as i see it

Kawhia

2009-04-10T06:54:14Z

for Eugene

Painted in the watercolour of fleeting showers
the pure ink of cloud splashed on metallic bluff
Kawhia's bastion, shadows of Motungaio Pa
fish-and-chip cafes and rough-chalked signs
a barge rusts at anchor, memories twisted in rata.

I stand on the sandhill, look through the salt mist
the ocean's promise as wild as cold-fused brass
through the eye of a dream I see a waka move
weary wood and men, sunlight and liquid fire
flashing unison of paddles with history to prove.

Te Tohunga Kokorangi chants karakia
Hoturoa's stern eyes stalk storm and wind
two man-gods with fierce words of obsidian
keeping oblivion at bay as into Kawhia's womb
the waka, as a knife, cuts the ocean's skin.

Brother, can I borrow your culture? See how it fits?
You who sings 'No reira ko Tainui te waka'.
Rather than toss back tequila shooters shoulder to shoulder
can I taste the ancestral salt, feel the damp life,
breathe the waka's spray cutting the rythm of Kawhia's bar?

At Kawhia, Tainui's etched stone memory
beyond my flirtation with a salty dream
the waka and my dreaming dissolve into the ocean mist
lost as driftwood on the beach,
dead men's bones washed clean with steel water.

Summer Solstice

2007-12-22T09:12:47Z

Summer Solstice – the longest day – today. Outside at 9 PM there is still light enough to read a newspaper.

This photo was from the deck at nine. All this is a new experience for a tropical lad where the days are more equal between the shortest and the longest. Solstice – what does it mean? I guess this is the day on which Christmas was supposed to fall back when early Christianity moved into northern Europe and ambushed major pagan festivals of the deep winter solstice (Christmas) and the first full moon following the spring equinox (Easter). Today was a giant festival proclaiming the gods of consumerism if a drive through Rotorua this morning was any indication. Car parks were rarer than snow in Darwin, families trudged, burdened with loads of wrapped packages, shopping bags overflowing, their eyes glazed over, unfocused and searching for the family car and respite.

The earth didn’t move for me on Thursday night. A deep and fierce earthquake (6.8 on Richter’s scale) smacked Gisborne around the chops. Gisborne is only 150 kilometres away as the earth crackles. People felt the quake in Dunedin and Auckland according to news reports. Here in Rotorua, where I sit with some excitement and expectation on the devil’s cauldron, missed the whole bloody thing. Had to find out about it yesterday morning on Al Jazeera’s news coming out of Doha. Duh!

And talking about a tropical lad’s tastes and the summer season, the majority of people I have spoken with here while discussing the joys of a good mango have not experienced the heaven of having mango juice trickle down from salivating chops to ruin yet another t-shirt.

I found out why the other day when I invested in a little festive extravagance by way of three mangos. The fruit was tasteless and juiceless and the product of a long sea voyage from Ecuador. What’s wrong with Australian mangos? This was my first reaction, reconstituting memories of plump juicy Bowens, the delight of a Bullock Heart – the exquisite taste of a strawberry mango - slender and sweet. And the visual symphonies of the more recent developments like the R2E2 and the Calypso. Then I figured money exchange rates – the ozzie dollar is just getting too expensive and I supposed there was an Ecuadorian escuto valued at about three million to one NZ dollar. A tickle of Google quickly points out Ecuador uses the US dollar - thus I am still confused economically speaking. So I recall hot steamy days in Darwin with superfluous chilled mangos, thick shakes of mango and cream and at night the chattering of flying foxes fighting over the fruit in trees in the back yard, leaving black and acrid dung on the driveway and cars as a memory of their visit.

Happy birthday Lynda!!!

‘Tis the season to be Hongi

2007-12-22T04:50:40Z

Six weeks in Aotearoa. In the heart of Te Arawa whenua, on the border of the lands of the Tuhoe people (of recent so-called ‘terrorism’ fame). Six weeks of struggling with vowel sounds in an attempt to travel the rough seas of passage from anglicised pronunciation to something vaguely acceptable by the Tangata Whenua with whom I work.

Watching the early summer passions of oh-so-English gardens mature and create carpets of fallen petals of rhododendron and camellia. Plum trees fountain into the sky in plumes of green and now bow under the burden of reddening fruit. And as Christmas approaches it is the time for Christmas parties.

As I am employed within a bi-cultural institution, the cultural crossover is intense. Part of the essential luggage (the term baggage carries too much baggage) I brought with me was an eagerness to learn something of the undercurrents of the Maori – mainstream relationship. From the outside (a view I still maintain) NZ seems to have done a far better job of coming to terms with the mainstream / First Peoples relationships compared to Australia.

Yes, my reader, we could find escape in difference - go on about the strategic strength of the Maori in war, the established ownership of territory being well and truly in place before the coming of Europeans, the Treaty of Waitangi and so on. But it is after all almost 2008 and Australia still lags hopelessly in coming to terms with its Indigenous people, a history summed up by a string of broken promises from the first landing into the 21st Century and the biggest broken promise of the past decade or so – Reconciliation.

Soap box aside, yesterday was the staff Christmas party. More than 300 people spread over two rooms and the kai keeps coming, good will to all humanity and the bubbles flow freely. At the table at which I sit I meet a Kuia (respected elder woman) with a moko (tattoo) showing rank and commitment to Maoridom. I meet her husband, a Kamatua (respected elder man) with a traditional handshake and hongi. The party, like all staff Christmas parties is a year relived, long boring speeches, the excitement of awards for work well done until finally, the party starts to balkanise around four o’clock. Again all the festive good feelings of parting colleagues and new friends and a time for the greeting / farewell hongi.

The hongi is not what I thought … it is far more … far more than the ‘rubbing of noses’ as has been portrayed in non-NZ folklore. In many Iwi it is a sacred act, a sacristy I felt the first time I, with some uncertainty, met in this way with an elder male. Foreheads press together, noses flatten and both people breathe. Traditionally this exchanging of breath or Ha is meant to be a sharing of life force. And perhaps more for many than just merry Christmas.

The Bear and the Rooster

2007-12-17T23:53:20Z

The great Russian Bear is emerging from post-glasnost hibernation under Vladimir Putin’s hands and spurs. The recent Russian election, even with questioned validity, put the Putin bloc securely in charge of the nation. Now Putin seems to be following the path of the world’s smallest independent state, East Timor. The Russian bear seems a long way from the dusty streets of Dili where the cock crow is the loudest noise coming from where suburban houses and forest tumble from the steep hills behind the equatorial port city.

Freedom fighter and former (foundation) President of this newest nation state, Xanana Gusmao, put aside his plans for poetry, photography, pumpkin faming and family when blood was once more spilled on the capital’s streets in 2006. The symbolic role of President didn’t give him the hands-on power to pull the adolescent nation into line so he set forth a plan that in its fruiting saw him replaced by the other (and often considered better known to the world) face of Timor Leste Jose Ramos Horta while Xanana looked to torpedo himself into the role of Prime Minister. This meant sinking the first PM Mari Alkatiri in a somewhat convoluted path via Horta and Estanislau da Silva. President turns Prime Minister to maintain (or in Xanana’s case increase) power.

So while the roosters crow in Dili, the bear growls in Moscow. Putin’s grand design emerges today. Propose stalwart supporter Dmitry Medvedev as the next Russian President and like Xanana take a run at the Prime Ministership - a seat whose power, under Putin’s fist, will undoubtedly increase exponentially. Medvedev is a long time player on Putin’s team, has a good ‘face’ and persona for politics in the new Russia and most importantly is relatively independent and does not carry the baggage of a major faction or bloc.

Whether Putin can pull the strategy off will depend on the electoral support of Russians, but undoubtedly he sees it as a chance to bring the bear back to full rearing stature with the ability to shake the world a little with its chest thumping.

Meanwhile Xanana Gusmao toils on the front line of East Timor’s war against poverty, economic instability, high unemployment of young hotbloods and the political intrigue of over 400 years that makes up the political landscape of the beautiful half-island. Viva Timor Lorosae.

Dateline Wellington

2007-12-12T10:17:29Z

Sunday December 9: The Beechcraft flies in to the City of Winds but today is calm. The city clings to the side of hills in an attempt to stop slipping into the harbour and Cook Strait. Shipping and the harbour create a saline heart for the city. Cuba St, the grotty former red light harbour district is still saved from the claws of gentrification. Coffee shops with individual atmosphere, alternate versions of most things, homeless people and the upwardly mobile young bureaucrats who could be from Canberra or Washington DC mix as pigeons scrounge scraps and shit, adding Pollock-splashes to the modernist canvas.

Monday December 10: Helen Clark opens the conference for Aotearoa’s journalism educators, the reason my reader, that the dateline for this little blog has shifted to the capital. She walks into the lecture theatre and stands perhaps four metres from me. I’ve met and interviewed and been at close quarters with many national and world leaders but somehow this is different. How can I be cynical in the presence of this political luminary who, for me, has glowed like a distant lighthouse of centre-left politics across the Tasman through the dark years of John Howard. She wears a black pantsuit under a creamy linen jacket - worthy of mention only because this is the style that attracted the wrath of the establishment when she wore something similar to meet the queen. Her face is softer than reflected in the TV representations of the media scrum, more feminine. She speaks in relaxed tones, eyes slightly squinting, and she speaks sense.

I raise my eyebrows a little when the conference MC introduces her as Miss Helen Clark. Apparently she prefers the honorific ‘Miss’ to ‘Mrs’ (she is married) or the more neutral ‘Ms’ – but then New Zealand is full of contradictions. She does take the MC to task over his description of Wellington as the cultural heart of NZ, insisting her home city really holds that title adding “… but of course I am a JAFA,” using the Kiwi acronym for people from the nation’s largest city – Just Another Fucking Aucklander – true! She discusses the media in a soft voice somewhere between a speech and a chat, defining what she sees as a good journalist: A person who understands the wider picture, the context - cultural or political, where a story might sit in the broader context. She spoke of the Fourth Estate and the necessity of a good questioning media as integral to democracy and the danger of the loss of truth and balance where journalists are ‘imbedded’ in war zones. She discusses her belief that the cultural diversity of NZ is not yet fully represented in the mainstream media and the worrying fact that a large percentage of today’s journos were born after many definitive events of our living generations, have little understanding of them - many seeing historical events such as WWII as ‘antediluvian’. She gave the Herald a nudge for its months-long attack against the government but did so in calm good temper. A good talk.

Tuesday December 11: Second day of the conference. Early morning sustenance required to subdue alcoholic indulgence of last night at the conference function at Mac’s Brewery. Another grey morning, at the Roxy Café in Cuba St. Ahhh the first mouthful of coffee – strong and a little bitter but it goes down like the joy of happy clappers at an ol’ time revival meeting … ahhh. Are all the days so grey in Wellington? Yet the Kiwis say the weather is ‘turning it on’ for us meaning, I guess, that a gale force blizzard isn’t blowing through the city. It’s not yet 7:30 as I write, across the road a deli cum fast food place is called Munchen Burgers, it’s busy and the incandescent lighting warm in the cool grey.

The home of the Munchener Burger is next to Roger’s Tattoo parlour which is next to the Rasa Malaysian restaurant. Such is the view from the little round table in the Roxy, polished clean yet with the incendiary graffiti of cigarette burns from a different time. Two tradies sit between me and the window, jeans splotched with dried paint, sharing a newspaper. People still read newspapers in NZ. A skateboarder goes past along Cuba St, sounding like a passing train as the wheels thraddle the coarse road surface. Eating scrambled eggs and mushrooms – out of necessity, my knee against the red brick and rough mortar of the old wall. Landscapes of snow-capped peaks and wild green valleys hang on the opposite wall, painted from a different palette than the grey on grey of Wellington.

Dateline Rotorua

2007-12-08T21:43:20Z

The drought of November lasts nearly two weeks. Clouds, mountainous and grey blue, roll across Rotorua in great angry charges and then dissipate. Lesser clouds play across a blue sky like children. The promise of rain is ever present but it never seems to fall. The driveway blows dust and the garden plants brown-off. “Until cloud or fog covers Ngongotaha, it will not rain,” a colleague, whose ancestry tracks back to the Te Arawa canoe, tells me. On Wednesday evening cloud swirls like a turban around Ngongotaha … and it rains steadily for 24 hours, silent cold rain barely audible on the roof through insulation. The garden gulps thirstily.

I walked along a stream fifteen minutes walk from the cottage. It is a clear fast flowing stream snaking through backyards of suburbia. I watch trout in the water swing gently against the flow, letting go with the current in free fall then turning into the current once more, holding their place. A mother, waist-high daughter and a 12 year-old son are by the stream. I approach and the boy holds up a rainbow trout of about a kilogram in weight. He is proud to be providing for his family. We smile, talk nothings for a moment and I walk on.

Saturday morning – yesterday – I walk to the city centre of Rotorua, if it can be called that. I immerse myself in a bookshop for half an hour and spend $89 too much. Sitting in the Robert Harris café in Tutanekai St. The Saturday morning crowd is lining up for lunch, cafeteria style. I sip a double shot flat white, slightly bitter but has a delightfully etched fern on its creamy skin. A group of Maori people march down Tutanekai St, a small hikoi of some sort. I missed the beginning of the procession, listen now to the chanting platitudes in te reo, flags billowing in the Saturday air, flags in green and red, white and blue. Possibly it is a protest against the arrest of Tame Iti in October under the controversial Suppression of Terrorism legislation. Some of the young men have their faces covered in masks as the ‘ninja’ police did during the raids. People in the café chat, oblivious to the 30 or so marchers. Cars crawl slowly behind the marchers, drivers only slightly frustrated by the slow-down, they seem accepting. People sip coffees and nibble scones.

A thought: Is subversion essential to art?

Late yesterday cloud again immersed Ngongotaha. It rained steadily and quietly all night.

The sun still rises

2007-12-01T20:26:02Z

Dateline Rotorua

An occasion arose this morning to look at a satellite view of the globe. I experienced a little puff of interest to see that sprawling little brown continent to the West was still there. And I have it on good account, through conversations coming from my daily investments in Telecom NZ, that the sun is still rising over that wide dusty land. What’s this all about? Surely if Oz had been flung into the dark reaches of outer space there would have been a brief mention at the end of TVOne News if for the only reason all those world-beating Aussie sports teams had drifted off, to be lost forever on the great odd-shaped plate called Australia.

The surprise dear friend, is that so many Australians believed fervently that the sun wouldn’t rise if the Howard conservative government was voted out of power. Darkness would surely prevail. The future would disappear more quickly than hope in a remote Aboriginal Community. Middle Australia consisted of, after all, the not-so-silent majority that voted the Howard tsunami into power in 1996, saw the immediate dismantling of health and legal services to Indigenous communities across both remote and urban Australia, that saw the undemocratic destruction of ATSIC - the first elected, albeit flawed, democratic voice for Indigenous Australians … ever!

This was the majority that bought the ‘baby overboard’ lies of the Howard government and elected the conservatives on the strength of it; supported the delightfully named ‘Pacific Solution’ designed to keep all those millions of hectares of drought-stricken land safe from a handful of refugees spluttering across the South China Sea without a wing and not much of a prayer. This was the majority that chose being able to afford a plasma television receiver over recognising the nation had a marginalised people living in third world conditions and poverty.

This was the majority that allowed its government to remove the tiny work-for-the-dole scheme called CDEP that gave pride to a few thousand people in remote communities. CDEP was removed under the pretence that the so-called beneficiaries would be ‘forced into the workforce’ in areas where absolutely no workforce exists beyond CDEP. And, to conclude this indictment of the best part of a dozen years, this was the not-so-silent majority that swept Pauline Hanson into power along with One Nation and a speckled heckle of red necks that exposed the true nature of at least part of the Australian nation.

The litany of grievance could fill many pages, but my friend, you get the gist. So what has now happened? Has the majority turned? Is there a renaissance of the multiculturalism that rose in the early nineties? An enlightenment perhaps? Let’s not be too hasty but the Howard government is no more, disintegrated into bickering and cat-fighting. John Howard has lost the unlosable seat of Bennelong to (gasp!) a woman and (gasp! gasp!) a journalist. Kevin-Oh-Sevin has taken the reins of the nation and the resources boom. And my friend, the sun still rises although the future, through the dust clouds of Kyoto ratification and a slight drawing back from Bushocracy in Iraq, is still vague.

With this change in government, I find myself for the first time in my life wearing a tag around my neck that says ‘ex-pat’. For all of two weeks and two days I have resided on top of one of the most volcanic and earthquake prone splotches of green heaven on earth. I have no idea of comparative statistics and vulcanologists’ predictions, but San Francisco has nothing on Rotorua.

It is linguistically impossible for an Australian to pronounce Rotorua correctly. If one purses one’s lips darling, ties a granny knot in the tongue and murmurs lots of m’s, r’s and t’s you kind of get by.

The Australian landscape is old, eroded and sturdy, the belching bellows of youth long subsided into late middle age. Here in Rotorua you are constantly reminded of the roaring furnace that makes up the heart of our planet. Entire villages have been swept away, the landscape rearranged more surely than Mum shifting furniture in spring. On the air, in gentle puffs, is the sulphurous aroma of Rotorua. I can smell the earth breathing.

It’s not the first time I’ve tried to leave Australia for Aotearoa. The first time was after the Republic referendum debacle. The second time after Tampa. This time it’s for real – with a job, belongings somewhere on the high seas as I write, a real Internal Revenue Department (IRD) number, as of today Broadband access, a Telecom NZ phone account even my own power account. It’s not Zambia or Saudi Arabia – but it IS different.

And within ten days of my arrival there is a change in government in Australia! Do I roll up my journalist’s cynicism? Do I suddenly accept the changing good heart of the people of Middle Australia? I will tentatively pack away the heavy burden of disillusion I have carried for many years. However I will keep the honed blade of cynicism at hand, I have no doubt it will be needed.

John Howard? Strangely I have little emotion either way for the man. I hope history reflects the truth, that the dozen years of the Howard regime be written as a grubby historical anomaly as Australia and all Australians continue the journey towards doing things just a little better.