1 – A Woman in Pine Block (Beth’s POV)

Chapter One – A Woman in Pine Block

Themes: Hopelessness : Maori Lifestyle : Alcohol : Violence : Dreams : Other cultures : Books

Short Info:  Introduction to Beth, the kids, the setting of Pine Block, Jake Heke, the idea of being Maori

This chapter introduces us to Beth Heke, a Maori woman, a wife, a mother.  We immediately learn about how Beth covets her neighbour, Mr. Trambert’s (“lucky white bastard” page 1) property and lifestyle. He lives close to, but separate from, Pine Block in a nice house on a nice street. Beth goes on to describe Pine Block “A mile-long picture of the same thing; all the same, just two-storey, side-by-side misery boxes” (page 7). She compares her own neighbourhood to that of the ‘white’ neighbourhood and how run down and depressing it is. Pine Block is full of rusting cars, cracked footpaths, broken down houses, washing machines on the lawn (page 12), rubbish over-flowing in the gutters, sending kids to bed with no sheets.  Tells us that she feels like a queen riding home in a taxi with groceries and observing the Pakeha world “And she’d be looking out the window and she’d notice the Pakeha houses, how most of em had well-kept lawns and nice gardens with flowers and shrub arrangements and some with established trees …” (page 12).

Beth goes on to discuss the children of the neighbourhood, including her own children “Beth wondering, all the time wondering. At them. The kids.  The unkempt, ill-directioned, neglected kids.  And her own kids. How were they going to fare?” (page 7). She discusses the plight of the children and how parents neglect them because of the booze. She states that she would never neglect her own children, no matter how boozed she was. Talks about the children who are so alone that they live in car wrecks, sniffing glues and so on.  No wonder then, that children want to join the local gangs as substitute families. The neighbourhood gang is called The Brown Fists; ‘Though there were kids who’d joined with their arch-rivals, the Black Hawks, across town, and so got to do battle, often fatal, with their Pine Blocks brothers and cousins and childhood friends.  Maori against Maori’ (page 15). Beth despairs at the thought of her eldest son, Nig, joining a gang.

We are introduced to Jake Heke for the first time through Beth where we learn about his violent nature, “and yet I love the black, fist-happy bastard.” (page 1). We learn that Beth dreams but she has been suppressed for so long by her living conditions and her husband that they barely exist anymore. She dreamed of being like Mr. Trambert and how her life has turned out to be nothing like that at all, She had dreams then.  But they got lost along the way.  Sixteen years is a long time.  For dreams to stay alive.  And wasn’t as if the dream was to be a Trambert, a Mrs. Trambert, no.  Just to have a whole house with her own bit of land under her feet that she and Jake and their kids could call their own. But nothing like a few hidings – from the man supposed to be part of the dream – to reduce life and its dreams to thoughts that grow to disbelief.’ (page 8).

Beth ruminates on what it means to be Maori as she looks down upon the wasted landscape of Pine Block ‘Feeling like a traitor in her own midst because her thoughts so often turned to disgust, disapproval, shame and sometimes to anger, even hate.  Of them, her own people.  And how they carried on. At the restrictions they put on themselves …” (page 8). Her discussion leads on to thinking about other cultures that she sees in the ‘soaps’; Americans who are ‘beautiful people being nasty to each other, rich, white bitches and bastards not satisfied with life being kind to em.’ (page 9). Whilst thinking about ‘the Maori problem’, Beth ruminates on the fact that nobody reads and whether this means something or not, ‘And it occurred to Beth that her own house – no, not just her own house but every house she’d ever been in – was bookless.’ (p10)  ‘Why are Maori’s not interested in books?  Well, they didn’t have a written language before the white man arrived, maybe that was it.  But still it bothered her.  And she began to think that it was because a bookless society didn’t stand a show in this modern world, not a damn show.  And I live in it, don’t I?  and my kids.’ (p10)

We learn a lot about Beth’s own nature, including the fact that she perceives herself as being strong, a fighter, even in the face of a husband who beats her.  This foreshadows her change of character later in the text. But I’m a fighter, I ain’t the type to lie down and let people, life, roll over me.’ (p13)