For the Love of Beasts

Text and photos by Alan Knowles (published in Grace Magazine, May 1999)

A crush of poultry moves daintily out of the way as my boots slither in the fine wet mud and chook shit that cove the driveway and spatters up the weatherboards of Helen Rotman's house in Ohariu Valley. Its dark beneath a canopy of skeletal trees in stark winter nudity where six enormous turkeys stand guard, ominously watchful, their red wattles pendulous like huge rubber snots. The mud goes all the way up the tiny steps to clog the front doormat where I stand and knock hoping to meet the "crooked little woman" who from my scant information sounds like Wellington's Dr Doolittle.

A broody bantam eyed me from its nest in the bottom of a bucket as I peered into the dim interior. There was no one about, but the sight of a small black Thompson submachine gun leaning against a wall made me want to run, but a hundred silent chooks would witness my cowardly retreat.

And so fearing that my "deliverance" was nigh I slithered in the wet mud to the rear of the house looking for the occupant, only to find a jumble of bare wood buildings and huge bare walnut trees. The sea of chooks parting before me as I moved had been joined by ducks, geese, peacocks and cats, but no owner, although I had an uneasy feeling that someone was watching.

A year earlier a friend had been here seeking fertilised eggs for his kids who wanted chickens in their roosterless city chook run. Of course the chicks grew into cockerels whose crowing irked the good burghers of go-ahead Newtown, and they had to go. Not having the stomach to lop off their heads my friend bundled the noisome cocks into his car, drove to Rifle Range Road, and surreptitiously dumped them from whence they came, on Helen Rotman's farm.

This guilty story had surfaced over a glass of wine, and knowing my love of photographing eccentrics, he suggested I visit his 'crooked little woman with her animals' with my camera. He pleaded not to be dobbed in for dumping his roosters. "Hey, I wouldn't do that mate!"

And so there I was spooked on her property and retreating fast along the side of the house, expecting any moment a bolt between the shoulder blades. I no longer wanted to meet this woman and thought only of reaching the safety of my car. But a window opened under a dark tangle of vines and there was Helen Rotman. Her broad open face reminding me of poet Hone Tuwhare whose ageless features and inscrutible expression gave little away. She looked younger than I expected perhaps because of her immaculately groomed hair.

The mention of my friend drew no flicker of recognition, and the request to photograph her with the animals met a blank stare that added to my unease. But she did offer a cup of tea, and made no move for the machine gun.

A clutter of muddy footwear and cats at the back door left little room to move. "Leave those on," she said indicating my gumboots. "I've got paper down." But I did remove them, and thankfully only the pong of the poultry and a cloud of tiny flies followed me inside where crisp newspaper covered a freshly washed floor.

One of the many cats sprang onto the kitchen table to investigate the visitor and nuzzle the plastic cow glued atop the sugar bowl, while Claudia Schiffer's cleavage mocked me from the floor as I lamely tried to explain my quest. Helen asked the same question in so many different ways I begin wondering if she was dumb or part of a Pol Pot interrogation squad!

It turned out to be none of the former, a lot of the latter and a little deafness. The idea that someone should want to photograph her was so novel it took time to gel in her mind. And when it did, her reaction was swift.

"Absolutely not! I'm the ugliest woman in the world and you'll just make fun of me!" But her curiosity was aroused and I didn't get the short shrift.

Getting to know her was obviously going to take time, as she taciturnly refused to respond to direct questions. Like the cantankerous French photographer Cartier-Bresson, she preferred conversation to the interview, but if someone had to do the interviewing it would be her!

Helen had some form of severe spinal deformation that skewed her back from shoulder to hip (the result of polio as a child and now manifesting as arthritis) but her movements about the kitchen were sure, albeit slow and deliberate. And the big strong hands that ripped opened the cellophane on the biscuits were those of a manual worker.

Our first conversation was more of a one-way interrogation with Helen's questions probing and poking her curious visitor with ferocious intensity. Eventually she agreed to show me around the farm, but her emphatic refusal to be photographed meant I left the camera behind as I followed her diminutive frame with its rolling gait to meet her "beasts".

We entered a paddock where the sheep crowded around instead of running in fear. There were seventeen, mostly former pets handed on by owners too soft-hearted to turn them into the Sunday roast, and all partial to the bread Helen had in her pockets. She pointed out those that had been "dumped" on her by people who didn't ask. "They must throw them over the fence there and drive off", she said without rancour.

This sounded familiar, but I say nothing of my mate's roosters, and ask if she minded animals being dumped?

"Yes I do! I wish people would ask." But I got the impression there was not a critter alive she would refuse.

On a distant hill she pointed out four donkeys, a cow, a pony and her beloved hinny - the progeny of a horse stallion and a jenny donkey, as opposed to a mule with vice versa parents. I'm introduced to two fluffy bantams, "Days" and "Bay", no longer loved by the family in Days Bay, which did ask if she would take them. The bantams and an injured pigeon shared a cage as protection from ferrets.
Some of the ferrets were wild, and some unwanted family pets. My query about harbouring mortal enemies of the animal world was answered with a vague lecture about all beasts being beautiful. She tried to protect the vulnerable, but if her magpie was a bully then that was the natural scheme of things. It seemed that Helen would play God by feeding her beasts and repairing damage, but she wasn't going to get involved in their politics.

I was warned not to enter an aviary with scrapping cockatoos or it'd be me who got ripped up. Then I was formally introduced to the 100 chooks (mostly roosters), 200 ducks, 18 geese, five peacocks, two pea hens and their chicks, the turkeys….. It was late afternoon and feeding time at the front of the house. Helen removed the tarpaulin from the rear of her ute revealing a vast supply of bread. And like a rock star before a cacophonous sea of fans she proceeded to satisfy the hunger of her gobbling, honking, quacking sea of fowls. Quite enough material for a photo essay.

Before I departed I repeated my request to photograph her and the animals, only to be told that it was a silly waste of film! I could photograph the beasts, but not her.

On my next visit I produced my camera which prompted Helen to ask if I had ever photographed starfish? When I replied in the negative she said, "What a pity, they're fascinating beasts". Thinking nothing would surprise me now, I expected to be shown an aquarium in one of the sheds. But instead she informed me that she was co-writing a major book on starfish for the National Institute of Water and Soil where she specialised in describing and drawing sea stars and brittle stars!

I hadn't time to process the startling news that my rustic hillbilly "Dr Dolittle" was actually a senior research scientist, for an amiable Dutchman had joined us in the kitchen shooing cats off the bench before making himself a cup of coffee. This was Jan, her husband, who had come to New Zealand in 1952 as an architect.

He had emerged from his woodwork loft in the barn where he was making toys for his grandchildren from an earlier marriage. Jan had retired as the Victoria University campus architect to continue his hobby of making ingenious and diabolical toys, between architecture assignments. There were wooden arks with fully functioning cranes, donkey carts and articulated croaking frogs. His toy firearms were so convincing that years earlier there was a police call-out to Ohariu Valley when their only son, Jonathon, aimed one at traffic as a child.

They squabbled over whether Helen should allow me to photograph her. Jan thought it a good idea and she repeated that she was the world's worst looking woman, adding that her cousins had told her as a girl that she was the nearest thing to being a Downs Syndrome child!

"In fact I think I have a little Downs Syndrome in me," she said with a deadpan face to be envied by any poker player. "What rubbish!" was Jan's reply. "That's like being a little bit pregnant!"

I later learned that it was this childhood taunting by her older sister and cousins over being "simple" that prompted Helen to travel to "prove" herself. She had always been fascinated by animals, an interest she shared with her father, Arthur Gruchy Clark MC, OBE, a GP and surgeon in Napier. His studies in zoology resulted in a cicada, a fish and a shellfish being named after him. Helen had graduated MSc in zoology from Victoria University, and with this qualification headed off to the Royal University of Malta in 1959 to lecture under zoology Professor Owen Thomas, a friend of her father.

In Malta, she had only one pet, a short tailed bat raised as an infant and kept in a box for two and a half years. Her interest in animals was matched by an interest in men, which was fortunate as most of her students were of the opposite sex. Maltese men were spoiled and worshipped by Maltese women, and Helen liked them immensely. Unlike Italian men who she met when working at a Naples aquarium. "They acted stupid, and gave me the creeps".

Helen loved swimming in the Mediterranean and would join an Oxbridge team of scientists diving near Tripoli who would recover starfish for her research. "Libya was very romantic, and I loved watching the camels, horses and donkeys."

The next job for this footloose scientist in her early 20s was in equally exotic Ghana, at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, named after President Kwame Nkrumah. A man deeply hated for his self-glorifying opulence (he slept in a gold bed) in such a poor country. Helen had a large garden for her menagerie. Students soon learned of her love for animals and would bring all kinds, and lead her to snakes discovered in the university compound. She adopted small monkeys, which grew accordingly, cats, an eared owl that sat on her shoulder, and a mongoose, "lovely little beast". She learned not to get too familiar with her beasts after picking up a small African deer that slashed her arm with razor sharp hooves.

When Nkrumah was overthrown in a military coup in 1966 she watched horrified as her students rioted. They tied up African lecturers and hefted them onto a huge pile of books and threatened to set it alight. But European staff were spared this humiliation, and the students were hosed back into their halls of residence by the fire brigade.

The eared owl with its vicious beak accompanied Helen on a flight to the Isle of Wight where it was gratefully received by a bird sanctuary. She was on her way to the Smithsonian Institute in Washington DC to familiarise herself with their sea star collection as part of her doctoral studies. In America she collected a personal menagerie that included a terrestrial hermit crab. This was one of three pets (there were two cats) that moved into Jan Rotman's home in Rifle Range Road when they married in 1968. The crab had mysteriously found its way into New Zealand hidden in the sleeve of her coat! The only time I saw Helen Rotman at a loss for a robust riposte was when I challenged her over the wisdom of such action. She offered the lame excuse that Customs hadn't asked her if she had it, "besides there's no risk as two are needed for a breeding population". Eventually she admitted to disapproving of the practice: "I frown on it. It's a dangerous occupation that can introduce disease and unwanted pests."

The Smithsonian link continued in New Zealand when she joined their research ship, the Eltanin, on a survey to the southern oceans as part of her doctoral studies in Antarctic sea stars at Victoria University's Island Bay Marine Laboratory. At this time Jan was busy designing the Wellington Polytechnic's main tower block and School of Design, and would later work on Rongatai College's library block and north and south wings.

Slowly I was getting to know the family but Helen never actually gave me permission to photograph her, but perhaps because of my persistence she resigned herself to the inevitable. I had to grab pictures when I could, for Helen would turn away or drop her head when she noticed me lining her up.

Yet she invited me to the Carterton Agricultural & Pastoral Show where the popularity of her donkey and the little hinny, which looked like a miniature horse, was staggering. Kids clamoured for a ride and the womenfolk cooed. This was where the anarchist in Helen surfaced. As if it was the most natural act in the world, she changed the winning ribbons around among her less successful beasts, with the comment: "Red looks much better than blue on the grey coat."

No one seemed to notice or care about the oddly-decorated animals in the Grand Parade, except perhaps the winning donkey's owner, parading beside us and not speaking. Later we helped her to load her float.

Jan didn't come to Carterton preferring to remain on the farm to perform the endless repair and maintenance tasks. Besides, he did admit, good-naturedly, to misgivings over the menagerie that had invaded his home. "I do love animals, but its filthy outside and I slip and slide on the duck shit." Yet he sagely observed: "I came to the conclusion years ago, you can't change a person."

He recounted having to deal with a "plague of cats" that had been dumped on them and bred to unmanageable numbers. "We gave them a pleasant send-off with barbiturates, then had to dispose of two barrow-loads, about two dozen dead cats." And it fell to Jan to shoot a family of fecund pet ferrets, "that just appeared on the property", because they bred so fast.

These stories evoked sadness in Helen whose unconditional love for all beasts was tempered by the impracticality of husbanding every creature in need. They once gave live geese to Asian and Indian restaurant owners until they heard the birds were staked and force fed to fatten them. Helen went ballistic at this news and insisted the birds be killed on the property before being removed.

And then there was the financial cost to be considered. Jan lamented that they could pay for an overseas trip every year with what was spent on feeding the remaining 16 cats alone - four tins a day, plus gravy beef and chicken and ox hearts. The poultry devoured $50 worth of mash, maize, pellets and bran a week on top of the $10 ute-load of stale bread from local bakeries. And then there were the vet bills….

"I don't pay for it, I'm a pensioner," said Jan as he retreated from the conversation to his loft to plan his next creation - a dolls house, a trick camera with spring-loaded rat to frighten the sitter, or rocking Papa in bush shirt to delight a child.
Says Helen: "I'm well paid and there is nothing better to spend my money on."

If Helen's greatest pleasure was showing her beasts to children and giving donkey rides, her most vexing problem could be how to deal with a photographer more stubborn than herself….
"Alan, I doubt anyone is interested in this story, but if you get it published we'll go out to dinner, OK?"
"OK."
"You must not bring your camera."
"Yes Helen."
"You can publish any photo of my beasts, but I forbid you to use any of me."
"Um, yes Helen."
Thank god the submachine gun was only a toy whose staccato clatter clanged from a big round alarm clock magazine!