Radio review
Dan the man
by Diana Balham
Now may be a good time to get to know your drainlayer. Because, contrary to what’s been said about us in the past, New Zealanders are not a passionless people, and the brightest gems will sometimes be found lurking in a hole in the ground, clad in blue overalls. Or, if you wind the years back, a reluctant art-school ingénue, a lone firewatcher, a deer-culler, a whaler, writer, singer and one of the most exuberant raconteurs most of us have never met.
Dan Bergin was a gentle man and a gentleman: in his seventies and taking morphine to control his pain, he was still an adventurer who refused to go quietly. In act, Dan was still laying drains well after doctors told him he was not long for this world. Dan died recently.
But this was not the Dan he would have wanted us to dwell on. Jack Perkins’s delightful Spectrum documentary on National Radio, Hell on Earth Was the Meat Deck of a Whaler, played, fittingly on Good Friday. Dan was nothing if not a good Irish Catholic. He also loved his ceilidhs and his homes hosted many a good knees-up over the years. Edited with unobtrusive skill by Perkins, the programme presented the extraordinary life of Dan Bergin, weaving tall tales but true with live-music soundbites from the Bergin dance floor and meaty slices of Kiwi life from Dan’s CD, which he released last year.
Dan could talk for New Zealand. He swore that his antics inspired a number of anecdotes in his pal Barry Crump’s classic A Good Keen Man. “After three years on the firewatching, I then went deer-culling,” he said. “That was in the Ureweras. It was a marvellous place. As long as you kept your tobacco dry, you were right. I’ve often said that if they’d had plastic bags, I’d still be deer-culling. A lot of people would join up in October and be gone by Christmas. The first fortnight in a wet sleeping bag got rid of even the most determined outdoor types.”
But Dan’s fondest memories were of people, not places. His tiny Irish grandmother and the part she played in his Wanganui childhood revealed more about the man than his horrifying yarns about the hell of a whaler’s life (“Someone would accidentally puncture the whale’s stomach and the smell was horrific. Each whale had barrel-loads of parasites and they’d be wriggling around on the deck”, etc). “Uncle Tom would come in with his pea, pie and pud and wake us up, light the candle in the bedroom and she would listen to hear the clock strike 12 before she would eat the meat pie. Being a Catholic, she didn’t eat meat on Fridays. And I can remember her gazing searchingly into my uncle’s face and saying, ‘You haven’t touched the clock, have you, Tom?’, in case Tom had put the clock on a half hour, so that he could get to bed
earlier … Nana always had that lovely smell. It’s very funny these days that we wash so often and yet we don’t smell right.” And then he broke into a song about his beloved nana. “I remember mother’s mother, she never made five feet/yet she made a dozen kids in her bed in Dublin St/And when I was a little lad I shlipped in her big bed/We hardly made a bump that you would notice.”
Dan might have described himself as “a dedicated man of no work, much to my family’s distress”, but he touched a lot of lives. I knew him for years: a genuinely kind man who, if he were a few decades younger, you would swear was up to no good; a man who loved to dance and to fill his house with singers and musicians; a man who had seen hardship and hell and retained his essential humanity. I hope that he
has as much fun in the next life as he has had in this one. Thanks Dan. Go raibh maith agat agus síochán leat.
