It’s a package deal, since we cannot befriend the Laurensons without the Kerrs or vice versa. Right now Jude is standing at the window. Since I came into the kitchen she has supplied me with a blow-by-blow account of the shovels and picks and backpacks shoved in the back of the Laurensons’ Pajero. And now, for my information, she says, ‘There go the plants. Tea-trees by the look of things.’ Then she gives the saplings their Maori pronunciation—Kanuka. She releases the word slowly as if it is a new taste she is unsure about. But native saplings is the essential point, here. This is something the Laurensons and Kerrs get together to do at weekends. They climb the hilltops around here and put up with the gorse clawing at their arms and legs to plant natives. Ross Laurenson has told me all about the colonising instincts of pines. How on windy days the pine seed is carried aloft to the native stands. From there, it is an amazingly short time until they gobble up the goodness of the earth and lay waste to entire hillsides.
