White Island was an ever-active part of my childhood, its curling smoke visible 50 kilometres out in the Pacific Ocean. Mum’s all-day teacup often rattled and spilled from the frequent earthquakes. Dad usually took a scientific approach, but he agreed with local Maori that earthquakes were linked to volcanic activity from White Island through the Central North Island Volcanic Zone. As postmaster Dad issued stamps and helped me fill my Stanley Gibbons stamp album. Thereby hangs the last tale of the Kotuku Chronicles, Stamp in the Creek.
Inspired by the Australian television series Mystery Road, this is the 1949 Origins back story of the new postmaster at Kotuku, Jack Cavanagh, the youngest in the Commonwealth, and teenage drug dealer Bob Rogers. Bob has had a harsh childhood and aims to ensure an easy adulthood. The solution is the issue of the White Island stamp set including a rare invert, only the second ever identified in New Zealand, worth thousands on the international market. Radio spreads the word of the blowing up of the Kotuku Post Office stolen safe and White Island stamps floating in the creek. Many fortune-hunters swarm into the village, none more determined than Bob Rogers. To get his hands on the stamp, Bob employs arson, blackmail, stand-over tactics, car conversion and the kidnapping of Cavanagh’s son.
In this close-knit village of Kotuku, Jack’s friend Stationmaster Rangi Rangihau and storekeepers and bakers Ron and Mavis Pritchard, local barber and billiard saloon proprietor Oswald Cottle, cinema projectionist Wally Pokai, parish priest Father O’Reilly, publicans Bert and Freda Tingey, all pitch in to help locate the missing lad. Others are more interested in finding the stamp, like quarry owner Sam Peat and former Kotuku postmaster Leonard Stropp.
The police have not been successful, largely due to Bob having an informer in the local station. Jack’s bosses are more worried about a public service scandal, and for a good reason, a disgruntled post office employee has been eavesdropping in the post office telephone exchange on party line conversations and has assisted Bob’s scheme. When Jack takes his son’s bike and his son’s dog to chase a tip-off, a thunderstorm and flooding cuts off the village, but a farmer has a solution involving his Massey Ferguson tractor.
It is fitting that my final story is dominated by White Island, albeit in stamp form. When I was homesick in London, I took notes on growing up in my childhood village, which I shaped into my first book, The Kid from Matata. White Island looms over the book, the place where miners were killed, a volcano always threatening to explode. This image was more vivid than the features I wrote in England. I once asked a colleague who was also a published author and television science journalist what was his secret. He said find something you love and specialise in writing about it. I had to come home to find what I loved, writing New Zealand social history.
After several decades writing many features and publishing social histories, I was researching the history of our volcanos for a tourist book that was not commissioned. By this time I was so immersed in the project I had taken a tourist helicopter into the dead Tarawera volcano and the very live White Island. Being brought up to waste not, want not, I turned the research into my first novel Whakaari, a futuristic thriller involving a terrorist plot to trigger a White Island explosion. At the same time I turned Matata into the fictional Kotuku, having revisited the village in my research and recalled the sand hill where our gang discovered gold in the shape of coins. The result was Gold in the Creek.
By now I had the fictional bit between my teeth and a sequel followed, Geyser in the Creek. I wanted to complete the trifecta and it seemed natural to take the characters in those two yarns back to their origins, the postmaster issuing stamps and the villain trying to get his hands on the one flawed stamp, an inverted White Island. Thus, I have come full circle in my writing and real lives, with an upside-down image of the ever-smoking White Island volcano.
Postscript: RIP the tourists and tourist operators who died visiting this spectacular and deadly active volcano.