Bohemia Village Voice

Purakaunui Falls, New Zealand - could this be the one?

A couple of years ago a postcard dropped onto my doormat which was not of the usual run. For one thing, it bore an image in black and white of a waterfall of unassuming size, which I did not immediately recognise as any I had seen either in a book or in the field. I turned over the card to read the words on the left-hand side: ‘Dear Nigel, Greetings from Bohemia. It’s everything you said it would be. But remember your promise. Love Marian.’
The card was addressed on the right-hand side to Nigel Stockrose, at my current address in Chapel Park Road. Mr Stockrose I assumed to have been a former resident of this house, though until then he was not someone for whom I had received post.
When I looked at the date on the card I could see why. Whoever Marian was, she appeared to have written her message on 30th July 1957, some 48 years earlier. The postmark was too faint to offer confirmation of the date, though perhaps that was confirmation enough, along with the faded red and white New Zealand stamp with a tariff of one shilling and sixpence, which bore the youthful profile of our current monarch.
There was no caption on the card to explain the image on the front, and thus I have no idea of the exact whereabouts, or the name, of the waterfall.
Alas, I no longer have the postcard, having passed it to someone I know who deals in such things. But in the days following the card’s belated arrival, and even long after I had given it away, I found myself pondering several questions. First: is there indeed a place known as Bohemia anywhere in New Zealand, or was this perhaps an ideal that existed in the writer’s mind, and in that of Mr Stockrose, a paradise that both had jointly dreamt of and that Marian had somehow discovered simply by travelling so far away from the Bohemia she had left? Second: what significance did the waterfall hold for either one of them, where can it be found, and does it have anything at all to do with the Bohemia to which Marian referred? And third: what was the promise of which Nigel Stockrose was being reminded?
There is a certain prurience, of course, in dwelling on the intimacy implied in these questions, and I would not want to tread heavily on the memories of either Marian or Nigel that older readers may still cherish. However, one can’t help but wonder when a mystery such as this postcard seemed to offer lands literally at your feet, having finally reached its proper destination almost fifty years later, only to find that the person for whom it was meant had long gone.
I can only guess at how difficult it would have been to communicate across such a distance in 1957, and thus how vital it was that this postcard reached its intended recipient. I was a mere babe in arms at the time, and can dimly recall my amazement as a small boy some years later when my mother took a phone call from a cousin in Nova Scotia. But I do so hope that Nigel and Marian had the chance to meet again, that she could tell him in person about the wonderful Bohemia she had found on the other side of the world, and perhaps gently remind him of the promise he had made to her, whatever it may have been.