base of Farewell Spit.

There can be few places in New Zealand more isolated, which was part of the reason it was chosen as the venue. Golden Bay itself feels cut off from the outside world by the formidable barrier that is the Takaka Hill; descending into the Takaka Valley always feels to me like dropping into a mystical realm reminiscent of the author James Hilton’s fictional Shangri-La. But even by Golden Bay standards, Pakawau is off the beaten track.

The tiny settlement doesn’t hold an especially significant place in the history of my family, although some cousins have a bach there, and in many ways it was a wildly impractical location, being a long way from anywhere and particularly hard to get to for those coming from Auckland and overseas.

Yet in other ways it was wholly appropriate, being a beautiful, unspoiled spot surrounded by bush and sea and a long way from civilisation. These are irresistible attributes to members of my whanau, who inherited from their parents a fondness for out-of-the-way places.

But I digress. The main reason for explaining all this is to emphasise how remote Pakawau is, and how improbable – but utterly typical of New Zealand – was the experience I’m about to relate.

On the Sunday morning we all gathered to clean up the Pakawau Memorial Hall, a classic Kiwi country hall where we’d had a knees-up the previous night. The job done, a few of us were standing around outside saying our goodbyes when a Farewell Spit Tours bus trundled past.

This being a place where traffic is so infrequent that strangers automatically acknowledge each other, we gave a friendly wave to the handful of people on the bus. I was vaguely conscious of someone waving back.

It was only when my wife and I got back home to Masterton several days later that our next-door neighbour poked her head over the fence and told us that she and her husband were the couple waving from the bus.

Now I’m no mathematician, but the odds against such an occurrence – our neighbours from a town hundreds of kilometres away in the North Island passing that spot at that precise moment, in one of the most sparsely populated parts of the country – must be overwhelming.

In New Zealand, though, we are almost conditioned to expect it. We live in what must surely be one of the most intimate societies in the world. It has become a cliché to say that the six degrees of separation that supposedly connect every human being on the planet are reduced to two in Godzone.

It must make the conduct of an illicit affair infernally difficult. The chances of being spotted, if not in the act then at least in incriminating circumstances, must be higher than anywhere else in the world. (For that reason it was hardly surprising that a brothel that started up a couple of years ago in a Wairarapa town lasted only a few weeks; it was on the main highway and its carpark was in full view of passing traffic.)

Being seen outside the Pakawau hall wasn’t the only example during that weekend of the eerie New Zealand propensity for freakishly coincidental encounters. On the Saturday morning, I drove to the Collingwood store to get a few supplies, including ice for our chilli-bin.

I had barely walked in the door before the woman in charge of the store approached and asked if I wanted some cardboard cartons to put my ice in.

“Whoa!” I thought. I knew Golden Bay was renowned for its other-worldly quality, but never imagined that the local populace was endowed with extra-sensory perception.

The explanation turned out to be disappointingly prosaic, but in keeping with the two degrees of separation theory. Someone else from the du Fresne whanau had phoned earlier to inquire whether the store had ice, because it was needed for the bar that night.

When I walked in, the woman behind the counter recognised me from my time at the Nelson Evening Mail (as it was then) 25 years before. She had worked there too, and assumed I was the du Fresne who had phoned earlier about the ice. Only in New Zealand …

When I related this to other family members my sister, never one to be outdone, mentioned that when she and her husband called at the charming retro coffee caravan parked near the boat ramp at Collingwood, the female barista who served them had been a pupil in my sister’s art class in Hawke’s Bay aeons before – and furthermore, the barista’s brother was married to the former girlfriend of my sister’s son and farmed next to him in the foothills of the Ruahine range.

By now I suspect we’re getting down to one degree of separation.

My sister also told of lunching with her husband and daughter at the Mussel Inn (a famous Golden Bay establishment which I regard as over-rated, though it’s considered heretical to say so), where the daughter knew the bartender from her theatre course at Victoria University.

But two degrees of separation stories don’t just crop up in New Zealand. My favourite one, still, concerns my first visit to London in 1985.

On a quiet Saturday afternoon I checked in to the Royal Commonwealth Society in Northumberland Avenue, where I was to stay, and entered my name in the guest register.

The guy behind the counter, who had said very little up to this point, looked at my name and remarked casually: “You must be one of the Waipukurau du Fresnes” (actually he used “Waipuk”, the abbreviation favoured by locals).

Indeed I was one of the Waipuk du Fresnes. It turned out that he came from Waipawa, five minutes away from my home town, and his mother knew my mother through the Catholic Women’s League.

From France to New Zealand via Denmark

(First published in the Nelson Mail and Manawatu Standard, January 4, 2012.)

We grow up in a vacuum, many of us.

After my father died in 1984, I realised I knew virtually nothing of his early life. He hardly ever spoke of his childhood or upbringing, still less of our family history.

Born in 1907, he was of a generation that focused on the present and the future. Life was something you got on with; dwelling on the romantic past didn’t put food on the table or a roof over our heads.

Both Dad’s parents had emigrated from Denmark (though his father was of French descent), but we grew up largely ignorant of any cultural heritage. His knowledge of Danish, as far as we were aware, was limited to a few words.

It was almost as if the du Fresne family had magically sprung into being fully formed in the Manawatu, where Dad was born. Our deeper origins went unacknowledged.

In this respect, the du Fresnes were typical of many New Zealand families with non-English roots who were subtly discouraged from keeping alive their cultural traditions. There was pressure to conform and assimilate: to learn English, knuckle down and not make waves.

The several thousand Scandinavian migrants who settled in the lower North Island in the late 19th century – my grandparents among them – quietly complied. They rolled their sleeves up, went to work and learned to become New Zealanders (much as Dutch immigrants did several decades later).

For them, the past literally was another country – one they left behind psychologically as well as physically.

It’s often the following generation that seeks to recapture what has been lost, and so it turned out with my family. In our case it was my cousin Yvonne du Fresne who immersed herself in the family history.

The oldest of my generation by some margin, Yvonne grew up amid the Danish community in Palmerston North , the older members of which still spoke their mother tongue, at least in private. An observant and precocious child, she soaked up their language, their songs, their food, their traditions and their stories.

The experience of being among these people shaped Yvonne’s life and her later career as a writer of novels and short stories, which drew heavily on her Scandinavian heritage and on the experiences of migrants struggling to preserve their identity in an Anglo-Saxon society.

The rest of us cousins, it must be said, showed little interest. We had our lives to get on with and would sometimes roll our eyes, figuratively speaking, when Yvonne talked, as she frequently and earnestly did, about our Danish and French connections. But it has become clear to us in recent months that we owe her a great debt.

You see, the first-ever du Fresne family reunion will be held next month in Nelson. To coincide with this occasion, a family history has been written (also a first). Had Yvonne not accumulated such a body of knowledge about our past, the publication would have been … well, perhaps not impossible, but certainly not as complete.

Largely as a result of her efforts, we have been able to piece together a narrative that traces our family’s origins back to the birth of Lambert Dufresne (as the name was then spelt) in the town of Warquignies, in what is now southern Belgium, in 1688.

The Dufresnes were French Huguenots – Protestants forced to flee religious persecution by Catholic France. They initially resettled in Prussia but in 1720 found permanent sanctuary, at the invitation of Denmark's Protestant king, in the Danish town of Fredericia. There they remained part of a tight French Huguenot community, on good terms with their Danish neighbours but determined to preserve their distinct identity.

My grandfather, Abraham Heinrich Dufresne, a master builder, emigrated to New Zealand in 1890 and made for the Manawatu, where his cousin, Reformed Church pastor Abraham Honoré, had settled years earlier. There my grandfather met and married Anna Clausen, youngest daughter of a family that had arrived from Denmark in 1875.

Like the Dufresnes two centuries earlier, the Clausens had been displaced by the turbulent currents of history. When the Prussian army invaded Denmark in 1864, bent on reclaiming the region of Schleswig, the decisive battle was fought on the Clausen farm near the town of Dybbol. The graves of Danish soldiers, buried where they fell, still surround the farmhouse today.

After the Danish forces were routed, thousands of families emigrated rather than live under Prussian rule. The Clausens chose to come to New Zealand because the Lutheran bishop Ditlev Monrad, a former Danish prime minister, had spent time in the Manawatu and returned to Denmark promoting New Zealand as a destination.

The Clausens remain a well-known family in the Manawatu (and stalwarts of the Lutheran Church) to this day. And evidence of my grandfather’s skill as a builder survives in the form of Kaingahou, the magnificent homestead that he built for Bishop Monrad’s grandson on the main highway just south of Palmerston North.

Abraham and Anna produced an interesting family. In the 1930s they moved to Eastbourne, near Wellington, where the du Fresne home was the venue for lively left-wing political discussions and celebrated musical soirees attended by Jewish refugees from Europe.

My apolitical father bemused his radical family, and caused consternation in the Danish Lutheran community of Palmerston North, by marrying a girl from a staunch Irish Catholic family and converting to Catholicism.

Dad’s youngest sister Elsie and her husband, the journalist and historian Dick Scott, were members of the Communist Party at a time when involvement in left-wing politics carried considerable risks. (Both quit the party in protest at the Soviet Union’s brutal putdown of the 1956 Hungarian uprising.)

Nelson figures prominently in the family story too. My father’s two younger brothers settled there in the post-war years – Viggo at Ruby Bay and Chris at Mapua. Viggo became the first licensed commercial winemaker in the South Island, pioneering viticultural techniques (such as planting classical European vines in unforgiving stony ground) that have since become the norm.

Chris was one of the earliest Nelson potters and later campaigned tirelessly for official action over the highly contaminated Fruitgrowers’ Chemical Company site at Mapua. Often dismissed as a stirrer, he was ultimately vindicated long after his death when the government took over the site in 2004 and instituted a massive cleanup. (Ironically, the decontamination project was supervised by Chris's daughter, my cousin Jenny Easton.)

Pulling these stories together in a coherent family history has been richly satisfying for my cousins and me. The sad irony is that Yvonne, who did so much to make us aware of our heritage, won’t be around to enjoy the forthcoming celebrations. She died last March, aged 81.