A lonely death at Horseshoe Lake

Sunday, 18 February 2024

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They found her body on a cold day in June, inside the lonely house by Horseshoe Lake.

There was no forced entry. No sign of foul play. Its 80-year-old inhabitant had simply died.

A coroner swiftly rendered his verdict - heart disease, abetted by chronic renal failure - and closed the case. No inquiry needed. It was a normal death, at a normal age, in highly abnormal surroundings.

Frances Rawling lived in the ruins of an abandoned suburb in east Christchurch. She haunted the creeping wetlands, the swooping lake, the native forest bursting through fruit trees and garden shrubs; a lonely figure among the fading neighbourhood watch signs, the grey roads crumbling into dust.

She owned one corner of this post-apocalyptic landscape; a tidy brick house, painted a pleasant yellow matching the heaving lemon tree by the front door. A snug little cottage in a deep, dark forest.

Rawling once had thousands of neighbours, who left one by one.

She didn’t join them. She carried on, mowing the lawns and trimming the trees, careful not to disturb the honeybees going about their business in hives beneath a bedroom window. She mooched around her house, free of technology and surrounded by memories. She distributed sunflower seeds to eager magpies from her back step and marvelled at the swelling population of wading birds.

The occasional dog walker would stumble across her house, and she would regale them with stories.

That’s what Rawling was doing when she was last seen alive in late April. Her body was found 50 days later. Precisely when she died - in April, May, or June - is unknown.

The house had given it away, in the end. As autumn turned to winter, weeds crept through the cracks of the driveway and the lawns became overgrown. The drawn curtains were tinged with yellow. A boundary fence collapsed. The house had succumbed to its surroundings; submitted to the red zone. A dog walker hadn’t seen her in a while, and requested a welfare check.

This is where someone’s life story might usually end. But Rawling’s death has a curious epilogue.

When most people die, a loved one will know within hours. It might take a week or two in complicated cases. But Rawling’s next of kin still doesn’t know she died because no-one can find them.

She did not have a partner or children. She did not use the internet and only reluctantly used a cellphone. Her will, found among her belongings, was to-the-point - she wanted her modest estate bequeathed to the cancer charity CanTeen, and to be cremated with her grandmother.

Without a next-of-kin, the usual post-death process dragged. There was no-one to receive the body or arrange a funeral. Nearly six months later, there had been no death notice, no memorial service, and no public comment on Rawling’s death. The old house decayed further; thieves raided the power lines for copper. The weeds grew ferociously, swallowing her garden.

It is tempting to make assumptions about Rawling’s life based on her death. A hoarder, perhaps. Someone on the margins. A forgotten person.

But Rawling defied simple categorisation. She had friendships spanning half a century. Friends fondly recalled her acts of kindness, and shared anecdotes about intense life experiences they’d shared. Even in her final years, Rawling had occasional visitors who traipsed through the red zone to see her.

And yet, the fact she went unseen for months, living in isolation within a major city, raises a question. Thousands of people left their communities and built new lives in the aftermath of a shared disaster.

Why didn’t Frances Rawling?

Into the red

A roar in the night. Broken windows; mud oozing from the earth; shadowy figures staggering bleary-eyed from their homes. Such was the beginning of the final chapter of Frances Rawling’s life.

She had moved to Christchurch five years earlier, leaving her Kaikōura home - a little place perched above the wild sea, darkened by the looming mountains - and settled into the placid surrounds of Horseshoe Lake.

The lake itself is an imposter, a lake only on paper, resembling a muddy stream, green and dark in the bush. It’s actually a disconnected branch of the Avon River, a phantom limb that loops in a horseshoe shape. From above, the suburb looks like a green thumbprint.

Horseshoe Lake was one of the nicer parts of the east. A Fendalton vibe without Fendalton prices. Rawling’s home at 18 Tasman Place was one of the best - tucked away in a quiet cul-de-sac away from the main streets, about 100m from the lake.

She was on friendly terms with her neighbours. Don Crerar, who lived across the street, had been in Horseshoe Lake since the late 1960s. “It was very nice,” he said. “Everyone looked after each other. We still see neighbours from that area.”

Rawling, he recalled, was just “an ordinary person” - private, but not unfriendly. No-one bothered her and she kept to herself.

Its end came about abruptly. Horseshoe Lake had been built in the era of engineering hubris, where unruly landscapes could be tamed with pumps and pipes. To drain the land for housing, the city built its largest pump station nearby to briskly dispose of unwanted flooding.

Some houses were immediately written off after the September earthquake. The aftershock the following February finished off the rest.

Horseshoe Lake was red zoned. The land had sunk below sea-level. One by one, with a feeling of grim ceremony, houses were bulldozed and their occupants moved on. A poem appeared in the window of a house on Tasman Place: “You are more than just mortar and brick / For us you were a gift / A safe haven where we once lived”. Others stayed for a while, battling for the compensation they were owed, which in many cases came slowly or incompletely.

“That was a very upsetting time,” Crerar said. “The whole thing was terrible. Just terrible.” He lives on the other side of the city now, and misses his old community. He still hasn’t received a full payout.

Eventually, everyone in Horseshoe Lake went, willingly or otherwise. All but one.

Roger

Jens Christensen is rummaging through cardboard boxes lined against the wall of a storage unit.

Most are filled with junk. Hardcover books about gardening or diving; old coins and bottles retrieved from shipwrecks. Boxes of photos. The assorted detritus one gathers in a life.

He picks up a photo dated 2008. People are posing; the caption reads “Time with Rachel”.

“Who are they?” Christensen says. “We’ve got no idea”. He picks up a document. “Last letter from Vinny”, Christensen reads. He sighs. “I don’t know who Vinny was.”

Frances Rawling had no online presence. She had no relatives in New Zealand and was estranged from most of her family. She left objects that held sentimental value - she presumably wouldn’t have kept them, otherwise - but they are impossible to understand without context. It’s like finding a code without a cipher.

When he heard his old friend had died, Christensen leapt into action. He worked for the police in his younger years and was trained to consider the what-ifs. A house in the red zone would be a target for vandals, he thought. If they didn’t move quickly, the place would be burgled or torched.

Within days, he had assembled a posse of Rawling’s friends to comb through her house. They worked all day, collecting any valuables to save for the estate.

There wasn’t much. A trailer load of furniture went to an auction house; So did a gold-embossed sewing machine. Some old dive tanks were sold off. Everything else remains in purgatory, scattered in boxes for the next-of-kin, should they emerge.

Rawling had always been intensely frugal, Christensen said, someone who lived on the “smell of an oily rag”. When a ship wrecked near Kaikōura, Rawling had recovered the tins of food on board and ate them, even where the labels had washed off. She could make a 50 cubic-foot oxygen tank last longer than anyone else in her scuba diving days; She even breathed frugally.

But Christensen was surprised at the empty space in Rawling’s red-zone house - the bare cupboards, a nearly empty fridge. “There was just nothing at all.”

Several times a year, he trudged through the empty streets of the red zone to see Rawling, a task made more difficult over the years by the council putting the gate further and further back.

On his final visit, two months before she was last seen alive, Rawling was in good spirits. Christensen was thinking then about the what-ifs. What if you get sick? What if you die here?

“It was on the tip of my tongue whenever I visited, but I never got around to it,” he said. “I wish I had, now.”

When they found her body, the police contacted Christensen, who - in the absence of relatives - has helped coordinate the estate. It’s why he’s holding onto boxes of her stuff and trying to find a next-of-kin.

In one box, he’s looking for a specific photo, one of the few of Rawling in existence.

It was one of two used in the funeral programme. The first shows Frances standing in front of her house, grinning for the camera, captioned “Remembering Frances Rawling”. The other shows a man holding a crayfish. His grin is identical. The caption reads “Remembering Roger Rawling.”

There had been discussion about using both photos, both names.

“To me, it told the story,” Christensen said.

Under the sea

Roger Alfred Frank Rawling was born in Porthcawl, a seaside town on the south coast of Wales.

Her father was in the Royal Air Force (RAF) - hence Rawling’s initials - and her mother worked in a dress shop.

Frances went by Roger for most of her life and presented as male. It was only in retirement that she adopted the name Frances.

It’s unusual to report on someone’s birth name after they’ve transitioned, a practice known as dead naming. But Rawling didn’t mind being called Roger, even when she was Frances. Both were part of her identity.

Rawling was intersex, born with sex characteristics that did not fit the male or female binary. (For that reason, The Press is referring to her as Frances and using feminine pronouns, but references by others will be preserved.)

The condition was poorly understood when Rawling was born. Intersex people were often categorised as either male or female and raised accordingly. Rawling was assigned male at birth and raised as Roger, even as her own preferences tended otherwise.

It was an upbringing, by her account, filled with casual cruelties and isolation. She once saw her father build a model submarine and give it to the boy next door. She told friends her parents had disowned her when she was 7, leaving her to be raised by grandparents.

Later attempts to reconnect with her parents were rebuffed; when she was 19 and about to move to New Zealand, she went to tell her parents she was leaving. They slammed the door in her face.

It was 1963 when Rawling and her grandmother, Ruby Box, boarded a ship called The Corinthian and moved to Christchurch. The pair lived in a bungalow in Sumner a few streets back from the beach.

Rawling was a locksmith by trade, but her passion was the sea. She quickly built a reputation in the burgeoning diving community.

In 1969, she appeared in The Press after discovering a Māori artefact while skin-diving off the Kaikōura coast. “This discovery confirms the exciting possibilities of underwater archaeological research in New Zealand,” the director of Canterbury Museum said at the time.

As a member of the Canterbury Underwater Club, she mentored others.

“When I joined the club, there were a few people that looked after me - showed me how to dive properly and safely, how to fish, how to boat,” said Paul Reed, a close friend.

“One of those people was Roger, who showed me incredible kindness and generosity.”

Her engineering skills, mostly self-taught, were remarkable. In the early days of underwater photography, she welded together a box made of perspex and stainless steel. When she worked as a commercial fisher, she built her own fibreglass boat.

She was, Reed said, the kind of person who was talented at everything. She was also someone you could trust, even at the bottom of the sea.

“You couldn’t get a better diving chum,” he said. “He was just a great bloke to share those times with.”

When Don Scott, a former member of the diving club, needed help with something, he knew Rawling was someone to turn to.

“I built my first speargun with him,” he said.

“He was right into helping people interested in diving to get into it. I’ll always be grateful for that assistance when I was a novice diver.”

And yet, despite these friendships, Rawling was instinctively private. She would withdraw from others, including those trying to help.

“Roger had a hell of a lot of friends, but he had a way of pushing people aside,” one friend said.

“A lot of people felt Roger had it in for them, in that he would push them away. But that was just Roger - he had to live with so much.”

There were few support groups for Rawling to lean on to better understand her intersexuality. When an expert on hormonal conditions gave a seminar in Christchurch, a friend offered to take Rawling.

She stayed after the talk and chatted to the speaker, who later sent her 53 pages of material. “It helped Frances understand a bit more about what was going on,” the friend said.

Life became harder when she transitioned. She told friends she had left Kaikōura in part due to judgement from the community. She said she had been harassed and abused for her appearance; kids threw rocks at her.

In Christchurch, one cafe refused to serve her, she told a friend. Her private nature, some believed, was less a preference and more a reflex; a way to protect herself.

“I think it was more about who he was, what he was,” Christensen said. “Yeah, definitely.“

The stayer at Horseshoe Lake

The ones who remained in the red zone, those who couldn’t be shuffled off the land, became known as the “quake outcasts”.

They each had their reasons. John Taylor, the last person in the Avonside red zone, was a gardener who loved trees and hated paperwork. A sign on his fence warned intruders they might be shot in the buttocks. He was uninsured when the earthquakes happened; he was found dead in his creaky villa in 2017.

Martin and Rae Francis, who live in Bexley, have refused to move. They believe the process has been unjust. In protest, Martin launched a long-shot political bid against Gerry Brownlee in the Ilam electorate but failed to unseat him. They still remain, even as the council threatens to move the floodwall protecting their house from the river.

Rawling had a different reason for staying; a sadder one.

She had been insured during the earthquakes through a small Queenstown-based company called Western Pacific. The company covered several hundred properties in Christchurch, most of them businesses.

But about six weeks after the February earthquake, the company went into liquidation. Its active policies, including Rawling’s, were cancelled. The company had been mismanaged; it was overexposed. There would be no payout.

The Government bailed out some insurers. Western Pacific pleaded for the same treatment but was told no. The company’s “impact on the overall recovery in Christchurch is likely to be small” and its failure was “expected to have a very limited impact on insurance markets”, Cabinet papers from the time said.

The effect on Rawling was profound. She was a retiree with a damaged and uninsurable house in a neighbourhood that would soon no longer exist.

“Roger felt aggrieved about not being paid out by the insurance company,” said Crerar, her neighbour, who spoke to her regularly after the quakes.

“It’s all he talked about. As a consequence, Roger was left with nothing. That’s why he stayed there.”

By 2015, only a few houses remained in Horseshoe Lake, including one other on Tasman Place. It went, too.

By 2016, she was alone.

“Roger really got screwed over,” said Scott, the diving friend. “No-one really knew what he would do.”

“The system just wasn’t looking after him as well as it could have been.”

Some stayers enjoyed life in the red zone. Left mostly untouched for a decade, it has reverted to a primal state; a flourishing wetland ecosystem with regenerating forest.

The council legally had to keep services running. At Tasman Place, that meant spilling wastewater directly onto an abandoned street nearby and having the red zone rangers periodically collect her rubbish.

“It’s like living in a lifestyle block,” Rawling told The Press in an unpublished interview in 2016.

“There’s a lot of wildlife. We’ve got ibis birds. We’ve got quail. Paradise ducks, you name it.”

And yet, she wanted to leave. For all its splendour, the red zone could be a lawless place. People had sex in cars near her house; She would hear gunshots late in the night. Martin Francis, the red zone stayer, recalled Rawling telling him about one such incident.

“Frances was in the house one day and someone went on top of the roof and started taking the iron off,” he told The Press.

“She called the cops, and they turned up and walked right past the guy’s ladder and knocked on the door. While they were talking to her, the guy climbed down from the roof, put his ladder onto the vehicle, and took off.”

Multiple people independently told The Press about an incident in which the armed offenders squad descended on Rawling’s house after receiving a report about a meth lab in the garage.

Rawling, a keen home brewer, had been making rum with a small still.

“I get quite nervous here on my own,” Rawling said in 2016, describing the “strange people” and “doubtful types” that flocked to the red zone.

“When I get my settlement I’ll be off. I don’t like living here on my own.”

It never happened. No-one can be sure why.

Rawling had savings, and friends willing to help. The council had been wanting to buy the property for years.

It was as though she had resigned herself to her fate. She was getting old; slower in her movements.

“Probably 12 to 18 months ago [Rawling] said to me, ‘I should be in a bloody retirement village’,” Christensen recalled.

“I said to him then, if you need a hand to get out of here I’ll help you. But that was the end of it.”

Epilogue

The December sun is ferocious; you can almost see the grass scorching underfoot during a long, quiet walk to the only house in Horseshoe Lake.

There have been a few changes since the community’s last soul passed on. The street sign at Tasman Place has mysteriously disappeared; some of the remaining power lines have been slashed. Graffiti on a faded road screams “COVID IS FAKE”.

Rawling’s house still stands, boarded up and being slowly absorbed by the regenerating forest.

One of Christensen’s tasks was to arrange a memorial service. When it finally happened in December 2023, he was surprised at the turnout; 40 people showed up, most of them former members of the diving club. Some drove all the way from Picton. There were tears. She may have had a lonely death, but her life was anything but.

The delay was because they wanted to find the next-of-kin, first. On that front, there has been no progress.

Rawling had sisters. She was in contact with at least one of them: Kim Rogerson, who had sent a Christmas card to her sibling at Tasman Place.

No-one has been able to find her. She was born in 1958, and has lived in Brisbane and Malaysia. No Christmas card arrived this year. She is said to look much like Rawling. Her sibling’s boxes of memories await her.

Soon, the red zone will transform.

Not long after Rawling’s death, the council got in touch with the estate about buying the property. It owns the surrounding land; Rawling’s 600m² section is a glaring pocket of private ownership in a vast expanse of open public space.

When plans for the future of the area were released in 2019, Horseshoe Lake was coloured blue. It would become a stormwater basin, washed over by floods of the Avon; recognition that the land should revert to its natural state.

It is a fitting tribute to Frances Rawling, who spent much of her life underwater.