The Good Life: The first exhibits arrive at the new Lush Places sculpture garden

Michele Hewitson

Contributing writer·New Zealand Listener·

20 Sep, 2025 07:00 PM4 mins to read

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The start of a magnificent sculpture garden. Photo / Greg Dixon

MONDAY: Much excitement. We were going on a very big outing. We were going to town.

We were going to collect our sheep. They are not real sheep. They are cut-out, painted plywood sheep that look like they have been created by some nut who constructed them in his man
cave while soused.

The sheep have been used since probably the beginning of time to decorate shop windows around Masterton when the annual Golden Shears competition takes over the town and at Christmas. The sheep are historical artefacts. Which is also to say they have seen better days. Some have their feet snapped off. One is wearing a grubby bandana.

We won them in an online auction of mountains of junk that have been stored in the derelict and doomed-to-be-demolished Masterton Town Hall. There had been, I told the keeper of the mountain of junk when we went to pick up our sheep, a fierce online battle we were determined to win. She laughed, gleefully, and said: “I’ll tell you who the real winner is. It’s me. I get rid of all this stuff.”

Greg also won two photographs of olde worlde Masterton. One is of the town’s Queen St. It was taken in 1875 and it looks like it. The other is of a mail coach outside the Club Hotel. He assumed from the measurements given for the Queen St photograph that the other would be of roughly the same dimensions and hence would fit in the car. It wasn’t and it wouldn’t. As we were considering this cock-up, another couple pulled up behind us towing a trailer. They, too, were there to pick up some junk. While they were carting out a bit of furniture from, possibly, 1875, a leg fell off. I may have laughed hysterically. They kindly offered to deliver Greg’s enormous photograph on their way home. “Oh, hooray,” I didn’t say.

Unlike the giant photo, we have a plan for the sheep. They are to become the first exhibits in our latest money-spinning scheme: the Lush Places Sculpture Park. We are certain it will be a huge attraction.

TUESDAY: More excitement. In an unprecedented event, we went into town for the second time in a week. We went to the town’s best second-hand bookstore, which we suspect is run by subversives, in search of a vintage blanket, which they also sell, for my forthcoming birthday. A vintage blanket is another term for an elderly blanket. We like elderly blankets. Unless they smell.

I spotted a guide to black magic on the shelves. “There’s a woman’s bare bottom on the cover,” I said, shocked. I am easily shocked. Prudes often are. The bookshop lady said the lady’s bottom was the least of it. She pointed us towards the “naughty corner”. It is hidden in an alcove. It contains a collection of “erotica”, which is another term for terribly rude stuff.

The collection came from a local pillar of the community, now deceased, who seems to have devoted his entire life to collecting terribly rude stuff. His family took this collection to the Red Cross, who called the second-hand bookshop because it couldn’t possibly sell such red-hot stuff. Had the bookstore lady sold any of it, I asked? Yes, she said, though presumably not to prudes like me.

Greg said we were taking our non-pongy elderly blanket away to “a nice clean home”. I said I hoped it had come from a nice clean home – by which I meant from somebody whose hobby wasn’t collecting “erotica”.

WEDNESDAY: Nothing happened.

THURSDAY: Nothing happened.

FRIDAY: I woke up to find a dead rat deposited by the side of the bed.

SATURDAY: It was my birthday. I woke up to find a dead mouse deposited in the hall. Greg said the cats had had a whip-around. It was a very small mouse. I suppose it’s the thought that counts.

SUNDAY: Vast excitement. It was to be the grand opening of the Lush Places Sculpture Park. It rained.

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