I am currently sitting in a palatial motel in Invercargill about to be whisked off to a show in Riverton.
That’s right, Riverton, I play ALL the big places.
Some may scoff at performing in Gore, Roxburgh or the third paddock after Nan’s, but I love touring small town NZ. I’m not saying I want to live there, I am fond of popping into Foodtown at 3am to buy mushrooms after all, but I sure do like to visit.
And contrary to many claims I haven’t been propositioned by a six fingered man and his sister for a four-way with a goat. There are no duelling banjos here, just the occasional Golden Guitar. (Though I hear there are some nervous Donkeys now in Sumner.)
What I also love is how each town not only has their own distinctive flavour, but also distinctive similarities.
There’s an obvious obsession with big things. We have enormous carrots, kiwifruit, trout, garage door openers, corrugated sheep, gumboots and hypodermic needles. In Riverton it’s a Paua shell, and in Wallacetown on the way there is a giant tap. The plumber it advertises also says you won’t get your big toe stuck in it, isn’t that nice.
The other thing every town has is a memorial of some kind. A bridge, an arch, a cenotaph, a wall, a sculpture, and so on. I always find it sobering to stop and read the names of the Glorious Dead. They suffered through things my Generation X pampered backside cannot even begin to imagine. I thought I was hardly done by when I had to bike to school in the rain, let alone tramping through snow with frostbite, dysentery and lice.
So I like to take a moment and peruse the names from each town, and there are always some from every town, and remember that NZ had the 2nd highest per capita casualty rate in WW1, that the USSR lost a staggering 26 600 000 people in WW2.