Kotuku has existed in my mind since I first clapped eyes on Matata 79 years ago. Kotuku is my invented village adjacent to Matata, where I grew up and went to primary school. Kotuku is like the imaginary friend of a lad who never grows up.
Matata was a coastal village of a few hundred in the Bay of Plenty, a dramatic place to grow up, beside a lagoon full of giant eels, 50 ks from the ever smoking Whakaari/White Island and its regular swarms of earthquakes under a village barely protected from breaking seas by dunes and a lagoon often inundated by king tides which sometimes lapped over the road and under the foundations of our home, while summer bush fires consumed the hills above where wild pigs roamed. The village hosted the occasional escaped bull from nearby paddocks or gruff billy goats looking to butt small boys, while local pig dogs were to be avoided like the plague.
This theatrical and self-contained backdrop stimulated a love of stories about other small, embattled villages. I read Whisky Galore at age 12 and developed an affection for whisky long before I drank it. A few years later I read Clochemerle and became a sucker for any foreign village yarn. Later the grim Akenfield village and sunny Cider with Rosie. Much later our own Taranaki tales, Me and Gus and Ronald Hugh Morrieson small-town Gothic.
Every May the duck-shooting season brought the shotgun hunters to Matata and the lagoon populated by ducks. The season was not really open until the white heron/kotuku arrived. One year somebody shot it, and the spirit left the late autumn village.
It might have been about then that Kotuku took up permanent residence in my heart as well as my mind. Working as a journalist in London, I used to express my nostalgia by writing stories about my Matata childhood. When they were published as The Kid from Matata my father said they were fiction. Maybe by then the lines between Matata and Kotuku were blurred, though the story in the book about Dad going fishing was real to me. Roger Hart painted a front cover of us kids with our shanghais and snake belts, the back cover the majestic kotuku taking flight through the raupo bushes at the edge of the lagoon, featured here with the shadow of the author behind.
I cannot put my finger on when I veered from New Zealand social history to stories about Kotuku, but it was certainly spurred by the six collections of Kiwi slang I published between the late 1980s and the early 2000s. If there was one single spark it was my father, once postmaster at Matata, lamenting Rogernomics shutting the post offices and railway stations, scarcely able to believe that a Labour Government could bring in the world’s first market-driven reforms. Once we led the world in health, and education and welfare reforms. This late 1980s reformation came from the dark side, fully flowering now in the aim of Trump and Musk and some satellite admins such as New Zealand’s current right-wing coalition government to cut the public out of all enterprise. My Kotuku stories are a tribute to my father and to all those small towns and villages that rose again out of the ashes of government reforms.
My first in The Kotuku Creek Chronicles is Gold in the Creek, about villagers rebuilding the bowling green despite the hysterical gold rush in the local creek. The second chronicle Geyser in the Creek has villager and local iwi combining to repel bureaucrats and politicians imposing tourist developments. The final is a post-war story Stamp in the Creek about unscrupulous intruders threatening villagers and their children in pursuit of a valuable local stamp. None of these stories took place in Matata, but their spirit does.