Becky Manawatu: “I really want to talk about the people – why they are and why they do the things that they do.”
There’s a swamp behind the houses on SH67 in Birchfield, just north of Westport. A scraggly swamp, giving way to paddocks giving way to beach giving way to the driving surf of the Tasman Sea.
“It wasn’t not dangerous,” recalls Becky Manawatu. “It had water and we were climbing pretty large trees. There was a kid, or a couple of kids, in every second house, pretty much, and we just used to go nuts.
“There was a tree that you could walk out on and it was like you were – I don’t know how to word it – you walked right across this tree and it was so large and so flat on the top it was like this little township above the swamp.”
Manawatu is divvying up fresh pies from the West Coast Pie Company on the kitchen bench in her home in Westport, just after the bend in the road that arrows straight through the town to the clattering masts and screaming gulls of the harbour.
It is a busy home. Gumboots by the back door, bikes in the carport, dog Bro patrolling the backyard, seven seats at the kitchen table for Manawatu, her husband Tim, her two children, Maddox and Siena,