Why Orangapai? The roll of the name curling off my tongue, perhaps. The scents the name floods into my mind's nostrils. The sense of time, the unrecorded and unknown histories, the name conjures. The location, looking out over familiar formations, known geography.
Orangapai is a place, nestled in the foothills of the Rock and Pillar range bordering the Maniototo plain. The name, I believe, translates roughly to well-being - my Maori speaking friends are welcome to correct if otherwise. From Orangapai, you look over the plain, to the rising folds of the Kakanuis, the evergreen beard growing around Naseby, the spiralling smoke ascending from Ranfurly's town dump. At the top of the Rock and Pillar, above Orangapai, you can see farther, over the back of Rough Ridge, with the plain laid out before you. In dry months the Maniototo becomes a patchwork of irrigated green and agonising brown. The tracery of willows across the plain marks the flow of the Taieri. I used to swim in the Taieri, by Kokonga and further west at the Creamery, but the dairy farms upstream have polluted the river now.
A brief, cobbled together history for you. The Hamiltons gold field, created in the 1860s, shares the same space as Orangapai, overlapping spheres of naming. A Union Church, built in 1865 of corrugated iron and tongue and groove, stood at Hamiltons. “An oven in summer and a refrigerator in winter,” according to one settler. In 1914, a sanatorium for sufferers of tuberculosis was constructed, with 112 beds. This facility was later managed by the Justice Department as a boys' borstal, a reformatory institution for juvenile offenders. How reformatory? Some of these boys worked on Maritanga Station, my parents's farm, picking rocks off paddocks for lunch and cigarettes. The place is now a private Christian retreat centre; the Quakers in Aotearoa had their summer gathering there in 2006. I'm still pondering what Christians are retreating from.
I believe I first visited the area when I was 11 or 12. The large complex was seemingly incompatible with the surrounding landscape. The dated buildings, the abandoned, institutional feel, conveyed an eerie sense, of decaying time, history past. I recall the greenhouses were full of growing plants, tomatoes and the like, so perhaps the Christians were in residence at the time of that first exploration.
The greenhouses allow me to segue away from the naming of the blog, and to the intent. I presume Orangapai to be a vessel, a documentary voice for myself, and a connection to and for my friends. You are able to follow life's arc, and I may disseminate observations, perspectives and modest learnings for others, hopefully, to enjoy. But the greenhouses, you ask, where is this segue link? To the brimming green on a balcony. That is the link. Growing there are tomato plants, hot peppers (including Bolivian Rainbow, Chimicheka, and Ivory Banana - the imagery of names), shiso, and herbs: basil, coriander/cilantro, rosemary, sage and spearmint occupying space on the balcony. Yellow flowers and little bulbs of green mark forming tomatoes and Sarah's bursting enthusiasm.
The balcony is attached to an apartment, of Discovery Village apartments, bounded by First Avenue, running approximately east-west, and by Alder and Birch Streets, running perpendicular to First. In habitation within are Sarah and I. We live on the east coast of Vancouver Island. From our balcony we see a pair of rows of two-storied town houses, windows and roof eaves like eyes framed by squared hair staring back, and behind a line of Douglas fir. Across Alder, the view is of the southern tip of Quadra Island, including the lighthouse at Cape Mudge. Surrounding are the waters of the Strait of Georgia, making turbulent passage through the narrow channels of the Discovery Islands, of which Quadra is one. Beyond Quadra, disrupting the horizon, are the Coast Mountains. The place we live is the River City.
