The polar bear of Ramarama

Paul Janman and Ian Powell and I are selecting images and texts for an exhibition called Ghost South Road at Manurewa's Nathan Homestead. The show will open on May the 18th, and on June the 10th there will be a day of activities including panel discussions, a theatrical performance, and a wargamers' reenactment of the battle of Martyn's Farm, which was fought beside the Great South Road on August the 17th, 1863.

Here is a creature that Paul and Ian and I want to include in the Manurewa show. We spotted it a week and a half ago, when we drove to Ramarama and walked, in the company of the kaumatua and historian Pita Turei, along a quiet, gently rising stretch of tarseal called Flay Road, which follows the route of the original, pre-diversion Great South Road across Ramarama's undulating farms and lifestyle blocks.

Pita spotted a grove of ancient totara complicating the edge of a dairy farm, and a stream full of whitewater, and a cliff low enough to scramble up and down without much effort, but high enough to wreck bullock carts, and break the necks of cavalrymen and their horses. Here, he reckoned, was the spot where a taua drawn from several iwi ambushed a British convoy heading north from Pokeno's Queens Redoubt to another barracks at Drury.

We encountered the polar bear on the front lawn of one of Flay Road's series of noiseless cottages. The animal is one of the random yet curiously meaningful objects that we've found up and down the Great South Road, as we've walked and photographed and filmed. It sits waiting to ambush anyone who passes the old battlesite, and is as incongruous as relict totara amongst the Anglicised Ramarama landscape of hedges and cows and oaks.