Peta Carey, Potton & Burton, $39.99, October 1
Anyone who’s spent serious time in Te Anau, or even just dropped into the town’s pub-slash-cinema, knows Kim Hollows. Maybe you’ve bumped into his big brothers, too. Legendary helicopter pilots, hunters, charmers, characters; yarns about the three buzz the place like sandflies. But, as Kim says in this incisive family history, “No one… knows.”
Peta Carey has known Kim (pictured left as a teen) and his older brother Mark for something like 40 years. Long enough to be wary of taking this project on; Kim, as she writes, is “mercurial”.
Her book heaves with yahoos and big-country egos, Tiger Moths and Land Rovers and helicopters. There are great steaming piles of deer, each worth a fortune. The men shoot from helicopters, dropping into the bush—and clambering out again—using chains dangling from the machines. They get gutting down to a quick art. Time is money. The pilots push their luck. On the ground, the men are hungover to hell and covered in blood. They stop every now and then to vomit, slurp up cold water from a tarn. Stick the knife in again. Good stuff.
But Carey also gives her book a soft heart: the eldest Hollows boy, Gary. She was persuaded to take on this project when Kim sent her an audio file that started, “It’s 31 years to the day since Gary was killed.” Chopper accident, of course. The book is littered with them. Those and suicides; so many deaths that Carey puts them in footnotes. “Funeral, funeral, funeral,” as Kim says. He talks about “a process of hardening”. He talks about the love of his life, Janey Blair, who died with her four passengers after flying into wires at Lake Manapouri. A witness tells Carey the sky filled with what looked like white confetti.
Carey pushes Kim and Mark to grapple with these losses, and the reasons that they are not among the dead. It’s not their pain, though, that lingers after reading, but the moment in which little Kylee Hollows, Gary’s daughter, hears her dad clatter off on a shoot—and starts to listen for his return home.
