New Zealand Listener – August 24, 2019

54 LISTENER AUGUST 24 2019

A

nthonie Tonnon is a historian.

Yes, he’s a musician, too – a

one-man band of electronica,

keyboards and a particularly

nice 1968 vintage Yamaha guitar

• but these days he’s primarily involved
  in repackaging New Zealand’s past into
  poignant indie pop performances to make
  his audience rethink how, why and where
  we live as Kiwis.
  Sounds intense? Well, actually, no – it’s
  all rather fun and hands-on. For example,
  when the Listener gets in touch to talk
  about a few upcoming gigs, Tonnon is
  deep in preparations for a home-town
  Whanganui performance of his Rail Land
  show, which requires the audience the
  travel to and from St Peter’s Church,
  Gonville, on a specially chartered bus that
  traces the old No 6 tram route between
  Castlecliff Terminus and Whanganui
  Tramshed at Taupo Quay.
  It’s a familiar shtick for Rail Land – the
  first, last November, involved chartering
  a train from Dunedin to Waitati; others

have involved the audience catching

trains to Palmerston North, Paekākāriki,

Masterton and Ellerslie.

The effects of including the transport

in the entertainment aspect of the show

aren’t just that it creates a collegiate, all-

in-this-together atmosphere, but also that

Tonnon can highlight the network of rail

and tramways that once linked small-

town New Zealand and that were scrapped

to create what are now essentially – in his

words – “zombie towns”.

Old Images, the song released to

accompany the original Waitati Hall Rail

Land performance, is packed with wistful

strings and lyrics about Tonnon touring

old Otago stations, lingering over rusted

fences and disused tracks. But he’s quick

to ditch any notion that he’s wallowing

in nostalgia. Yes, he spent hours doing

research for his shows at the Otago Set-

tlers Museum, Otago Museum and the

Hocken Collections at the University of

Otago Library, and, yes, as a history gradu-

ate, he revels in talking about primary

and secondary sources and explaining

the “farebox recovery ratio”, which

determines the viability of a particular

transport route. But he’s primarily fixated

on making his audience concentrate on

the “now”.

We are, he insists, “fighting against an

incredible loss of memory”.

“The rail system has been so under-

valued, by those who run it and with the

generational change in the 1990s, that all

the information about it hasn’t even been

digitised. You need a history degree just

to work it out. Rail Land is the ultimate

metaphor for talking about the way we

Station

to station

Anthonie Tonnon

wants to transport

concert-goers –

into orbit or just

down the line.

MUSIC

by James Belfield

IA

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“I struggle with the

culture of music that

I grew up in of just

playing songs and

‘being real, man’.”

Space waltz: A

Synthesized Universe

was first performed

at Otago Museum’s

planetarium. Right,

Anthonie Tonnon.

BOOKS&CULTURE