the town with one garage

Reefton 1976

A six-pub two-dog town. Not even a town. An extrusion of dwellings that had coalesced over the years into permanence when the miners began to stay on. The week before, the town’s second petrol station was razed to the ground. Rumours abounded. Amongst the older generation, fingers pointed to the brash young (under 60) owner of the newly built station across the way. Amongst the young – well, let’s just say, there was an above-average number of bored teenagers in Reefton in 1976.

“You’ll like it here” said my kindly elderly hosts, “we’ve got a new petrol station. And someone from the city [ie Christchurch] has opened a record store. We’re a young person’s town.”
My hosts worked all day in their little store and they were fairly easy going, their only concern was about the threat I posed to their local reputation as upstanding small business owners:
“Don’t go into the pub! This is a small town – everyone will know!” At the age of 12, it wasn’t much on my To Do on Holiday list.

I stayed in a house of books. There was no reason to venture out. But even so I spent an inordinate amount of time wandering the five or so streets. From my wanderings I got that: the town contained twenty people under the age of 20 (twice the usual number); that they had 3 cars between them all; that the American muscle car group were the dangerous outsiders. Was it them (with the petrol station)? They were always going somewhere. There was a lot of driving around to be done. Lots of revving of engines in the forecourt of the remaining petrol station and one by one, they’d go. Then, for hours at a time, the township would be encased in a chugging near-silence until, all of a sudden, two cars, then one more, shot back down the main street. And at nights the wail of a lone piper practising bagpiped dirges kept all right thinking people inside their homes.

Reefton in summer, in 1976, with deeply plunging bush clad hills sheeted in white daubs of steamy cloud; eerie greenish light from a sun shot through with bush-fog; buzzing cicadas; older people with sleeves rolled up over plump elbows; coal ranges always lit – in both the first New Zealand town to be lit by electricity, and the last to let go.

My hosts found it creepy that their guest read books and walked the streets spying on everyone. The month they’d arranged with my parents dropped to a fortnight.

A week after, newspapers carried the story of a drug bust gone wrong, shooting deaths in a nearby quarry, two cars of people involved – and they were looking for a third.

It was a good summer, that, the last time I was left to myself.

Returning to Reefton recently for the first time, there’s still only the one garage. Frozen into 1976, it didn’t have eftpos. As for teenagers – all gone.