Crash
Te Aute Crossroad S4 E1
It was perhaps an exaggeration to say that the most terrible moment of the entire Brow experience was the window seat falling off…
That happened in 2007. And it only failed to make the evening news because of developments elsewhere: the collapse, in the United States, of New Century Financial Corporation, a $1.75bn company that had become the largest independent provider of sub-prime mortgages. The first domino to fall in what became the Global Financial Crisis.
Which grimly unfurled. Come September 2008, when investment bank Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy, New Zealand’s then Finance Minister, Michael Cullen, described the meltdown as one of the worst financial crises since the 1929 Wall Street crash1: the Depression. Over 70,000 unemployed. Men walking from farm to farm, hoping for work, grateful for food…
M' pants have lost their creases,
I've fallen down on my luck,
The world has dropped to pieces
everything's come unstuck2.
Listening to Morning Report every morning, we were two quivering bunnies. What the hell was happening? How much worse would it get? What was to become of us?
The world had dropped to pieces. We had no work: for their own survival, businesses had pulled the plug on consultants. Projects we’d been working on were peremptorily cancelled.
And the Mangaonuku flooded again. The Brow road washed away. Everything came unstuck.
Detour.
With no money coming in, none could go out. So, I bought a book on fencing. Maybe, with time on my hands, maybe I could learn a new skill and repair all of the broken down fences on the property? What do you call it…pivot? First step, according to my book, was an inventory. We must walk the fence lines, identify, quantify, each, and record its condition. Prioritise. So we did. Tramped all over the property, measuring, labelling, photographing, recording. Creating a comprehensive asset register. Before deciding. That was a stupid idea.
Defeated.
Nothing for it but to sell. It’s been a blast, but the world has changed. Get real. Crawl back to the city and make a new start. One more round for Experience.
Nobody bid.
Not that I wanted them to, but, you know. Jesus Christ.
Eventually, as it somehow always does, the light returned. Michael Cullen handed to Bill English a clean set of books and he steered us through, to calmer waters.
We could smile again.
Even Dream again.
A.R.D. Fairburn Down on My Luck
Catastrophe!! oh, not really...cool - back to the dreaming which we were sooo good at...