Ghosting the road

Here's one of the publicity statements for Ghost South Road. We're hoping that the book has a little something for everyone. Come and have a beer, or a kava, or both, at the launch on May the 17th. 

NEW BOOK FOLLOWS A ROAD THROUGH TIME AS WELL AS SPACE

Ordinarily we think of the Great South Road as a way to get from one place to another - as a route to work or to a shop or a sports field.

But the Great South Road is a path through time as well as space. In the century and a half since it was built, the road has seen a series of terrible and strange events - an invasion, a war, refugee flows, riots, outbreaks of religious hysteria, epidemics, and much more.

Relics and reminders of this history - eroding forts, cemeteries stuffed with soldiers and pox victims, churches with bullet holes in their walls, bridges where bandits waited, pubs the police loved to raid, parks where lovers congregated - sit beside the traffic of South Auckland and the Waikato.

Since 2012 writer Scott Hamilton and photographers Paul Janman and Ian Powell have been journeying along the Great South Road.

Hamilton, Janman and Powell have followed the route of the imperial army that marched out of Auckland and invaded the Waikato Kingdom in 1863.

They have visited the roadside glades and forests where Maori refugees driven from Auckland by the war camped.

They have located the churchyard where the forgotten first Anzacs - white Australian and Pakeha New Zealand volunteers who fought together in 1863 - are buried together.

They have traced the path of the near-disastrous flight of Leila Adair, the scantily clad pioneer aviatrix, who outraged and titillated the conservative citizens of Hamilton with her new-fangled balloon in 1894.

They have followed the trail of the billions of rats who poured down the road from Auckland in 1900, infected with the bubonic plague, and visited Maori villages blockaded and starved by white militia during the smallpox epidemic of 1913.

They have searched for bullet casings left by the pair of stylish gay bandits who politely robbed Auckland motorists in the 1920s.

They have crawled through a cave where communist fugitives printed their banned newspaper during World War Two.

They have watched road workers sing an old Tongan lullaby beside a concrete mixer amidst the afternoon traffic in Papakura.

They have interviewed boy racers and religious maniacs, artists and road crash victims, old soldiers and new cops.

Ghost South Road is a book made with Hamilton's words and Janman and Powell's pictures. It includes thirteen chapters, and hundreds of black and white and colour images. Ghost South Road was commissioned by Auckland's mayor, and has been published with the help of Creative New Zealand.

Ghost South Road shows that both the history and the present of of Aotearoa New Zealand are wilder and weirder than anyone imagined.