Observations of a Rural Nurse

by Sara McIntyre

Published by Massey University Press, 2020

Interview by Sally Blundell

“Places such as Kākahi,” wrote Peter McIntyre, “may seem to be going backwards, even to be dying, but in a civilisation faced with disaster this may well be what will ultimately save them. At least in Kākahi, much of what makes life worth living has been preserved.”

It is unlikely McIntyre, war artist and prolific painter, was thinking of a novel virus when he wrote these words in 1973 but this small, former sawmilling town deep in King Country, the subject of so many of McIntyre’s paintings, has been a welcome sanctuary for his family in lockdown.

“Like towns all over the world, when the sawmilling stopped, Kākahi stopped,” says McIntyre’s daughter, Sara. “But it didn't die. It is a lovely little community to live in and right now it feels even better. I feel lucky to have been here in the lockdown. We could still go to the store, there were conversations and phone calls. Our so-called bubble here is pretty idyllic at the moment – it is making us all feel far more appreciative of the place.”

That place – its people, its buildings, its tearooms and rodeos and startling landscape – are profiled in McIntyre’s new book Observations of a Rural Nurse, 290 pages of stories, essays but mainly photographs. Photographs of crocheted blankets and family portraits, of lace curtains and rusting cars, washing on the line and sofas on the front porch. Photographs of horses and hangi and TV satellite dishes; long country roads; museums and churches and the bowling club; Rowena’s pirate flag, Erihi’s kākahu, the two cars parked up at International Zephyr Day and the heavy sun- and rain-drenched beauty of the King Country.

As curator Julia Waite writes, the paintings of McIntyre senior dwell on absence: abandoned barns, empty streets, broken gates – a nostalgic record of an historic town. His book Kakahi New Zealand gave the town a “cult status” (a status still seen in the sign pointing down Peter McIntyre Street) but through her photographs his daughter takes a different reading. Yes, the general store has been on the market for years but still everyone is secretly pleased the owner, now in his 79th year, hasn’t found a buyer. The old billiard hall has been boarded up for decades and is now considered unsafe, “but no one has the heart to pull it down, says McIntyre. “It is a lovely bit of history going back to the ‘20s or even earlier, to the old sawmilling days, when the town had a two-storey hotel and a railway station.

“So no, I don’t see decay. Because I live here and I know the people – they don't see themselves in poverty, they don't see decay, and I don’t either. It’s like places on the East Cape and in the Hokianga – there’s a beauty but it’s also how the people live. It’s almost like the original New Zealand that is still enduring. People in their 50s and 60s are now coming back. You can buy five acres and a house for very little so people interested in the lifestyle, in conservation, are moving in. If you go to the pub on Friday night at Owhango, it is a really interesting bunch. And the marae is here, so Kākahi will always go on.”

McIntyre was nine, her younger brother Simon just five, when their parents Peter and Patti accepted an invitation to stay with a family friend in Kākahi for the first time.

“My parents were hung over. They’d had had a house full of house guests and were fed up and exhausted and the last thing they wanted to do was go and stay with other people. They’d had a real humdinger row but as we came down the saddle (from Lake Taupō) they were gobsmacked – they had never been in this area before and they thought it looked stunning. Dad later described it as one of the most successful holidays they ever had.”

Peter and Patti McIntyre were hooked. They bought a property overlooking the Whakapapa River and built a two-bedroom holiday house, a refuge from their life in Wellington, a place for fishing, painting and photography. A family snap in the book taken by her father at Kākahi around 1960 shows a young Sara holding an old camera. “Sara’s interest in all things photographic,” writes Simon, a respected artist in his own right, “has never waned.” Some 18 years after this photo was taken, he gave her a 35mm Pentax camera.

After university study “sort of fizzled”, McIntyre saved up enough money for her OE to England and Europe. She was 22, on her own, the mother of twin three-year-old boys. Patti, she writes, was mortified; Peter opened the champagne. “My father always had the attitude if you want to do something, you can,” she says.

In London she bought a Bedford ambulance and took off to Ireland, France, Switzerland, Italy and Greece armed with an Instamatic 110 with drop-in film cartridges. By the time her boys were five she was back in Wellington, remarried with her third son, casting around for a way to keep herself “employable”.

“I didn’t want to fritter my days away and I couldn't stand the women’s lunches and coffee mornings with all the babies – I was never very good at that sort of thing.” In her late 30s, she started nursing training, eventually landing a job at the at Wellington’s Neo-Natal Intensive Care unit.

But Kākahi kept tugging at her sleeve. After her parents died (Peter died in 1995), McIntyre took over the unlined, rat-infested workman’s cottage on the neighbouring property, bought by Peter some years earlier. With sweeping views over the river and a local population of whio, korimako, kererū and tūī, “It felt like home.”

“I had multiplying grandchildren and my brother’s children were at the age of wanting to come without their parents. So I had it insulated and relined and rewired and replumbed, but I did it a bit too well – I didn’t like going back. After 16 years working 12-hour shifts, I’d sort of burned out. I liked the job, but it was a killer.”

She took six months’ leave without pay and returned to Kākahi “to see if I could cope with it.” Within the year she had left her job and closed the door on her small cottage perched above Wellington’s Island Bay.

“I knew some people in the village but because we came here only on holidays I didn't know a lot of people. But once I got used to the idea I might be a week without seeing anyone, I adapted to it quite well. I could still go to the store every day if I wanted to but I find the solitude quite nice. I don’t see it as an unhealthy thing. I don't think I am a hermit – I have a lot of people coming to stay.”

She found work as a district nurse at Taumaranui Hospital, travelling the long gravel roads to the small rural towns of National Park, Ōhura, Waimiha and Whakahoro.

King Country nursing and photography, she writes, “made sense”. Driving down rough gravel roads, past spectacular stands of native bush, listening to their stories of those who lived in the small towns, “I got a hell of a lot more out of it than just the photographs.”

But the photographs themselves tell a unique and intriguing story. Some are taken on a Nikon, some on a small Fujifilm camera, but mostly she uses her iPhone.

“When you’re visiting someone’s house it feels less intrusive. It feels like cheating but it is easy and I am more interested in the scene than the technology. I am not interested in the fancy stuff – what you see is what you get.”

What she got, including a photograph of a goat on a doorstep in Taumaranui posted on Instagram in 2014, attracted the attention of gallery owner Anna Miles. Two years later, at the age of 64, McIntyre had her first exhibition. That year too Miles gave her a copy of A man walks out of a bar, a collection of black and white documentary-style photographs taken by NZSO violinist Lucien Rizos and complied into a book by Damien Skinner. “Anna said, ‘Think about a book.’ For me that was… crikey!”

That book, released this month, will be followed by an exhibition of her work at the Sarjeant Gallery in Whanganui.

On the phone from the hillside home she shares with her dog, a two-year-old fox terrier cross called Bean, McIntyre seems bemused by the sudden turns her life has taken. Now 68, she is planning to convert the old garage, currently home to her ride-on lawnmower and chainsaw, into a studio. She checks the stoat traps for neighbours and sees her brother and his family when they come down from Auckland to stay at the original family bach next door.

Already she is working on a new photographic project, a “little series on the gardeners of Kākahi and around Taumaranui” – the gladioli growers, the tree planters, the vegetable gardeners. “We’ve got some marvellous gardens here – some are shambolic, they are not Auckland gardens, but in my rounds as a nurse I learnt so much about vegetable gardening, usually from the men – when to dig in the lupin, what to plant. I would watch them to know what to do next.”

Sally Blundell is a freelance journalist / writer / editor from Ōtautahi/Christchurch.

Interview published with the support of Creative New Zealand

Observations of a Rural Nurse
Sara McIntyre
The Sarjeant Gallery Te Whare o Rehua Whanganui
27 June – 18 October 2020