By Rhonda Bartle

Johnny Poutu, ex-miner, takes his spot at the bar and swigs from a Whangamomona Hotel beer mug, complete with dog tag No.004 around the handle.  True Whanga men hang their glasses on the wall to mark long-term loyalty and to avoid dish-washer overload. Suspended from hooks at the end of the counter, usually the empty mugs don't wait too long to be filled.  As one barmaid whispered, 'This town is full of big drinkers.'

Johnny Poutu, a softly spoken man of indeterminable age and history, might not fit that category - but then again he might.  He's been in Whanga for 17 years and seen a lot of the pub.  'They've loaned me this stool,' he smiles. 

But just because he's been here a while doesn't make him local. He's still a bit of an import, he reckons. 'I used to come down here a long time ago to play football, before I got married. Not long after the war. And I did a lot of pig hunting, and I liked the place.  I said to my family, if I ever retire, this is where I'm heading for.'

That's my house

True to his word, when the time was right, he arrived in Whanga with money in his pocket for a house. 'I came down here one weekend because my son was already living here and I had a walk around.  There were three places that had been for sale and this was the last on the market.  I put a price on it.'

His savings bought an old railway home that had been transported from Tahora, cut down the middle and brought to the township in two pieces.  'I worked it out that that old house would be about 90 years old,' he says, pointing through the window in the direction of his home. 

If it wasn't for Marg and Murt Kennard's place, the old Australasia bank on the corner which is now M & M's Bed & Breakfast and Café, he would be looking at his house.  It's close enough to the pub to chuck a pool ball on its roof.

'It's like the one across the street the other way,' he says, It's one of the oldest buildings here. It's all heart rimu, solid as.'

No trials or tribulations

Winter gets very cold here, with a lot of fog.  'You've got the open fire going all the time, all winter.  See up there by the big red shed?  There's that big orange canvas?  That's my wood pile.'

But Johnny doesn't mind the winter cold or the still, dry heat of summer. It's an easy trade for what he sees as the best things here:  Whanga time and Whanga freedom. 

'You do what you want to do in your own time without some bastard telling you what to do.  You don't have to do anything here that you don't want to.'

Even isolation doesn't figure on his map. Son Lou, now a painter who helped paint up the pub, lives here and recently the whole family came down to celebrate Lou's 50th birthday.  Isolation, Johnny says, is not a problem.

No retail therapy: many shops have closed in Whanga which means a journey into Stratford.

'We haven't got no shopping centre here, no petrol bowsers, so people have to get used to travelling to Stratford.  You've got to work out week by week what you need  because you can't just go out to a store here. But so long as people have reliable transport, there's really no difficulty.  And quite often if people know you're going in, they'll get you to get things.'

And visa versa, of course.  'The community spirit, I think, is what keeps this place together out here. I think that's why the Republic Day is such a big thing.'

Dancing in the streets on Republic Day

After local body restructuring in 1989, Whangamomona become part of a bureaucratic bungle which made it part of Manawatu-Wanganui district, instead of the Taranaki district it had always aligned itself to.  Residents decided to cede from the rest of New Zealand and become the Republic of Whangamomona. 

Republic Day is now held every two years to celebrate and elect a new President. No, Johnny says, he isn't tempted to run, he's too old and mellow, but in 1999 his goat Billy Gumboot was the second ever President voted in.  Billy followed local man Ian Kjestrup, who had earlier held office for ten years, into power. 

Billy died in active service while weed-eating on the hill and is buried on a dusty terrace that overlooks the town. Tai Poutu the Poodle, who belongs to Johnny's son was the next President, and in 2005, the supremely bearded Murt Kennard became Whanga's top dog.

Like most of the people here, Johnny Poutu loves Republic Day.  'People stay up all night, carry on next morning,' he says, 'then there's a big clean-up next day, and then back again, over here. They all get together and the money goes between the two schools and the camping grounds so the community all gets a cut out of it.'

He tells how last Republic Day he was sitting here at the bar when a woman's head came through the opened window.  'It was dark then, and you couldn't see that street for people dancing.  There was a band out there.  And this woman said she was keen to see if there was a dance floor.  And I said, 'You're standing on it, it's a couple of hundred yards long.'

Here for the long haul

But as he quickly points out, Whanga's not exactly like that all the time. 'Sometimes it's like a bloody morgue in here, don't you worry.  I've often come in here and there's just me and the bar lady here all day, and then suddenly they come out of the woodwork and you can't move in here.  You don't know where the hell they've come from.  That's the way the place is.'

Even on the dullest days, he has no plans to move. 'When I go on holiday, at Christmas time, I'm only away two or three days.  I can't get home quick enough.'

He always hurries back to the pub, 'Our meeting house,' which is a clubroom for various sports as well as a decent place to hold committee meetings. 'Netball, hockey, rugby is a big thing,' he says. 'You can meet a lot of people here.' 

A little ancient history

Instead of having a phone, the publican takes Johnny's calls.  And sometimes strangers arrive and actually know who he is, like the woman who as a child sat in front of him at school and the son of a man who mined with him in Ohura.  Both of them just turned up out of the blue.

'I had a good job before I came here. I went down the mines in 1947 and came out in '69. I had 21 years down there.'

Gently, Johnny leans further back into history. 'I was shit scared that first day.  I thought, Jesus, I'm not working down here too long, it's too dark anyway.  I decided to stay a week, earn enough money to move on.'

Twenty years later he was still there.  'Five or six hours a day, that's enough underground,' he says. 'It was all hard work, all physical and you lived with the danger. I lost a brother in '63. He got killed down the mines in a fall.  He was putting a rail in and the slab came down.  It was quick.  More people killed on the road, anyway, than in the coal mines.'

He drops into a quieter story about how his younger brother and he flipped a coin to see who got which job. 'There was one on the railway and one in the mine and he got the railways, stayed 40 years.  I lost him last September.' 

When the mine closed in 1969, he worked in the underground tunnels at Turangi until 1975. 'After that, I shot up to Hamilton and got the first job where I could see daylight all day.' 

That was in the Hutton's bacon factory where he spent the next 12 years until he retired.  'They told me they didn't need my services any more, I was getting too bloody old.  I come down here, was only here for a few months and I got a job driving the school bus.' 

Never too old for a new career

He drove between Marco and Whangamomona schools for the next ten years. 'See that girl serving behind the bar? I used to pick her up when she could only just climb on the bus.  Everyone's a cobber out here.'

Johnny smiles and falls into a different era entirely, that of the pioneers who long ago arrived to break in the Whangamomona bush.  'They got land in the back, were given a packet full of nails, a hammer and an axe and told, 'Go for it.'  That's it. They worked their guts out here.'

Sometimes, when he's cutting firewood, he comes across a fence line high in the bush.  'That's the sad part about it. All that hard work. The first world war came along and most of them went overseas and 70% never came back and the land just reverted.' 

He smiles, a little wider this time, and chugs a bit more beer.  'I've decided not to worry too much about the past, but to think about the future now, which is where I hope to spend most of my time.'