By Rhonda Bartle

Where's the whare: The last 7km to Alley's cottage is 4-wheel-drive only. Image Puke Ariki Collection TS2006_1030.

Looking for Alley's cottage

Few people venture into the depths of the deserted Moeawatea Valley because, really, who would want to? Unless, of course, it's to see where Rewi Alley walked naked through the bush and check out the whare where he lived.

Moeawatea means 'a place where you sleep in the daytime.' It's the back of beyond, something you realise the moment you talk with the girl in the Hāwera information centre, south Taranaki.

"Moeawatea?" the voice goes. "You want to see Rewi Alley's cottage?"

"Yes," you reply. "I want to go and have a look."

"You know it's just a track, don't you? It's 50km from Waverley, and the last 7km is 4-wheel-drive only?"

Fine. I'm off then, but only if it doesn't rain. The track can be closed for up to five months in winter.

A New Zealand history makers

In October, 2005, a panel on Prime TV rated the late Rewi Alley 78th on a list of top 100 New Zealand history makers.

Alley was a Sinophile, someone who loved all things Chinese, and one of this country's most distinguished sons. A soldier, writer, poet, translator, industrialist, visionary, a man intent on social reform - anyone who grew up in this country during the 1930s and 40s with an interest in progressive politics would still consider Alley a hero.

And if not here in New Zealand, then certainly in China. Resident there for 66 years, a secret member of the Communist party and homosexual to boot, Alley embraced the culture and the people, particularly the children and the poor.

When China was thrown into chaos by the 1931 Japanese invasion, he came to see the peasant villages as the strength of a new future.

From his Shanghai base, he became involved in flood and famine relief. Using money smuggled in from overseas, he worked tirelessly to establish the Gung Ho cooperatives, until more than 200 of them were turning out guns, hand-grenades and blankets, often using machinery nicked from under the combined Japanese nose.

Gung Ho, Work Together was, and still is, Alley's rebel yell, and the legacy he left behind after he died in 1987 at the age of 90. It subsequently became part of the English Language.

Into the misty back-blocks

To get to Moeawatea, you turn off State Highway 3 at Waverley, between Hāwera and Patea, and weave your way inland, or you can take the Kohi Rd, a few kilometres north.

Either way, at some point, the two roads will come together and you'll be heading into the misty highlands of back-blocks Taranaki.

Behind you, the farmland drops rapidly away, until you end up hugging razor-back ridges in a sharp, hostile landscape. The valleys on either side of the road are deep, appallingly so, and in January, the toi-toi waves like danger flags to warn the unwary.

The road is safe -  rural delivery actually runs this far -  but it doesn't feel or look like it. The recommendation from serious 4-wheel-drivers is never wear your seat belt out here. Then you can bail out if your vehicle rolls off the edge.

Finally, a name on a letter box half-hidden in the scrub, and it's not Rewi Alley's. But it's here, at Ernie Matthews' mailbox that you turn and follow the blue papa trail down, down, down into the valley. You scrutinise the sky often because if it rains you could get stuck here until the rutted track dries out.

At the very bottom when you hit the flat, you find yourself surrounded by dry fields and bush-clad hills, all barren and beautiful, green and lush. The Tawhiti Stream feeds through the landscape -  a dark, murky colour.

Above you hangs the Tawhiti Bridge, rust-red and ancient. Built in 1915, it's a fine example of a hardwood truss design and it's the last of its kind in Taranaki. Now unsafe to drive on, it's been replaced by a sharp-edged white concrete ford which looks very square in the water.

The old Tawhiti bridge hangs across the river at the bottom of Moeawatea Valley. Image Puke Ariki Collection TS2006_1031.

The valley

It was the Tawhiti Bridge that carried Rewi Alley and his mate Jack Stevens, both ex-soldiers, into the Moeawatea in 1920 to take up 800ha of the roughest rehab settlement farm around.

As Alley would one day write in his autobiography: "the stories of the struggles that have been made to tame it and use it for better livelihood and better production are an epic so far unwritten.

"Ours was an isolated back-country farm. We farmed there in a pioneer way and increased the stock to a thousand sheep and a hundred cattle. We worked like slaves, sometimes sixteen hours a day."

It was in this valley that Alley and Stevens worked naked except for boots, shorts slung over their shoulders to cushion fence posts and guns.

As Alley noted wryly, camp bread tastes good after an experience, but after a while, after tackling scrub, exhausted and wet through, to carry the wood down the hill to bake the break after cooking one's dinner, the pleasure begins to recede.

But after you switch off the engine and let the quietness rush in, you can almost understand why they did it. No noise except the drone of the bees.

The warmth hits you above and below. Splendid isolation swings off the hills. Aside from the occasional lazy baa of an unseen sheep, you could be the only person on earth.

Somewhere round the corner, their whare still stands. Reluctantly, you turn the key, remembering how after six years of back-breaking slog here, Alley left Stevens to it in preference of a slow boat to China. He bought a one-way ticket to Shanghai.

The whare in 2006, with kitchen out the back. Image Puke Ariki Pictorial Collection TS2006_1023.

The whare

Photos of the whare taken in 1921 show a tiny four-roomed structure built on government bought posts, with a veranda out the front to keep the shade. Photos from the 1980s show a place falling apart. Pull in beside the cottage today and what strikes you most is how old, yet how new it looks. The paint seems fresh. It's empty but it looks lived in.

Outside, herbs grow in clumps in a makeshift garden. Someone's recently cooked their bush stew over embers on the grass. The whare appears remarkably sound all these years down the track. You can't help thinking film-maker Dave Harre and his team did a pretty decent job.

Four years after Ally left, Stevens left too. The land passed through the hands of two farming families until Ernie Matthews added it to his property in 1972. The cottage won Category 2 heritage status with the Historic Trust but fell into ruin, home only to possum hunters.

It's thanks to Dave Harre of Oratia, a man passionate about such New Zealand symbols, and writer Geoff Chapple of Auckland that it still survives today.

After filming in the valley in 1989 for his film of Alley's life Second Blade of Grass, and realising the whare would not last another winter, Harre and Chapple approached then Prime Minister David Lange for money to restore it.

Harre felt Alley, who never fit the typical New Zild rugged rugby stereotype, was a good alternative hero for future generations. Though Lange turned down the request for money, saying, "Rewi Alley hated monuments," he provided the voiceover for the film.

Goff coughs up the money

Minister of Labour Phil Goff came up with $85,000 for the work, (prompting serious debate in public and in parliament over the worthiness of the project and the use of public money) on the proviso that Harre and Chapple "take some young people in to do it."

The Moeawatea Heritage Conservation Process: Service Learning with Kiwi Attitude commenced shortly afterwards, with Harre as "some kind of leader."

Harre bought an old derelict house in Patea, south Taranaki for the timber, and negotiating the road and the weather, carted everyone and everything in.

"There were supposed to be eight (young people) he wrote in a paper in conjunction with Roger Boshier, Professor University of British Columbia, Vancouver.

"Impossible to choose. I took 10, which, once the project began, expanded to twelve. I gathered them up in an old VW bus from the towns and farms of Taranaki and Wanganui. The road down is barely a car wide and cut into a steep hillside.

"The surface slopes inwards and after rain, the VW bus would slither sideways into the bank. Skid the other way and you were down a 200m drop. We went over a bridge with a sign proclaiming it unsafe.

"Around the corner, up and down a few more hills and there was Rewi's house. 'Oh shit!' said someone in the back of the van. It was a hulk of grey, rotting timber."

Alley's view of things

Today, you can stand on alley's porch and see what he saw. Horses graze the hillside beyond the river, where a swing-bridge gives access to another farm and a single stone chimney stands.

It's a supremely peaceful place. The old shearing shed across the track continues to battle the ravages of time. Next to it a tangle of kiwifruit vines struggle to keep the gate posts up. Chinese gooseberries. Alley would be pleased.

Go inside and there are books piled up beside the fire and a couple of stray chairs that urge you to sit down, take your boots off, rest a spell.

Two newer buildings out the back, added during the repairs, offer an old black coal range and a hanging meat safe. No electricity here.

A claw-footed bath waits as though warm water will miraculously arrive courtesy of the solar panels leaning against a wall.

In 2006, Alley's door is always open and the beds are always made. Walking in Alley's footsteps, you can't help but be in awe of the work he did trying to knock the land into shape.

In his autobiography, just one of 66 books he produced, Alley writes of the valley in a lyrical way; of rata trees in flower, the myriad of birds, the brushing of wet fern against his bare legs. He carried away such sensory memories that he was able to conjure them up at will in faraway Beijing.

He wrote of fruit that grew like magic and the joys of preserving it in beer bottles with the tops cut off. How, in the upper tracts of the Waitotara, while hunting wild pigs, he and Stevens found a deserted sheep station, "with lovely lawns, a rusting power plant and deadly silence." There, they picked raspberries, walnuts, lemons and pears.

A matter of survival

But other pages tell a different kind of truth of their existence. "Once, while felling bush, a dead branch was pulled out of a tree directly over my head by the vines attached to the kawa I had cut. The corner of the axe drove into my face, leaving a good gash.

"I had to walk over the hills and back home for Freddy Stevens, Jack's brother, to tie it up. I had lost a good deal of blood and was kind of dreamy."

Once, while riding his half-broken horse Hamud on a rare trip to Waverley, a large lump of papa fell of the cliff, causing the horse to rear in panic. Alley was thrown off, but his foot caught in the stirrup and he was dragged for "some miles" until the stirrup cut the leather and he was left unconscious in the roadway.

Injured and stripped of his clothes, he came to with his three sheep dogs sitting beside him, heads all to one side, wondering what had happened to him.

Alley suffered numerous injuries and dislocated bones that had to be teased back into place. His jaw was the worst, sticking out badly on one side, needing extra weight to shift it.

After three months in bed -  at least part of the time with Stevens in the bed next door, suffering a twisted leg also caused by Hamud -  he finally made it out to see a doctor, only to be told that he should recuperate for a few more months at the Rotorua Spa.

As Alley notes in his laconic style: "I had just enough money to pay his fee and get back to Moeawatea, so the advice was really pie in the sky."

Toitoi flags and blue papa bluffs: Image Puke Ariki Collection TS2006_1027.

The value of simplicity

Alley believed that his time at Moeawatea brought him down to earth and taught him the value of simplicity.

"I learned a lot there of struggle and the basic things have kept me in good stead. Life in the valley gave me an ability to face up to the cold winds for days and smile. It cleared away a lot of war dreams."

But perhaps his upbringing played a major part in the man that he became. Perhaps it was a combination of his mother's practical nature and his father's 'learn by doing' that allowed Alley to survive stinging Taranaki winters and overheated summers and work his way into a Chinese world where he would leave a lasting impression.

He was always quick to credit his parents for his strengths. He considered his a "fortunate childhood." Named by a childless aunt who admired Rewi Maniopoto, the chief who fought the British forces during the 1860s land wars, he grew up "a little blonde Anglo-Saxon with a Māori name."

His mother was a woman of great ability, balanced and thoughtful. "She had a breadth of understanding of international issues remarkable in our New Zealand society," he wrote. "She was intensely practical, with a great brief in the future of mankind -  a truly wonderful person in every way.

"She was part of me. I would have told her anything she asked, but she was not inquisitive. To have such a mother was my great good fortune."

His father, a schoolteacher, was "a great believer in social progress, a socialist before his time, and someone with enough discipline to keep everything in order."

Proof of life in the Moeawatea Valley: Poplar fence posts with wire imbedded. Image Puke Ariki Collection TS2006_1024.

A huge exotic pond

In 1926, at the age of 29, Rewi Alley went to China and never came back. Guided by his own mission statement of "making one's life mean something to people, rather than letting the sordid quest for fame, face or fortune dominate it," he ended up not only with monuments, but with medals.

An advocate for the overworked, underprivileged and underfed, he talked politics with Mao Zedong and later Che Guevara. He earned greatness and respect in a huge exotic pond where few foreigners make a ripple.

A non-practicing homosexual, he adopted tow Chinese boys who grew to assume positions of power.

As the most widely-travelled European into China's interior he is still considered today, the outsider who wrote the most, and with the most authority, on the land and its people. When he died, a quarter of the world's population mourned.

It's a long way to China from the back-blocks of Taranaki. You can't help thinking how remarkable it all his, squatting on his whare steps in the depths of Moeawatea, with your 4-wheel-drive parked outside and one eye on the sky.